Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] The flesh, then, will rise — and indeed all of it, and indeed this very flesh, and indeed whole and entire. It is held in deposit, wherever it may be, in God's keeping, by way of Jesus Christ, that go-between of utter trustworthiness standing between God and mankind, who will render man to God and God to man, spirit to flesh and flesh to spirit — who has already, in his own person, joined the two together, and matched bride to bridegroom and bridegroom to bride. [2] For even if one should insist that the soul is the bride, then flesh will follow soul as her dowry, so to speak: the soul will not go a prostitute, to be received naked by her bridegroom — she has her trousseau, her adornment, her own handmaid: the flesh; the two were foster-sisters, and they will go together. [3] But it is the flesh that is the bride — the flesh that, in Christ Jesus, suffered by its blood on behalf of the spirit its bridegroom. Whatever destruction you imagine for it, know it to be a mere withdrawal. It is not the soul alone that is set apart: the flesh too has, meanwhile, its own withdrawals — in the deep waters, amid flames, inside birds, within wild beasts. [4] When it seems to dissolve into these, it is, as it were, only poured into vessels. And if even these vessels should give out, and it should flow out from them too into its own womb, the earth, it will be reabsorbed there as if by a detour, so that it may be brought forth again out of that same earth as Adam once was, to hear from the Lord: 'Behold, Adam has become as one of us' — truly master, then, of the evil he has escaped and of the good he has laid hold of. Why then, O soul, do you begrudge the flesh? [5] No one is so close to you, whom you love next after God; no one is more your brother than she who is born with you, even in God. [6] You, rather, ought to have prayed her resurrection into being: through you, if anything, she went astray. But it is no wonder if you hate the one whose very author you have also rejected — the one you have made a habit of denying or altering, in Christ too, along with that same Word of God made flesh, whom you corrupt now with your pen and now with your interpretation, dragging in besides the secrets of your apocryphal books, those fables of blasphemy. [7] But almighty God, against these wits of unbelief and perversity, has, in his most provident grace, poured out in the last days of his own Spirit upon all flesh, upon his menservants and his maidservants, and has quickened the struggling faith in the resurrection of the flesh, and has cleansed the original writings, by the clear light of unambiguous words and meanings, from every obscurity of doubt. [8] For heresies were bound to exist, so that the tested might be shown for what they were; and these could not have dared what they dared without some occasions drawn from the scriptures — and so the original writings seem to have supplied them with certain materials, materials, however, refutable by those very same letters. [9] But since it was not fitting that the Holy Spirit should be hidden either, lest he fail to overflow even into such utterances as no cunning of the heretics could sow seeds against — indeed, so as to pull up their old turf by the roots — he has now, through a fresh prophecy poured out from the Paraclete, dispersed all the old ambiguities and as many parables as they please, by an open and transparent proclamation of the whole mystery. [10] Whoever has drunk from that spring can thirst after no other doctrine; no fever of questions will burn him up; and by drinking of it everywhere, he will be refreshed even on the resurrection of the flesh.