Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] But lest the resurrection be thought to be preached only of those bodies committed to tombs, you have it written: "And I will command the fish of the sea, and they shall vomit up the bones that have been eaten, and I will make joint fit joint and bone fit bone." [2] "So," you say, "the fish too will be raised, and the other beasts and the flesh-eating birds, that they may bring back up those they devoured -- since even in Moses you read that blood is to be required of every beast?" Not at all: rather, beasts and fish are named in this restitution of flesh and blood precisely to make the point more forcefully -- that even devoured bodies will rise, since a reckoning is demanded even from the devourers themselves. [3] And I think Jonah furnishes an apt proof of this same divine power, when he is disgorged uncorrupted, both flesh and soul, from the belly of the sea-beast -- and surely three days would have sufficed the whale's insides to digest that flesh, more readily than a coffin, a tomb, or the slow decay of any burial laid to rest. [4] Never mind that the beast also pictured, in savage men, those who rage most fiercely against the Christian name -- or even the angels of iniquity themselves -- from whom blood will be exacted in requital owed. [5] Who, then, is more fit to learn than to presume, more careful to believe than to argue, more devoted to divine wisdom than indulgent of his own -- when hearing something appointed by God for flesh and skin and sinew and bone, and yet dreams up some other meaning, as though what is proclaimed for these substances were not meant for man? For either nothing at all is destined for man -- not the largess of the kingdom, not the severity of judgment, not whatever the resurrection is -- or, if it is destined for man, it must necessarily be destined for those very substances out of which the man to whom it is destined is built. And this too I ask of those most subtle re-molders of bones and flesh and sinews and tombs: why is it that whenever something is pronounced of the soul, they interpret it as nothing but the soul and do not twist it into a figure for something else, while whenever something is stated about some bodily form, they insist it means anything rather than what it names? [6] If bodily things are parables, then so are things of the soul; if things of the soul are not, then neither are bodily things. For man is as much body as soul, so that one kind cannot be allowed riddles while the other is barred from them.