Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] For if you look back further still to the point where the mention of the outer and inner man was introduced, will you not find the dignity and hope of the flesh intact? [2] For when, speaking of the light which God has made to dawn within our hearts, so as to illuminate the knowledge of his glory as found in the person of Christ, he says we have this treasure in earthen vessels — that is, in the flesh — is it because it is earthen by its origin from clay that it is to be destroyed, or is it exalted because it is the storehouse of a divine treasure? [3] But if that very light of God, the genuine light, that which resides in the person of Christ, holds life within itself, and that life is entrusted along with the light to the flesh, is the thing to which life is entrusted going to perish? Plainly, if it perishes, the treasure itself perishes too: for perishable things are entrusted to what is perishing, as new wine to old wineskins. [4] So too when he adds, Always carrying about the dying of Christ Jesus in our body — what sort of thing is this, which can now be called both the temple of God and the tomb of Christ? [5] But why do we carry about the Lord's dying in our body? So that the life too, he says, may be made manifest. Where? In the body. In what kind of body? In a mortal one. Therefore in the flesh — plainly mortal on account of guilt, but also vital by grace — see how great a life is meant, that in it the life of Christ should be made manifest. [6] Then in an alien matter of salvation, in a substance destined for perpetual dissolution, will the eternal, continuous, incorrupt life of Christ — now even the life of God — be made manifest? Or of what period is the Lord's life that will be made manifest in our body? [7] The life he lived up to his passion was not only made manifest among the Jews, but has now been proclaimed to all the nations as well. Clearly it signifies that life which broke the adamantine gates of death and the bronze bars of the underworld, which is henceforth now ours. [8] Finally, it will be made manifest in the body. When? After death. How? When we rise in the body, just as Christ did. For lest anyone argue that the life of Jesus is already made manifest now in our body through the discipline of holiness and patience and righteousness and prudence, wherein the life of the Lord was manifest, the apostle's most far-sighted intent suggests: [9] For if we who live are handed over to death for Jesus' sake, so that his life too may be made manifest in our mortal body — clearly he says this will happen in our body once we are dead. But if then, how, unless he is raised? [10] Accordingly, in the conclusion too, Knowing, he says, that he who raised up Jesus will raise us up also together with him — since he has already risen from the dead — unless 'together with him' means 'just as he himself was raised.' But if indeed just as he himself, then certainly not without flesh.