viii Christ's argument for the Resurrection. 139 



the body that shall be ... it is raised a spiritual 

 body." 1 



More remarkable still is the concluding sentence 

 of Christ's reply, in which He asserts that sufficient 

 proof of the Resurrection ought to be found in a 

 passage of Moses where the Resurrection, or Im- 

 mortality, is not mentioned. The Sadducees, we are 

 told, were put to silence by it. 2 They had no 

 answer ready which was at once plausible and 

 popular, and perhaps the novelty of Christ's argu- 

 ment confounded them. But they were not 

 convinced ; and we may imagine one of them saying 

 to another on their way home : " See to what straits 

 the defenders of the doctrine of a Resurrection are 

 driven, when they come to argue the question on the 

 only sure ground of the letter of Scripture ! A 

 Pharisee would not have put himself so evidently in 

 the wrong as this poor ignorant Nazarene has done, 

 by quoting as decisive of the question a passage 

 which has no bearing on it whatever." And we may 

 fancy the other replying : " He does not know what 

 a syllogism is. But if he had the faintest idea of 

 logic, he would have seen that his argument tells the 

 opposite way. Because God called Himself the God 

 of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob, after they had 

 lain for centuries dead, it follows that God is a God 

 of the dead as well as of the living." 



Now, if we confine ourselves to the ground of 

 merely grammatical and logical interpretation, we 

 1 1 Cor. xv. 37-44. 2 Matt. xxii. 34. 



