Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] The confidence of Christians is the resurrection of the dead: believing this, we are what we are. Believing this is compelled by truth; and truth is unveiled by God. [2] Yet the common crowd mocks, reckoning that nothing survives after death — and all the while they hold funeral rites for the dead, and with the most lavish devotion too, matched to the departed's habits and to the season's delicacies, so that those they deny have any feeling at all are presumed, even so, to have appetites. [3] But I shall laugh at the crowd all the harder when they burn the very dead most savagely whom afterward they feed most gluttonously — earning credit and giving offense with the same fires. O piety playing at cruelty! Does it sacrifice, or does it insult, when it burns even as it burns the burned? [4] Plainly the wise sometimes join their opinion to the crowd's. That there is nothing after death is the school of Epicurus; and Seneca too says that everything ends after death, even death itself. [5] Yet it is enough that the opinion of Pythagoras is no less weighty, and Empedocles and the Platonists insist, on the contrary, that the soul is immortal — indeed, they go further still and affirm that it returns even into bodies, though not the same bodies, and not always human ones, so that Euphorbus is counted as returning in Pythagoras, and Homer in a peacock. [6] At any rate they declared the soul's return in bodily form, tolerable enough in having changed its quality rather than denied it outright — grazing the truth, even if never quite arriving at it. So the world, even when it errs, does not fail to know the resurrection of the dead.