Mark 12:27
Mark 12:2727He is not the God of the dead, but of the living. You are badly mistaken!”
Mark's parallel to carries the same Watchtower reading: the verse is forward-looking, describing God's certainty to raise the patriarchs at the future resurrection. Because soul-sleep doctrine cannot accept that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are currently conscious, Jesus's argument is reframed as a promise about the future rather than a deduction from present reality.
Mark's phrasing is sharper than Luke's: "He is not the God of the dead but of the living. You are very much mistaken." Jesus tells the Sadducees flatly that they are wrong precisely about the intermediate state — they thought God could be the God of dead patriarchs (because they denied resurrection); Jesus replies that God is not the God of the dead at all, which means the patriarchs are not dead in the sense the Sadducees imagine. Take the rebuke at face value: if soul sleep were true, the Sadducees were right and Jesus's correction misfires. Pair with (the patriarchs "having seen [the promises] from afar… now desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one") for the patriarchs as currently conscious witnesses awaiting resurrection.
As at , the NWT renders the opening clause "He is a God, not of the dead, but of the living" — the same anarthrous-theos indefinite construction, contrary to the consensus of standard English translations ("He is not the God of the dead but of the living"). The pattern is the same one that produces "a god" at . Here the rendering is less doctrinally weighted than at but the consistency of the practice is worth noting.