Matthew 22:23 - Coke's Commentary on the Holy Bible

The same day came to him the Sadducees— It is generally known that Sadoc, the master of this sect, and from whom the Sadducees took their name, thought that God was not to be served from mercenary principles; that is to say, as he crudely explained it, from the hope of reward, or fear of punishment. His followers interpreted this as an implicit denial of a future state, and so imbibed that pernicious notion of the utter destruction of the soul at death;—equally uncomfortable and absurd. The story which they mention here seems to have been a kind of common-place objection, as we meet with it in the old Jewish writers. Some are of opinion, that by the resurrection which the Sadducees denied, is to be understood the resurrection of the body; others contend, that it signifies simply the existence of men in a future state: properly speaking, however, the two notions coincide, for as the Sadducees denied the immateriality of the soul, a future state, according to their conceptions of it, could mean no thing else but the resurrection of the body; and their denying the resurrection of the body, was the same thing with their denying a future state. Farther, as they had no idea of spirit, they were obliged to make use of terms relative to the body, when they spoke of a future life. Hence came the familiar use of the word resurrection in their disputes, to denote a future state simply; and this sense is notmore unusual than the meaning which they affixed to the worddead, when they made it to signify persons annihilated, or who have no existence at all. See Luke 20:38. Our Lord's reasoning in behalf of a future state, placed in this view, is clear and conclusive. See Drusius, and Lightfoot on the place.