Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] Once we have the Lord's own words, what must we suppose his deeds signify as well — those raisings of the dead from biers, from tombs? What was the point of it? If it was for the mere display of power, or for the immediate benefit of restoring them to life, it was not, after all, so very great a thing that they should have to die all over again. [2] But if it was rather to secure faith in the future resurrection, then that bodily resurrection too is laid down as the pattern from the very form of its own proof. [3] And I will not put up with those who say that the resurrection then was destined for the soul alone, and only ran its course in the flesh as well because the resurrection of the invisible soul could not otherwise be demonstrated except through the raising up of a visible substance. [4] Those who do not believe God can do what they do not believe he can, know him badly. And yet they know he could have — if they know the record of John: for he who displayed to view the souls of the martyrs alone, still resting beneath the altar, could certainly also have shown them to the eyes as risen, without flesh. [5] But I prefer to think God incapable of deceiving — weak only in the matter of trickery — lest it seem that he set forth his proofs otherwise than he had arranged the actual event; or rather, lest, if the example of resurrection failed to be persuasive without flesh, all the more he should be unable to display the fullness of the example without that same substance. [6] Yet no illustration ever outweighs the very reality it stands for. But it would be greater if souls were to be raised along with bodies as proof of a rising without body, so that the whole salvation of man might be made to answer for half of it — when the very nature of examples would demand rather the lesser thing, that is, I mean, the resurrection of the soul alone, as a mere foretaste of the flesh that is also to rise in its own time. [7] And so, according to our own truth, those examples of the dead raised up by the Lord commended both the resurrection of the flesh and of the soul, lest this gift be denied to either substance. Yet as examples they demonstrated all the less: for they were not raised into glory nor into incorruptibility, but into another death.