Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
'Joy without end,' Isaiah declares, 'shall crown their heads' — nothing is without end except after the resurrection: 'pain and grief and groaning,' he says, 'have fled away from them.' So too the angel says to John: 'And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes' — from those same eyes, of course, that had wept before and could still have wept, had not divine indulgence dried up every shower of tears. And again: 'For God will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more' — and so decay shall be no more either, put to flight by incorruption just as death is put to flight by immortality. If pain and grief and groaning, and death itself, arise from injuries to both soul and flesh, how can they be removed unless their causes cease — namely, the injuries of flesh and soul? Where, in God's presence, are hostile mishaps? Where, before Christ, are ruinous assaults? Where, before the Holy Spirit, are demonic onslaughts, now that the devil himself, with his angels, has already been plunged into the fires? Where is necessity, or what men call fortune or fate? What plague remains for the risen once pardon is granted? What wrath for the reconciled once grace is given? What weakness after strength, what feebleness after salvation? Recall how the garments and sandals of the children of Israel, through those forty years, remained unworn and unfaded; how, in their very bodies, justice fixed the easy growth of nails and hair within a measure fit for their standing and dignity, so that even this would not be reckoned a form of decay; how the Babylonian flames did no harm to the turbans or trousers of the three brothers, foreign as those were to Jews though they wore them; how Jonah, swallowed by the sea-monster, in whose belly shipwrecks were digested day by day, was spat out unharmed after three days; how today Enoch and Elijah, not yet crossed off by resurrection since they have not yet undergone death, but having nonetheless been translated from the world and thereby already candidates for eternity, are learning the flesh's immunity from every flaw, every harm, every injury and insult — of what faith do these stand as tokens, except the faith by which we ought to believe these are proofs of that coming wholeness? For, on the apostle's authority, these things were written as figures for us, that we might believe God more powerful than every law governing bodies, and, above all, the preserver of the flesh — he who protected even its garments, even its sandals.