To Pammachius Against John of Jerusalem

³³ If I wished to prove the resurrection of the flesh and of all the members, and to give the meaning of the several passages, many books would be required; but the matter in hand does not call for this. For I purposed not to reply to Origen in every detail, but to disclose the mysteries of your insincere “Apology.” I have, however, tarried long in maintaining the opposite to your position, and am afraid that, in my eagerness to expose fraud, I may leave a stumbling-block in the way of the reader.

I will, therefore, mass together the evidence, and glance at the proofs in passing, so that we may bring all the weight of Scripture to bear upon your poisonous argument. He who has not a wedding garment, and has not kept that command, “Let your garments be always white,” is bound hand and foot that he may not recline at the banquet, or sit on a throne, or stand at the right hand of God; he is sent to Gehenna, where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth. “The hairs of your head are numbered.”

If the hairs, I suppose the teeth would be more easily numbered. But there is no object in numbering them if they are some day to perish. “The hour will come in which all who are in the tombs shall hear the voice of the Son of God, and shall come forth.” They shall hear with ears, come forth with feet. This Lazarus had already done. They shall, moreover, come forth from the tombs; that is, they who had been laid in the tombs, the dead, shall come, and shall rise again from their graves.

For the dew which God gives is healing to their bones. Then shall be fulfilled what God says by the prophet, “Go, my people, into your closets for a little while, until mine anger pass.” The closets signify the graves, out of which that, of course, is brought forth which had been laid therein. And they shall come out of the graves like young mules free from the halter. Their heart shall rejoice, and their bones shall rise like the sun; all flesh shall come into the presence of the Lord, and He shall command the fishes of the sea; and they shall give up the bones which they had eaten; and He shall bring joint to joint, and bone to bone; and they who slept in the dust of the earth shall arise, some to life eternal, others to shame and everlasting confusion.

Then shall the just see the punishment and tortures of the wicked, for their worm shall not die, and their fire shall not be extinguished, and they shall be beheld by all flesh. As many of us, therefore, as have this hope, as we have yielded our members servants to uncleanness, and to iniquity unto iniquity, so let us yield them servants to righteousness unto holiness, that we may rise from the dead and walk in newness of life. As also the life of the Lord Jesus is manifested in our mortal body, so also He who raised up Jesus Christ from the dead shall quicken our mortal bodies on account of His Spirit Who dwells in us.

For it is right that as we have always borne about the putting to death of Christ in our body, so the life, also, of Jesus, should be manifested in our mortal body, that is, in our flesh, which is mortal according to nature, but eternal according to grace. Stephen also saw Jesus standing on the right hand of the Father, and the hand of Moses became snowy white, and was afterwards restored to its original colour. There was still a hand, though the two states were different. The potter in Jeremiah, whose vessel, which he had made, was broken through the roughness of the stone, restored from the same lump and from the same clay that which had fallen to pieces; and, if we look at the word resurrection itself, it does not mean that one thing is destroyed, another raised up; and the addition of the word dead, points to our own flesh, for that which in man dies, that is also brought to life. The wounded man on the road to Jericho is taken to the inn with all his limbs complete, and the stripes of his offenses are healed with immortality.