Sadducees, we are told, are “those who say there is no resurrection.” Sadducees were a religio-political party in the Israel of that time. To them, the only hope for Israel’s survival lay in collaborating in various ways with the Roman occupiers. They saw authority for the people of God residing solely and strictly in the first five books of what we call the Old Testament: the Pentateuch; the “Torah” portion of what contemporary Judaism refers to as Torah, Prophets, and Writings. To them, ultimate authority resided strictly in the Law of Moses.

            Hence, their argument vis-á-vis resurrection would have been a simple one: those first five books of Moses — Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy — contain no teaching about any “resurrection from the dead.” Resurrection from the dead, therefore, was, in their belief, not a teaching from God. It was a human-made superstition, something nice we like to believe because it makes us feel warm and secure, as if death weren’t the end of everything. But as far as the Sadducees were concerned, there was no substance to the belief. The only God there is, was or ever will be, in the only “Word of God” that there is, had promised no such thing. There was no resurrection.

            The Sadducees’ chief opposition party at the time was the Pharisees. The Pharisees saw authority as residing in those first five books of Moses — and beyond. God’s Word was there in those books, to be sure, but also in the prophets and in the historical writings, and beyond that, in the Oral Tradition of interpretation that had been handed down from generation to generation, including the six hundred and some regulations that prescribed, among other things, exactly what

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