Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
So far, I think, go the terrifying "obstinacies" of the Christians. Now that we have shown these are shared in common with you, it remains to compare the laughable — as you call them — persuasions. And yet our whole "obstinacy" is really built on our persuasions: we presume the resurrection of the dead. Hope of resurrection is contempt for death. Laugh, then, as much as you like, at minds you think utterly stupid, who die in order to live; but so that you may laugh more easily and cackle more freely, first take a sponge, or a moistened tongue, and erase for the moment your own writings, which likewise assert that souls return into bodies. And yet how much more acceptable our presumption is, which maintains that souls return into the very same bodies; while how much emptier is what has been handed down to you — that a man's spirit might come to lodge in a dog, a mule, or a peacock! Likewise we proclaim a judgment appointed by God according to each man's deserts after death; you assign this to Minos and Rhadamanthus, having rejected the far juster Aristides altogether. By that judgment we say the wicked will spend eternity in unending fire, and the pious and innocent in a place of delight; among you too, the arrangement of Pyriphlegethon and Elysium is disposed no differently. Nor is it only the myth-makers and poets who sing of such things; the philosophers too affirm the migration of souls and the apportioning of judgment.
XX.