Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] But if there is, even before God, some sect more akin to the Epicureans than to the prophets, we shall know what they hear from Christ, as the Sadducees did. For it was reserved to Christ to strip bare all that had lain hidden till then, to set straight what had been in doubt, to fill out what had only been tasted in advance, to make present what had been foretold — and, not least, to prove the resurrection of the dead not merely through himself but in himself. [2] But now we must ready ourselves against other Sadducees, partners in that same opinion: they acknowledge only half a resurrection, that of the soul alone, having as much contempt for the flesh as for the very Lord of the flesh. No one else, in fact, grudges salvation to the bodily substance except the heretics of that other divinity. [3] And so, being forced to arrange Christ differently as well, so that he may not be taken for the Creator's own, they went wrong first about his very flesh — either denying it any reality at all, in the manner of Marcion and Basilides, or granting it some peculiar quality of its own, after the heirs of Valentinus and Apelles. [4] And from this it follows that they exclude from salvation the very substance whose fellowship with Christ they deny — quite certain that it stands equipped with the strongest prejudgment in favor of the resurrection, if flesh has already risen in Christ. [5] For this very reason we dispatched beforehand a book concerning Christ's flesh, where we establish it as substantial, against the emptiness of a phantom, and vindicate it as human against claims of some special quality — since its very condition inscribed Christ as both man and son of man. [6] For in proving him fleshly and bodily, we thereby also lay down, by way of prescription, that no other god is to be believed but the Creator, while we show a Christ of exactly the kind promised by the Creator, in whom God is recognized. Having thus established both the God who authored the flesh and the Christ who redeemed the flesh, we shall now go on to establish also the resurrection of the flesh — fitting, of course, both the God who authors flesh and the Christ who redeems it. [7] This, roughly, is how we say the dispute with the heretics must be entered: for order always demands that the argument be drawn from first principles, so that it is settled first who it was that is said to have ordained the very thing in question. [8] And indeed the heretics, from an awareness of their own weakness, never proceed in orderly fashion. Well aware how hard a labor it is to insinuate a second divinity against the God of this world, whom all men know by nature from the testimony of his works — known even more surely from the sacraments handed down beforehand and made even more plain in the preachings — they take up the pretext of a more urgent cause, namely, the very salvation of man, which must be sought before all else, and begin instead from questions about the resurrection, because the resurrection of the flesh is harder to believe than a single divinity. [9] And so, having stripped the argument of the strength of its proper order and loaded it instead with scruples that devalue the flesh, they gradually tune the hearer, through the very shaking and reshaping of his hope, toward a sense of the other divinity. [10] For anyone thrown down, or merely shifted a step, from the hope he had held with the Creator, is easily inclined toward embracing, even unbidden, the author of some other hope: for through a difference of promises a difference of gods insinuates itself. Thus we see many entangled, because they are first shaken loose from the resurrection of the flesh before they are shaken loose from the unity of the Godhead. [11] We have shown, then, so far as concerns the heretics, at which wedge-point we must meet them. And we have already met it, each under its own heading: on the one and only God, and his Christ, against Marcion; on the flesh of the Lord, against four heresies, laid down chiefly to prepare the ground for this very question — so that now the resurrection of the flesh alone should be handled just as if, among us too, it were uncertain — that is, uncertain in respect of the Creator (for many are untrained, and most are shaky in their faith, and many more simple, all of whom need to be instructed, guided, fortified) — because it is on this very flank that the unity of the Godhead is defended: for just as it is shaken when the resurrection of the flesh is denied, so it is confirmed when the resurrection is vindicated. [12] The soul's salvation, I believe, needs no further argument: for nearly all heretics, however they wish to construe it, still do not deny it. There is perhaps that one fellow, Lucan, who spares not even this substance — dissolving it after Aristotle's fashion and substituting some third thing in its place, something that is to rise neither soul nor flesh, that is, no man at all, but perhaps a bear, as far as Lucan is concerned. [13] This subject too has had our fullest pen devoted to it, on the whole state of the soul: holding it above all to be immortal, we recognize decay as belonging to the flesh alone, and it is precisely its restoration that we most assert — its matter reduced to its ordinary bodily state — insofar as, elsewhere, pressed by the course of the argument, we have deferred certain points. [14] For just as it is customary for some things to be tasted in advance, so it is also necessary that some be deferred — provided only that what was tasted in advance is completed in its own body, and what was put off is restored under its own name.