Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] He gives an account of this transformation to the Corinthians, saying: We shall all indeed rise, but we shall not all be changed, in a moment, in the blink of an eye, at the final trumpet call: only, naturally, those still surviving in the flesh: And the dead, as he puts it, will rise, and we shall be changed. [2] Once this ordering is grasped first, you will refer the rest back to the earlier sense. For when he adds, For this perishable thing must clothe itself with imperishability, and this mortal thing must clothe itself with deathlessness, this will be that dwelling from heaven which, groaning in this flesh, we long to be clothed over with — over the flesh, that is, in which we shall be caught, since he says we who are in this tent are burdened, and we do not wish to be unclothed but rather clothed over, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life — that is, while it is transformed by being clothed over with what is from the heavens. [3] For who, while still in the flesh, will not desire to be clothed over with immortality, and to prolong life, having gained death as profit through a substitute transformation, so as not to experience the underworld which will exact the very last farthing? Yet even after resurrection one who has already experienced the underworld will still undergo transformation. [4] For from this point we have already established that the flesh will rise in every case, and that through the coming transformation it will take on an angelic condition. [5] Or, if it is only in those still found within the flesh that this change must occur so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life — that is, the flesh by that heavenly and eternal overgarment — then those who are found dead will not attain life, having already been deprived of the matter, and, so to speak, of life's nourishment, namely the flesh: or otherwise they too must necessarily receive it back, so that in them too what is mortal can be swallowed up by life, if they are to attain life. [6] But you say: in the dead, this mortal element will already have been swallowed up. Not in all cases, surely: for how many will be found, say, dead only a day, corpses so fresh that nothing in them can be seen to have been swallowed up? [7] For surely you do not suppose 'swallowed up' means anything other than intercepted, abolished, snatched from every sense, ceased to appear in every respect. Nor is it established that the most ancient corpses of the giants have been swallowed up, whose skeletons still survive — we have already spoken of this elsewhere. [8] Moreover, quite recently in this very city, when the foundations of a temple were being laid sacrilegiously over so many old graves, the people shuddered at bones nearly five hundred years old still moist and hair still giving off its smell. It is established that not only bones endure but even teeth remain incorrupt over the ages — kept, as it were, like seeds of the body that will one day bear fruit in the resurrection. [9] Finally, even if the mortal element is found already swallowed up in all the dead, this is certainly by death, certainly by the passage of time, certainly through age — but is it by life, is it by the overgarment, is it by the infusion of immortality? [10] Further, one who says the mortal is swallowed up by these means has denied it is by others: and it will certainly be agreed that this is accomplished and supplied by divine powers, not by the laws of nature. [11] Therefore, since what is mortal must be swallowed up by life, that life must in every way be present for the swallowing to occur, and be swallowed up in order to be transformed: if you say a fire must be kindled, you cannot claim that the thing by which it is kindled is necessary in one place and not in another. [12] So too when he adds, Since indeed we shall be found not naked even when unclothed — speaking, of course, of those who will not be caught in life, in the flesh, on the day of the Lord — he did not deny that those he had foretold as 'unclothed' would be naked except in this sense: he wanted them understood as reclothed with the same substance of which they had been stripped. [13] For they will be found naked in the sense of having laid the flesh aside, or partly torn away or worn down — for this too can be called nakedness — and then they will receive it back, so that being reclothed in flesh they can also be clothed over with immortality: for to be 'clothed over' cannot apply to anyone but one already clothed.