It’s quite obvious if you’ve read the right sort of bad writing online.

Seriously, just imagine Jayman talking about Eru Illúvatar instead of Yahweh, it makes everything so much more amusing.

Meier was able to read those two short sentences and to know that Jesus was thinking about all that extra stuff about “permanent self-definition” and so on. Cool, huh?

He is able to place Exodus 3:6 within the context of the Hebrew Bible and ancient Judaism. This is what every reader should be doing.

His second premise seems a bit strange to me: it sounds like he’s taking Levitical prohibitions against touching corpses and conflating them with some kind of presumed divine revulsion for the immaterial souls of the dead.

That God is the God of the living, not the dead, is an echo of numerous passages from the Hebrew Bible. It is not assumed that the dead are only corpses (though the Sadducees would have believed that).

The Pentateuch contains numerous references to Sheol as the abode of departed souls, so it seems a bit unlikely that the Sadducees would have rejected the idea of immaterial souls in Sheol.

It may seem unlikely to you but it’s a fact noted by Josephus (Jewish War 2.8.14; Jewish Antiquities 18.1.4).

But now let’s go back to that first premise, that God’s “self-chosen definition” requires a “permanent” relationship to the three patriarchs. That’s kind of a lot of extra information to pull out of the words, “I am the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.”

Genesis states that God made an everlasting covenant with the patriarchs and Exodus 3 reiterates that God will continue to fulfill his covenant obligations to their descendants. This sounds like a permanent relationship to me.

If He had said, “I am the God of the Ten Plagues of Egypt,” would that require that from now on and forever more His identity would depend on Egypt existing under a cloud of darkness, gnats, frogs, dead babies and so on? And if not, why not? Would it be wrong to call God the God of the Ten Plagues, and not intend to claim a perpetual curse on Egypt?

Your analogy is not apt. God made an everlasting covenant with the patriarchs but did not issue an everlasting curse upon Egypt.

According to Jayman, all this extra information comes from the arguments Pharisaic rabbis were using, in their commentaries, to try and promote the idea of (Zoroastrian-style) resurrection and judgment as being valid Judaism.

No, the extra information comes from reading Exodus 3:6 within its canonical context. The rabbis, like Jesus, knew they could cite a small snippet of text and that their audience would understand its greater significance. You see the citation and are perplexed at why Exodus 3:6 is cited because you don’t consider how it fits in with the message of the entire Bible.

To say that Jesus proved the Sadducees wrong by appealing to the latter-day arguments of the Pharisees is to concede the main point that I was trying to make: that Jesus is citing Exodus 3 in order to prove a point that Exodus 3 does not make. The commentaries are the source of the doctrine, not the Scripture itself.

Jesus did not appeal to the arguments of the rabbis (which are from a later date). He appealed to the knowledge of a biblically literate audience to catch the full meaning behind his citation.

Since the patriarchs do not belong to “the dead” whose resurrection is at issue, however, then their relationship with God is entirely irrelevant to the question of whether or not the dead are raised. Indeed, since they are “living” (according to Meier), then even if the patriarchs were to be resurrected, it would still not be a resurrection of the dead, but only a resurrection of the living!

It would be a resurrection of the physically dead. Remember, the Sadducees believed that the patriarchs were not even alive “spriitually” (in Sheol). If the patriarchs were alive spiritually, as they must be for God to continue to fulfill his covenant promises towards them, then they would be raised in the messianic age to enjoy the climax of the covenant. Here there is the ancient Jewish presupposition that the “afterlife”, if it existed, involved resurrection (see below).

What’s more, as Exodus 13 tells us, the patriarchs, and specifically Jacob, were as dead as it is possible for a person to be. As Jacob made them swear in Genesis 50, the Hebrews still kept Jacob’s lifeless remains with them, so that they could return them to Palestine and not leave them in Egypt. These bones had not been knit back together and given fresh sinews and flesh, as in Ezekiel’s vision. These were unresurrected bones, and the Hebrews still had them, ten chapters after the burning bush passage Jesus was referring to. So if Jacob was not among “the dead,” then it’s a fair bet no one else is either, and where there are no dead, there is no resurrection of the dead.

The patriarchs were physically dead but still alive in Sheol (e.g., Genesis 15:15).

Notice how Meier tiptoes around this problem with some vague hand-waving about how “life beyond death in God’s presence” must be understood “in terms of resurrection” (whatever that means).

It means that, outside the Sadducees who denied the existence of an afterlife, ancient Jews believed in the resurrection of the dead. Remember that Jesus is arguing with a Sadducee and no one else (e.g., he is not trying to convince a 21st century atheist that the resurrection of the dead occurs). If a Sadducee was convinced that there was an afterlife then he would have believed in the resurrection of the dead because that was how the afterlife was conceived of among ancient Jews. If Jesus had talked to a different person his argument may have taken a different form. This is where understanding the context of first century Judaism comes in handy.