Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] If the whole of creation figures the resurrection too faintly for you, if nothing in its order signals such a thing — because its individual creatures are said not so much to die as to cease, and are thought not to be reanimated but merely reshaped — then take the fullest and firmest specimen of this hope: a thing that is itself a living creature, subject to life and to death. [2] I mean that bird peculiar to the East, famous for being unique, monstrous in its manner of reproducing itself, which gladly buries itself and so renews itself, departing and succeeding at the very close of its own life, becoming a phoenix again where a moment ago there was none, itself again where a moment ago it was no more — another, yet the same. [3] What could be more explicit, more clearly a sign pointing to this very question, or what other thing could furnish such a proof? God too, in his own scriptures, says, 'For you shall flourish like the phoenix' — that is, out of death, out of a funeral — so that you may believe that the substance of the body can be recovered even out of fire. [4] The Lord has declared that we outrank many sparrows: if we do not outrank phoenixes too, that is no great matter. But shall men perish once for all, while the birds of Arabia are secure of their resurrection?