12:18 The Sadducees were mainly urban, wealthy, and educated Jews. Their numbers were comparatively few, but they occupied important positions including many in the priesthood. Their influence was greater than their size as a party within Judaism. This is the only place Mark mentioned them. They claimed to believe only what the Old Testament taught, and they did not follow the traditions of the elders that the Pharisees observed. They did not believe in the resurrection because they said they could find no clear revelation about it in the Old Testament.
12:19-23 The Sadducees posed their hypothetical case to make any view of the resurrection but their own look absurd.289
12:24-25 The Sadducees did not understand the Scriptural revelation about resurrection. Furthermore they did not realize that God's power was sufficient to raise people and to raise them to a different type of life. Marriage as we know it will not exist when we have immortal bodies. Deathless existence will not require propagation of the human race. The Sadducees denied the existence of the angelic race (Acts 23:8), which belief Jesus also corrected. They considered their views enlightened, but Jesus said they needed enlightening.
12:26-27 In concluding that the Old Testament did not teach the resurrection, the Sadducees had overlooked an important passage in the Torah (Pentateuch). They regarded the Torah as particularly authoritative. Exodus 3:6 taught continued human existence after death. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were still alive in Moses' day. The Sadducees not only rejected the resurrection but also life after death.290The Jews had a more holistic view of man than most modern westerners do (cf. Gen. 2:7). The Sadducees concluded that if the material part of man died, the whole person ceased to exist. Jesus, who held the same unified view of man, argued that if the immaterial part of man lived the whole person would live.
The major error of the Sadducees was their mistaken understanding of scriptural revelation. Jesus' final rebuke (v. 27), unique in the second Gospel, stressed that flaw.
