Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] This scrutiny, then, of the heading and of the proclamation itself, defending as it does the plain sense of the words, ought to serve this end: that if the opposing side stirs up trouble by appeal to figures and riddles, the plainer texts should prevail, and should settle beforehand what is uncertain by what is more certain. [2] For some, having found the most familiar shape of prophetic speech — allegorical and figurative for the most part, though not always — twist even the resurrection of the dead, though plainly announced, into a merely imaginary meaning, asserting that death itself must be understood spiritually: [3] that the real death is not that which lies before us, the separation of flesh and soul, but ignorance of God, through which a man dead to God lies no less in error than in the tomb; [4] and that the resurrection to be vindicated is that by which a man, having come to the truth, is reanimated and brought back to life for God, and, ignorance's death having been shaken off, bursts forth, as it were, from the tomb of his old self — for the Lord too likened the scribes and Pharisees to whitewashed tombs. [5] From this, then, they conclude that those who have attained resurrection through faith are already with the Lord, whom they put on at baptism. [6] By this same cleverness they are also accustomed to deceive our people in conversation, as if they too admitted the resurrection of the flesh: "Woe," they say, "to him who does not rise again in this flesh" — so as not to be struck down at once if they were to deny resurrection outright. But privately, according to their own conscience, this is what they mean: "Woe to him who, while still in this flesh, does not come to know the heretical mysteries" — for this, among them, is what resurrection is. [7] And many, claiming resurrection to mean the soul's departure, interpret "coming out of the tomb" as escaping the world — since the world, too, is the dwelling-place of the dead, that is, of those ignorant of God — or else interpret it of the body itself, since the body too, in place of a tomb, holds the soul locked up in the death of this worldly life.