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By Root 2098 0

the power of him who raises it from the dead. For, if God does not give life to what is mortal and does not recall the corruptible to incorruptibility, then he is not powerful. But that he is powerful in all these matters, we ought to know from a consideration of our origins, because God took a lump of earth and formed man. For indeed how much more difficult and hard it is to believe that someone made out of previously non-existent bones and nerves and veins and all the other things which pertain to man something which is a living and rational man than that he reconstituted what was made and thereafter dissolved in the earth. (Adv. Haer. 5.3.2)

THEOPHILUS, ATHENAGORAS, AND TATIAN

All these fathers write at the end of the apostolic age, approximately 180-220 CE. Theophilus explains resurrection in the science of his time, as the remaking and perfecting of our earthly vessels. He takes Paul’s metaphor that the seed seems to disappear before the plant appears, suggesting that resurrection is like the organic growth of a plant; it is making the body whole for the first time.67

Athenagoras’ treatise On the Resurrection is the earliest surviving treatise specifically on the question, as Justin’s is fragmentary and possibly in-authentic. As with the other early fathers who write on this subject, it is hard to discover its exact audience. The fact that neither Theophilus, nor Athenagoras, nor Tatian make any significant mention of the Christ in their tractates or involve Christology in their demonstrations of resurrection suggests that they were written for a gentile, non-Christian audience to convince them that resurrection per se was neither as unlikely nor as disgusting a possibility as pagans might otherwise have thought.68

Athenagoras’ argument is straightforward: Christian teaching about the resurrection is worthy of belief. It is within God’s power to raise the dead and it is appropriate that God should do so. Such an innocent-sounding and sensible stipulation actually involves a considerable contradiction with ordinary Platonism and Aristotelianism. God, in fact, would never know material things in these philosophies. For them, God knows the ideas but not the individual material events, which would entail God knowing change, which would, in turn, suggest that God is mutable. In Philo’s discussion of God’s immutability, he is willing to risk God’s unity rather than give up his immutability. This was typical of the philosophical belief of the day. So Athenagoras actually propounds quite an exceptional view, one not likely to convince a serious Platonist of the day, a polemic rather than an argument. Ordinary people were likely to be the target audience. The argument does have a certain inexorable, pragmatic logic.

The resurrection body is produced by reconstructing the body from its constituent parts, which are reassembled for the purpose. A God who knows everything would know where the bodies of the dead are and, common sense tells us, that a God who knows everything is better than one who knows only some things.

Athenagoras argues that “reincarnating” the soul (clothing it in flesh again) will not wrong it as it did not wrong the soul to be “incarnated” in the first place. Certainly the pagans thought that clothing the soul with flesh was just, though it may not have been a pleasant status. After the body is decomposed, to put it back into an incorruptible body would commit no further harm (Res. 10.5), reasons Athenagoras. The incorruptible part of the equation is important to note because, otherwise, the body would eventually decompose again. It is the incorruptible, valueadded quantity that transforms the resurrected believer into the resurrection body. It is the material reassembled that carries the identity. (This would not satisfy a modern philosopher but it does make the body the clear carrier of the self.)

Yet it would have seemed entirely wrong to Platonists. For them, the soul was the carrier both of life (sensation) and identity (memory and intelligence). They held the notion that souls were incarnated for