About the Work:
In the Gospel of Matthew (22:23-33), we find Jesus engaged with the Sadducees, one of the four schools of Jewish thought at the time. The Sadducees were sympathetic to – and in time, would be absorbed into – the Greek culture around them. They denied that there would be a Resurrection and posed a puzzle for Jesus. In part of his reply, Christ points to the way God speaks about the dead. Ephrem the Syrian, writing from the point of view of Death, imagines a personified Death as the only one to truly understand the implications of Jesus’ words.
23 The same day Sadducees came to him, who say that there is no resurrection; and they asked him a question,
24 saying, “Teacher, Moses said, ‘If a man dies, having no children, his brother must marry the widow, and raise up children for his brother.’
25 Now there were seven brothers among us; the first married, and died, and having no children left his wife to his brother.
26 So too the second and third, down to the seventh.
27 After them all, the woman died.
28 In the resurrection, therefore, to which of the seven will she be wife? For they all had her.”
29 But Jesus answered them, “You are wrong, because you know neither the scriptures nor the power of God.
30 For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven.
31 And as for the resurrection of the dead, have you not read what was said to you by God,
32 ‘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.”
33 And when the crowd heard it, they were astonished at his teaching.
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