Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] But now, to cover all the ground at once, let us bring up what we saved for the close — a point that will do service even for the apostle himself, actually convicting him of the grossest carelessness if, as some would have it, he shut his eyes, as the saying goes, and with no distinction and no qualification simply drove all flesh and blood, indiscriminately, out of the kingdom of God — that is, out of the very palace of the heavens itself — when Jesus even now sits enthroned at the Father's right side: man, though God; the last Adam, though the primal Word; flesh and blood, though purer than ours, yet still the same in substance and in the very form in which he ascended, and destined, as the angels affirm, to come down again in that same form — recognizable, of course, even to those who pierced him. [2] This mediator, called of God and men, keeps in himself, as a deposit entrusted by both parties, the deposit of flesh too, the down payment on the whole sum. For just as he left us the down payment of the Spirit, so he took from us the down payment of flesh and carried it up to heaven — a pledge that the entire sum will one day be brought back there. [3] Rest easy, flesh and blood: you have laid claim to heaven and the kingdom of God, in Christ. If anyone denies you a place in Christ, let him deny Christ a place in heaven too — the very ones who have denied you heaven. [4] So when it says, 'Corruption shall not have incorruption for its inheritance,' this does not mean you should reckon flesh and blood themselves to be corruption — since they are rather liable to corruption, namely through death, seeing that it is death that not merely corrupts flesh and blood but consumes it outright. [5] Rather, since he had declared that the works of flesh and blood cannot obtain the kingdom of God, all the more, to drive the point home, he stripped the inheritance of incorruption from corruption itself — that is, from death, the very thing to which the works of flesh and blood contribute. [6] For shortly after he expressed, in a manner of speaking, the death of death itself, saying, 'Death is swallowed up in the contest: death, where is your sting? Death, where is your power?' Now the sting of death is transgression — that will be the corruption; and the strength of transgression is the law — that other thing, of course, which he set up as warring in his members against the law of his mind, namely the very power of transgressing against one's will. [7] For if he also says that death, the last enemy, is to be abolished, then in this way too corruption will not obtain incorruption as its inheritance — that is, death will not persist. [8] When and how will it come to an end? 'In a moment, quick as an eye can blink, when the final trumpet sounds' — 'and the dead shall rise incorrupt.' Who are these but those who were formerly corrupted — that is, their bodies, that is, flesh and blood? 'And we shall be changed' — from what condition, if not the one in which we shall be caught? For 'what is subject to decay must clothe itself with the imperishable, and what is subject to death must clothe itself with the deathless' — what is subject to death but flesh? What is subject to decay but blood? [9] And lest you think the apostle means something else, taking care to make you understand he is laboring over the flesh, when he speaks of 'what is subject to decay' and 'what is subject to death,' he speaks while holding his very own skin: certainly he could not have said 'this' except of a subject present before him, standing there to be pointed at — it is the language of bodily demonstration. [10] Now the corruptible will be one thing, corruption another; the mortal one thing, mortality another — for one is that which suffers, the other is that which causes the suffering. So the things that suffer corruption and mortality, namely flesh and blood, must necessarily also be the ones that receive incorruption and immortality.