Irenaeus of Lyons · a new plain-English translation from the original language
The preservation of our bodies is confirmed by the death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ; meanwhile the souls of the saints wait out that time, so that they may receive perfect and complete glory.
Since, however, some of those who are thought to have believed rightly go beyond the order of the advancement of the righteous, and are ignorant of the ways of preparation for incorruption, harboring heretical opinions within themselves — for the heretics, despising the formation wrought by God and not accepting the salvation of their own flesh, and moreover scorning the promise of God, and going altogether beyond God in their thinking, say that as soon as they die they pass beyond the heavens and the Demiurge, and go to the Mother, or to him whom they themselves have fabricated as the Father. Those, then, who reject the resurrection altogether, and as far as lies in them remove it from consideration — what wonder is it if they also do not know the order of the resurrection, refusing to understand that, if things were as they claim, the Lord himself, in whom they say they believe, would not have accomplished his resurrection on the third day, but, breathing his last on the cross, would immediately have gone straight up, leaving his body to the earth? But instead, he passed three days in the realm holding the dead, as the prophet declares concerning him: 'The Lord called to mind his sacred dead, those who had gone to their rest earlier in the ground of burial, and he descended to them, to bring them up and rescue them.' And the Lord himself declares: 'Just as Jonah spent three days and three nights inside the great fish, in that same way the Son of Man will spend time within the earth's depths.' The Apostle likewise states: 'This phrase, He went up — what can it mean, other than that he had first gone down into the earth's lower regions?' David too, speaking prophetically of him, said: 'And you have rescued my soul out of the depths of hell.' And having risen on the third day, when Mary, the first to behold him, bowed before him, he told her: 'Do not cling to me, since I have not yet gone up to the Father; instead go to the disciples and give them this word: I am going up to my Father, who is also your Father.'
If, then, the Lord kept to the rule governing the dead, so as thereby to become the firstborn of the dead, and stayed until the third day within the earth's lower regions, and only afterward, rising bodily — to the point of displaying the nail-marks to his disciples — went up to the Father, how can these people escape shame who claim that this world is indeed the one we inhabit, yet hold that their inner self, abandoning the body here below, rises straight to a region above the heavens? For given that the Lord passed through the very domain overshadowed by death, the place where the souls of the departed dwelt, and only later rose again in bodily form, and after the resurrection was taken up, it is plain that the souls of his disciples too, for whose sake the Lord accomplished these things, will depart to the invisible place appointed for them by God, and will remain there until the resurrection, awaiting the resurrection; and afterward, receiving their bodies and rising completely — that is, bodily, just as the Lord also rose — they will come into the presence of God. 'For no disciple is above his master; but everyone who is fully taught will be like his master.' How, then, could our Master not have gone away at once, flying off, but instead waited out the time of his resurrection appointed by the Father — which was also made known through the sign of Jonah — and, rising after three days, was only then taken up? So we too ought to wait out the time appointed for our resurrection, as foretold by the prophets, and so, having risen, be taken up, as many of us as the Lord shall count worthy of this.