Irenaeus of Lyons · a new plain-English translation from the original language
The long life of the ancients, the translation of Elijah and Enoch together with their own bodies, and the preservation, along with Jonah, of Ananias, Azarias, and Misael amid the greatest dangers, clearly show that God is able to raise our bodies to eternal life. As for the extent to which God was pleased to permit this, one need only turn to the sacred writings, where it will be discovered that those who came before us exceeded spans of seven, eight, even nine centuries, their bodies reaching such a vast number of days and sharing in life exactly as far as God willed them to live. But what shall we say of those two? Enoch, pleasing God in the very body in which he pleased him, was translated, thereby foreshowing the translation of the righteous. And Elijah, just as he was in the substance of his created form, was taken up, prophesying the assumption of the fathers; and in neither case did the body hinder their translation and assumption. For it was by those same hands by which they were formed in the beginning that they received their assumption and translation. For the hands of God had grown accustomed, in Adam, to fitting together, holding, and bearing up his creature; and since their bodies persevered a long time in that same created form, those hands could carry it and set it wherever they wished. Where, then, had the first-formed man been set? In paradise, naturally, just as the writing has it: God planted an orchard in Eden toward the sunrise, and there he set the man he had fashioned; and out of that place he was driven into the world on account of his disobedience. On this account the elders, being disciples of the Apostles, hold that those who were carried off were carried off to that same place (since a garden of that kind stands ready for the just and for those bearing the Spirit — the very place to which the Apostle Paul too was caught up, and there heard sayings not fit to be spoken, at least as far as concerns our present condition); and that those thus removed remain there until the final consummation, tasting incorruption in advance.
But should anyone deem it impossible for men to survive across so vast a stretch of time, and imagine instead that Elijah was not carried up bodily but that his body burned away in the chariot of fire, let him recall that Jonah was thrown into the deep and taken into the sea-creature's belly, and afterward, at God's bidding, was cast out unharmed onto dry land. Ananias too, and Azarias, and Misael, were cast into a furnace of fire heated sevenfold, and yet suffered no harm at all, nor was even the smell of fire found upon them. What, then, was that hand of God at work among them, bringing about things beyond expectation and beyond the reach of human nature — why should we be astonished at it, seeing it acted according to the Father's own intent? And this figure is the Son of God, as the writing records king Nebuchadnezzar's own words: Was it not three men we threw bound into the furnace? Yet look — I behold four moving about within the flames, unbound, and the fourth has the appearance of a son of the gods.
Neither, then, will the nature of anything that has been made, nor the weakness of the flesh, prove stronger than the will of God. For God does not belong to the things that have been made; rather, the things that have been made are subject to God, and all things serve his will. Wherefore the Lord also says: What cannot be done by men can be brought about by God. Just as it now seems incredible and impossible to people ignorant of God's arrangement that a man could live so many years, and yet those who lived before us did live so, and those who were translated live on as an example of the length of days to come; and that men came forth safe from the belly of the whale and from the furnace of fire — and yet they did come forth, led out as if by the hand of God for the display of his power — so also now, even though some, ignorant of the power and the promise of God, contradict their own salvation, judging it impossible for God, when raising up bodies, to grant them everlasting continuance, nevertheless the unbelief of such men will not nullify the faithfulness of God.