words. He meant to assert that the tribute was one of the things of Cæsar, and that because the coin in which it was paid was stamped with his image. More fallacious reasoning could hardly be imagined, and it is not surprising that the Pharisees "marveled at him." Nobody doubted that the Emperor possessed the material power, and no more than this was proved by the fact that coins bearing his effigy were current in the country. The question was not whether he actually ruled Judea, but whether it was lawful to acknowledge that rule by paying tribute. And what light could it throw on this question to show that the money used to pay it was issued from his mint? It must almost be supposed that Jesus fell into the confusion of supposing that the denarium with Cæsar's image and superscription upon it was in some peculiar sense Cæsar's property, whereas it belonged as completely to the man who produced it at the moment as did the clothes he wore. Had the Roman domination come to an end at any moment, the coin of the Empire would have retained its intrinsic value, but the Romans could by no possibility have founded a right of exacting tribute upon the circumstance of its circulation. Either, therefore, this celebrated declaration was a mere verbal juggle, or it rested on a transparent fallacy.
After the Pharisees had been thus disposed of, their inquiries were followed up by a puzzle devised by the Sadducees in order to throw ridicule on the doctrine of a future state. These sectaries put an imaginary case. Moses had enjoined that if a man died leaving a childless widow, his brother should marry her for the purpose of keeping up the family. Suppose, said they, that the first of seven brothers marries, and dies without issue. The second brother then marries her with the like result; then the third, and so on through all the seven. In the resurrection whose wife will this woman be, for the seven have had her as their wife? To this Jesus replies: first, that his questioners greatly err, neither knowing the Scriptures nor the power of God; secondly, that when people rise from death they do not marry, but are like angels; thirdly, that the resurrection is proved by the fact that God had spoken of himself as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and that he is not the God of the dead, but of the living (Mk. xii. 18-27; Mt. xxii. 23-33; Lu.
