A Question about Sadducees

And healthy pregnancies

Matthew 22 recounts a famous incident in Jerusalem between Jesus and the Sadducees. ESV:

The same day Sadducees came to [Jesus], who say that there is no resurrection, and they asked him a question, saying, “Teacher, Moses said, ‘If a man dies having no children, his brother must marry the widow and raise up offspring for his brother.’ Now there were seven brothers among us. The first married and died, and having no offspring left his wife to his brother. So too the second and third, down to the seventh. After them all, the woman died. In the resurrection, therefore, of the seven, whose wife will she be? For they all had her.”

The first thing I want to point out, which not everyone knows, is that the Sadducees’ example here is not just something they made up; they’re describing something from the Apocryphal book of Tobit (included as canon—and quoted from in many weddings—by Roman Catholics; rejected from the canon by Protestants): “Now it happened on the same day, that Sara daughter of Raguel, in Rages a city of the Medes, received a reproach from one of her father's servant maids, because she had been given to seven husbands, and a devil named Asmodeus had killed them, at their first going in unto her.”

Anyway, Jesus answers this story:

But Jesus answered them, “You are wrong, because you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God. For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven. And as for the resurrection of the dead, have you not read what was said to you by God: ‘I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not God of the dead, but of the living.” And when the crowd heard it, they were astonished at his teaching.

But here’s my question, because I read this in Greek, and it leapt out at me that the word for “resurrection,” ἀνάστασιν anastasin (whence Anastasia, whose name “means ‘she will rise again’”) is another form of the verb used right afterwards, translated here as “raise up,” ἀναστήσει anastesei. So I wonder if that’s a deliberate echo and, if so, what it means. I cant’t figure out what it would mean, but it felt like a striking enough similarity, those two very thematically charged words back to back, that it really stuck out to me.

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This outlandish hypothetical actually puts me in mind of the recent abortion debate, which, in post-Roe America, has increasingly become a campaign of fearmongering about the way Republican lawmakers and doctors are going to allow miscarrying women and those suffering ectopic pregnancies to suffer. That insane proposition has been hawked by The New York Times, The Guardian (“But with ambiguous, as-yet-uninterpreted but strongly worded laws now in effect in anti-choice states, providers don’t know what they are permitted to do for miscarrying patients”) and several Twitter blue checks. (“The issue isn’t what the laws literally allow/prohibit; it’s the chilling effect the threat of litigation creates,” wrote one, actually approaching the truth—that the pro-life laws being passed are good public policy.)

Of course, even though there’s enough of a superficial similarity that it brought that to mind, there’s a crucial difference. The Sadducees are posing a philosophical question about how a resurrection is supposed to work, and such a resurrection will after all have to account for remarried widows in some way (namely, the way Jesus details). But the edge cases discussed in the abortion debate aren’t the same. Historically, statistically rare stories about rape and incest have been invoked—but those emotionally charged hypothetical cases don’t affect the biological case for the humanity of the unborn child (either in this specific case or in general) or the moral case for granting him or her legal protection. But given the rate at which legislators seem to have figured out that Americans broadly will get on board with pro-life laws that allow carve-outs for those edge cases, the adaptation has been for pro-abortion folks to talk (as above) about the dangers these laws will pose for poor confused doctors who can’t distinguish between (A) an ectopic pregnancy or miscarriage and (B) a healthy baby, not yet born, that a mother is petitioning him to kill. Once again, whereas the Sadducees asked a philosophically valid question that pertained directly to the topic at hand, the pro-abortion folks are . . . trying to confuse and scare people. These laws do nothing to prohibit treatment for ectopic pregnancies and they have nothing to do with miscarriages, as the more transparent activists (see above) themselves admit.

I guess what I’m saying is, good for the Sadducees for asking an on-point question, and the pro-abortion folks aren’t even doing that much.