Explanatory Notes -- Mark 12:13-27 (Tuesday Debates II -- Taxes and Resurrection)

Paying the Poll Tax

12:13 And certain of the Pharisees and the Herodians send to him in order that they might trap him in word.

These individuals do not come to Jesus directly. They send innocent-looking representatives. We remember that not all Pharisees were hypocrites, but the Gospels remember certain individuals from the Pharisees as key opponents to Jesus. The Herodians were likely a group wanting to see some Herod in charge of Israel rather than a Roman governor like Pilate.

Jesus is not fooled.

12:14 And, having come, they say to him, "Teacher, we know that you are true, and it is not a care to you about anyone. For you do not look to the face of a person, but in truth you teach the way of God. Is it lawful to give poll tax to Caesar or not? Should we give or should we not give?"

Flattery is the name of the game. They don't mean a word of it. They don't believe he is true. They don't believe he teaches the way of God. 

On the other hand, it is true that Jesus did not play favorites with people because they were important by earthly standards. He didn't care if someone was rich. He didn't care if someone was famous. He didn't care if someone was powerful. If anything, those attributes made him less impressed with someone. Matters of worldly importance were "not a care" to him.

Then they get to the point. Should you pay taxes or not? If he says yes, then what kind of a Jewish messiah can he be, siding with the Romans. That won't make the people happy. These Pharisees can use it to knock down his popularity.

If he says no, then they can take him to the Romans. This guy is telling the people not to pay taxes. He's an enemy of Rome. You must stop him.

This is the double-bind they were trying to put Jesus in.

12:15 And having known their hypocrisy, he said to them, "Why do you test me? Bring me a denarius that I might see [it]." 16. And they brought [one]. And he says to them, "Whose image [is] this and the inscription?"

And they say to him, "Caesar's."

Jesus sees right through them. But they don't understand his perspective on money. They assume that money matters, that money is a thing. They do not know that money has no place in Jesus' values. It is not a thing. It is irrelevant to him and God's kingdom.

Jesus asks for a coin, worth about a day's wage. He asks whose image is on it. Obviously, it is Caesar's.  

12:17 And Jesus said to them, "Repay the things of Caesar to Caesar and the things of God to God." And they marveled at him. 

Whose image is on the coin? Caesar's? Well, give it back to him. Jesus' answer is that Caesar can have all his coins back. Coins are irrelevant to the kingdom of God. Money is irrelevant to the kingdom of God.

The Resurrection

12:18 And Sadducees come to him, who say there is not resurrection. And they were asking him saying, 19. "Teacher, Moses wrote to us that 'if a brother of someone should die' and leave a wife 'and he should not leave a child,' that 'his brother should take the wife and should raise up seed for his brother.'

The Pharisees have had their shot. Now it is the Sadducees' turn. The Sadducees were a priestly group who differed significantly with the Pharisees on a number of key issues, perhaps the most famous of which was the afterlife. The Pharisees believed in resurrection, often a very bodily resurrection. The Sadducees did not. 

Resurrection belief in Israel seems to have resurrected especially in the early second century BC, around the time of the Maccabean conflict. The Sadducees reflected the tradition before then, such as that found in the book of Sirach (ca. 200BC). Pharisaic belief of the late 100s is best reflected in a book called 2 Maccabees.

The Pharisees also followed oral traditions on how to keep the Law, called the "tradition of the elders." The Sadducees of course had their own traditional interpretations and oral traditions--they just denied it. They claimed just to stick to the Law and not the added traditions of the Pharisees. Nevertheless, the application of Scripture to a new context and new situations almost always involves going beyond what is explicitly said.

The Sadducees were from the highest social class of Israel. In one hypothesis, they actually were from the earlier lineage of high priests before the Maccabees took over the priesthood in 152BC. Then when Herod the Great eliminated the Maccabean line, this formerly priestly class was available to serve once again. In any case, it is a theory.

The law that these Sadducees invoke is the rule of levirite marriage, found in Deuteronomy 25:5. Because the firstborn son inherited the property, it was important for there to be a firstborn son. If an older brother did not have one and died at a pre-mature age, any younger brother was to take on his wife (even though he was probably already married) and raise up seed for him. That child, in effect, was not his son but the son of his older brother. This rule, in effect, is what happened in the case of Boaz and Ruth, although there he was not a brother but a relative of the deceased.  

12:20 "[There] were seven brothers. And the first took wife and, dying, he did not leave seed. 21. And the second took her, and he died, not having left seed, and the third similarly. 22. And the seven did not leave seed. Last of all, the wife also died. 23. In the resurrection, whose wife of theirs will she be, for the seven had her [as] wife."

The mention of seven brothers evokes 2 Maccabees 7, a classical Pharisaic text on resurrection. In that story, seven brothers and their mother suffer martyrdom because they believe in a better resurrection (cf. Heb. 11:35). The Sadducees here must think they are pretty clever and quite cheeky to evoke the image of 2 Maccabees. 

12:24 And Jesus said to them, "Do you not err on account of this, not knowing the Scriptures nor the power of God? 25. For whenever they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor give in marriage, but they are as the angels in the skies.

Jesus hands it right back to them. Once again, his opponents are making a false assumption. They are assuming that men will dominate women in the kingdom of God just like they dominated them then. They assume that, in the kingdom, women would be subordinate to men just as women were subordinate to men then.

