What does Matthew 22:28 mean?
The Sadducees have finally reached what they see as an absurd result of belief in resurrection (Matthew 22:15–27). According to them, a woman who was married seven times in life, then resurrected in an afterlife, will now have seven men with the right to claim her as their wife. This challenge is meant to show that human resurrection is ridiculous within the context of the Law of Moses. For the Sadducees, the Law of Moses—the first five books of the Old Testament, also known as the Pentateuch—are the only real Scriptures. Since those do not explicitly mention an afterlife, Sadducees reject the idea.Now the Sadducees ask Jesus to untangle the situation: whose wife will this woman be in the afterlife? Which of the seven of them will she be married to there since all seven of them had her? The question reveals the Sadducees' assumption that if there is an afterlife, it will be fundamentally the same as life on earth. Jesus will forcefully correct them in the following verses (Mathew 22:29–32).