Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
But flesh and blood, you say, cannot possess the kingdom of God as an inheritance. We know that this too is written; but we have deliberately put it off until now, so that whatever the adversaries throw up as a barricade in their very front line we might overturn in the last engagement, once all the other questions — so many auxiliary troops of theirs — have been scattered ahead of it. But even now let us ask that what precedes be recalled, so that the origin of the passage may govern its sense. As I understand it, the apostle, having laid out for the Corinthians the whole order of church discipline point by point, summed up both his own gospel and their faith in the announcement of the Lord's death and resurrection, so that he might draw the rule of our own hope from the very source on which it stands. And so he goes on: 'Now if it is proclaimed of Christ that he was raised up from among the dead, how can some of you be claiming there is no rising of the dead? Yet if that were so, then Christ himself was never raised. And if Christ was never raised, our proclamation amounts to nothing, and your trust amounts to nothing either. We would then stand exposed as liars about God, since we bore witness that he brought Christ back to life — one he never brought back, if indeed the dead do not truly rise. For if the dead do not rise, Christ too remains unraised; and if Christ remains unraised, your trust is worthless, you are yet trapped in your sins, and those who died within Christ are simply gone.' What point does he seem, through all this, to be building toward? The resurrection of the dead, you say — the very thing being denied. Certainly, wanting it believed on the model of the Lord's own resurrection? Certainly, you say. Now is a model built out of unlikeness, or out of likeness? Out of likeness, obviously, you say. But how did Christ rise — in the flesh, or not? If without doubt you hear that he died, that he was laid in a tomb, 'just as the Scriptures had foretold,' in no other way than in the flesh, then you must equally grant that he was raised again in the flesh: for the very thing that fell in death, that lay in the tomb, is the very thing that rose — not so much Christ existing in flesh as flesh existing in Christ. If, then, we are to rise after the pattern of Christ, who rose in the flesh, then we shall no longer be rising after the pattern of Christ if we ourselves rise without flesh. 'For through a man came death, and through a man the resurrection,' he says — distinguishing the authors, Adam of death, Christ of resurrection, yet establishing that resurrection shares its substance with death itself, since he sets their two authors side by side under the shared title of 'man.' For inasmuch as, in Adam, everyone dies, so too, in Christ, everyone will be brought to life, then they will be made alive in the flesh in Christ, just as they die in the flesh in Adam. But 'each in his own order' — that is, because each also in his own body. For the order of the merits, arranged as it were by name, will be arranged accordingly. But since merits are also credited to the body, the order of bodies must necessarily be arranged too, so that there can be an order of merits. As for the fact that some are even 'baptized on behalf of the dead' — we shall see whether reasonably. At least it points to their having instituted this practice on the presupposition by which others too supposed that a vicarious baptism would be of profit even to the flesh, toward the hope of resurrection — a hope which, unless it is corporeal, could hardly be pledged in a corporeal baptism in any other terms. Why, he says, are they even being baptized 'if the dead do not rise' — that is, if the bodies that are baptized will not rise? For the soul is not consecrated by washing, but by its own response. 'Why,' he says, 'do we also stand in peril every hour?' — through the flesh, obviously. 'I die daily' — through the perils of the flesh, surely, the flesh with which he also fought wild beasts at Ephesus — those beasts, that is, of the Asian affliction, of which he speaks in his second letter to the same church: 'We do not want you to be ignorant, brothers, of our affliction which came upon us in Asia, that we were weighed down beyond measure, beyond our strength, so that we even despaired of life.' All this, unless I am mistaken, he enumerates for this purpose: that in refusing to have the struggle of the flesh believed vain, he means, without question, to have the resurrection of the flesh believed — for the struggle of a thing that will have no resurrection must be reckoned vain. But someone will say, how do the dead rise? With what body do they come? At this point he takes up the qualities of bodies — whether the very same bodies are resumed, or others. But since that question belongs later, it will suffice for now that from this passage too a bodily resurrection is defined, in the very fact that the question raised concerns the quality of bodies.