Mark 12:13 – 17 Controversy with the Pharisees and Herodians

They seek to entrap him in speech, to have him self-incriminate. We are alerted to the insincerity of their flattery: it is so much “flannel”

Is it lawful to pay the tax to Caesar? The leading question operates against the background of the Jewish law. We have seen it before: “Is it lawful to pluck grain on the Sabbath?”(2:24); “Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the Sabbath?” (3:4) The issue is not so much the tax itself but the coinage used to pay it. The coin bears the imprinted image of the pagan god, the Roman Caesar, and hence it is an idol.

Bring me a denarius, and they did! This is extraordinary: Jesus was not carrying one of these coins but his entrappers were able to produce one. (Someone has said that this is like asking them to produce a slab of bacon, and then finding that they had one with them.)

Whose image and inscription is on the coin? In the time of Jesus the image is of the Roman god, Tiberius Caesar (14 – 37 CE), and the inscription would have read: “Tiberius Caesar Augustus, son of the Divine Augustus.” His stepfather Augustus Caesar was the first emperor to be named a god

Implied question: whose image is on you? The subtext comes from Genesis 1:26-27 “Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image; according to our likeness; … So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.’” This idea is called in Hebrew “bitzelem elohim” and in Latin “Imago Dei” The nature of the divine image is not the object of discussion here.

The things of Caesar give back to Caesar and the things of God give back to God. The answer of Mark’s Jesus not only avoids the trap of a leading question; it allows that Caesar has a small part to play in the big scheme of things and points to the major object of our allegiance, the Lord God.

There is a Rabbinic tradition that reflects on the superficial similarities, but profound differences, between the two images. It surfaces in the Babylonian Talmud (Sanhedrin 38a), but which is undoubtedly much older: “When the kings of the earth stamp their image on coins, they all come out the same. When the Holy One, Blessed be He, puts his image on humans, they are all different.”
Caesar only has a relatively minor call on us; the Holy One, Blessed be he, has the first and major call on our allegiance. Caesar’s power is limited to stamping out replicas of his own image; the Holy One, Blessed Be He, has the power to express the infinite variety of his own image.

There is no justification to be gained from this story for thinking that God (maybe) has a claim on our spare change. Unfortunately, this is the counter-assumption that interpretation has to struggle against in our western cultures.

Mark 12:18 – 27 Controversy with the Sadducees

The Sadducees who say there is no resurrection: The Sadducees are one of the 1st century Jewish groups mentioned by Josephus. They are neither a popularist group like the Pharisees nor are they as progressive. They are a small, elitist group with a conservative outlook based on the five books of Moses (c.f. the Samaritans). As a consequence, the new fangled suggestion that the soul does not perish at death (“resurrection”), based on suggestions in later biblical and post-biblical, books and championed by the Pharisees is rejected.

The “reduction ad absurdum”: The rejection of an idea, by showing that it can lead to absurdities is clearly exemplified here. Given the requirement of levirate (“brother-in-law”) law laid out in Torah (Deut. 25:5-6), we can easily imagine the situation where one woman has (successively) been married to several brothers. Resurrection, they conclude, makes a nonsense of this: “Whose wife will she be in the ‘resurrection’?”

Jesus responds that they are wrong on two counts:
You don’t understand God’s power. You must not assume that human relationships then (after the resurrection) will be the same as we know them now, with marriage continuing on as we know it now. God has the power to make all things new.

You don’t understand scripture. If you looked you would see that Torah itself presupposes life beyond death. In Exodus 3, God says he is the God of the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob who have all died. If existence ceased with death then God would have to have said “I was the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob”. (This is a win on the technicalities of grammar, made on the assumption that every letter of Tanak was there for a purpose. You can understand it without having to agree with it!)

No wonder then that they were utterly amazed at him!