But women will not be subordinate or inferior to men in the kingdom of God. Women will not be "given" in marriage. Indeed, there will be no marriage in heaven because there will be no sex in the kingdom. Both men and women will have transformed bodies like the angels in heaven. [1]

On a side note, there is no biblical basis for the sentiment you sometimes hear that husbands and wives will not recognize each other in heaven. This rumor presumably arose in some way from this passage. But the passage does not say anything like that.

[1] Mark is not clear what the location of this afterlife existence will be. I have chosen the kingdom of God on a new earth as the location. However, it is possible that heaven is in view. 

12:26 "And concerning the dead, that they are raised, do you not read in the book of Moses at the bush how God said to him, saying, 'I am the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob?' 27. God is not of the dead but of those who live. You err much."

Jesus gives another argument that sounds very much like the rabbinic arguments of his day. At the burning bush, God says, "I am the God of Abraham" (Exod. 3:6). Jesus focuses on the present tense. If God is the God of Abraham in the present tense, then Abraham must have continued to live beyond death somewhere. And we have other Gospel texts that suggest that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob will return to the earth when the kingdom of God fully arrives (e.g., Matt. 8:11).

Who were the Sadducees?

A Christian children's song has a verse, "I don't want to be a Sadducee, because they're sad you see..." The song points out the key aspect of Sadducees that sticks out to us--they did not believe in any afterlife.

Your typical New Testament survey class usually suggests a few other characteristics: priestly types, didn't believe in angels or spirits, only believed the Law was Scripture, Roman collaborators. Some of these stock characteristics are actually highly debated once you enter scholarly circles. Several of them, for example, are based on single statements in single sources whose interpretation is highly debatable.

For example, the idea that Sadducees didn't believe in angels or spirits comes pretty much from a single statement in Acts 23:8: "The Sadducees do not believe in resurrection, neither of angel nor of spirit. But the Pharisees confess both." Needless to say, it sure sounds like angel and spirit here expand in some way on the word resurrection. Acts thus seems only to be saying that Sadducees did not believe in life after death.

The idea that the Sadducees only followed the Jewish Law and not the rest of the Jewish canon comes largely from a single statement in Josephus book 13: "the Pharisees have delivered to the people a great many observances by succession from their fathers, which are not written in the laws of Moses; and for that reason it is that the Sadducees reject them, and say that we are to esteem those observances to be obligatory which are in the written word, but are not to observe what are derived from the tradition of our forefathers. "

But this passage is not contrasting the Law with, say, the Prophets or the Writings. It is contrasting some alleged following of the Law alone versus following the Law as interpreted by the "traditions of the elders." In reality, of course, we know that there never is some following of the Law alone. This is simply the normal perception of a religious group that they are following the Bible alone while other groups are following human traditions. In reality we all are following interpretive traditions.

The passage above goes on to suggest that the main following of the Sadducees was among the rich, and Josephus' statements that they were not a cohesive group probably indicates that they were not so much idealogicalically bound as socially bound, that is, what defined them as a group was primarily the fact that they were from a certain, somewhat aristocratic, priestly class of family.

The name "Sadducee" is close enough to "Zadok" to suggest a theory, namely, that when the Syrian king Antiochus Epiphanes took the priesthood away from Onias III in the early 2nd century BC, and then later when the Maccabees took over the priesthood (152BC), the displaced priestly families who were the true "sons of Zadok" continued to exist disempowered, but still wealthy and still in connection with the temple. They would represent a somewhat older strand of thinking, a more "conservative" one in the sense of resisting new ways of thinking like the newly risen apocalyptic stream of thought that arose in the early second century. Their rejection of an afterlife was simply the perpetuation of a point of view that was long standing at the temple, as we find in the Psalms. Sirach also seems to come from this social strand at the turn of the second century and embodies a similar view.

When the Romans took power in 63BC and then in 37BC when Herod the Great took over Jerusalem, the Sadducees were able to reinsert themselves into priestly leadership. We thus take largely at face value Acts 5:17 at face value to indicate a close association between many high priests and the Sadducean sect. They were Roman collaborators only insofar as it is good to be in power and when you can only be in power by maintaining a good relationship with those who grant you power, you walk a fine line.

The relationship between the Sadducees and the Essenes is an interesting one, as in some places the Dead Sea Scrolls take positions more similar to the Sadducees than the Pharisees. My hypothesis, one I haven't published and please remember me when you come into your footnotes, is that the Teacher of Righteousness was one of those displaced priests (here following James VanderVam's suggestion that the TR might have been the anonymous high priest of the years 159-152BC). But the group that would become the Essenes, "Enochic Judaism," I would suggest, was already in existence as an apocalyptic group well prior to this point.

The group we call the Essenes was thus a hybrid mixture of apocalyptic Judaism with a highly charismatic Sadducee. Even here, we are not talking about the Dead Sea group, which itself was a later, ultra-conservative spin off of this group that did not settle at the Dead Sea until some 50 years after the "Covenant of Damascus" was made, the settlement not existing until around 100BC.

And those are Schenck's thoughts on the Sadducees and Essenes, not likely to be developed in publication any time soon.