The resurrection of the dead has always raised a great number of questions, and many of them have been connected with the understanding of reality characteristic of the limited view of a fallen person living in a fallen world. The main problem here becomes the problem of human imagination and the habit of extrapolating the processes and models of the fallen world to a place where processes unfold differently and the models are unsuitable by definition.

For example, it sometimes happens that the need to explore other planets is "grounded" theologically precisely by the inevitability of the general resurrection: if, the supporters of this rather original theory claim, all generations that ever lived on Earth are resurrected, there will simply not be enough room for them on the planet; therefore, in order to settle them, they will necessarily have to resort to colonizing other planets, and that means preparation for the general resurrection presupposes both interplanetary travel and the colonization of planets suitable for life. For now, at the present stage of its technological development, as the supporters of this view maintain, humanity is not yet ready for the general resurrection. This very peculiar theory may appear amusing, but the arguments offered by its supporters are in essence not very different from those presented to Jesus by the Sadducees, who did not believe in the resurrection. There, too, a picture is drawn that comes down to the same pseudo-problem as the "problem" of the Earth being "overpopulated" by resurrected people: the Sadducees who draw it begin from the idea that resurrection means a person's return to the life of the fallen world that he lives now. Resurrection here is conceived not as movement forward, but as movement backward.

Jesus compares resurrected people with angels, not in the sense that people, when rising, turn into angels (following that logic, one would have to suppose that when they die they turn into demons), but in the sense that the spiritual and natural condition of the resurrected person differs from the spiritual and natural condition of the fallen person no less than the condition and life of that same fallen person differ from the condition and life of an angel. The Savior does not speak in detail about this new life, perhaps because, as fallen people, most of us would not understand His descriptions anyway; but He quite unambiguously rejects the very possibility of transferring the logic and models of the fallen world to the Kingdom, that is, He rejects precisely what we are so inclined to do in our conversations and reflections about the Kingdom.

Jesus' opponents sometimes arranged for Him a kind of examination in the Jewish theology of their day. The question about a woman who had been married several times in her life was used by opponents of faith in the universal resurrection, chiefly representatives of the priesthood, as an argument in debate: indeed, whose wife would she be if she met all her husbands alive? This was one of those standard "difficult" questions from the Sadducees to the Pharisees, to which there were their own "elegant" answers. Jesus, as is not hard to guess, was being tested on His knowledge of such answers.

He speaks about something entirely different: the life of the Kingdom, which is completely unlike the life of the untransformed world with its laws. He wants to show those asking Him that trying to apply the coordinate system of the untransformed world to the life of the Kingdom is a path that is a dead end from the start. In the Kingdom there is no earthly marriage not because the differences between men and women disappear there, but because the very quality of life changes there; even humanity as such changes, in both of its modes, male and female.

The problem about which those who doubt the resurrection ask Jesus could arise only in the completely incredible case that the resurrection became not the triumph of the Kingdom with its new life, but merely the return of all the dead to their former, untransformed life. In the world where time and cause-and-effect relations are an absolute reality, where no effect can be the cause of itself and where time is irreversible, there is indeed no way out of the situation described by the Sadducean theologians. In the untransformed world it cannot occur: its laws do not allow it.

The world where it is possible is ordered differently; different laws operate there, there is no linear time so familiar to us, and therefore the situation can be resolved in the most unexpected way. Jesus gives two examples as illustrations: God, for whom there are no dead, so that for Him Abraham, Isaac, and other great spiritual leaders, long dead for us, are alive; and David, who calls his "lord" the One who in our untransformed world has not yet been born.

It is no wonder that Jesus' opponents fall silent: what He has said does not fit into any framework of any theological schemes. Neither does the Kingdom He brought into the world.

In his letter to Timothy, Paul reminds him of the situation that had developed in the Ephesian church. There, as is clear, a tendency toward turning Christianity into a kind of new religion, based on the Torah understood externally and therefore clearly inclined toward legalism, was plainly visible and even growing.

Everything listed by the apostle that interested the newly appeared Ephesian "teachers" and their students at that time quite obviously concerned either the finer points of the text of the sacred books or the details of religious legislation, matters that in the Synagogue were handled only by zealots of the most refined casuistry. It is possible that in this way the freedom received in the Ephesian church was expressed in the lives of those who previously had been forced to be content with secondary and tertiary roles. Indeed, the church community of Ephesus, like that of many other cities, consisted mainly either of Jews or of those Gentiles who already had experience of synagogue life because they had earlier been interested in Judaism (in the Synagogue such Gentiles who believed in the God of Israel were called "God-fearers"). Some of these people may have known Jewish tradition quite well and even explained the Torah themselves to their fellow Gentiles, but in the Synagogue they were not considered rabbis or teachers, since for the Jews they still remained "Gentiles." And now, in the new church community, where Jews no longer had the former exclusive right to teach, these people found themselves precisely as teachers.

The problem, however, was that they were now continuing to teach newly converted Christians the same thing they had previously taught their fellow Gentiles in the Synagogue: the Jewish religion as they themselves understood it. The Church, strictly speaking, did not need this: Christianity is not a religion, and there is no special need to train Christians in any religious tradition whatever. Meanwhile, the Ephesian "teachers" were not only engaged in such teaching but, apparently, considered it fundamentally important and absolutely necessary for every Christian. It is this misunderstanding that Paul asks his disciple to notice.