His Words on the Resurrection of the Flesh

You will give us none of these answers. You turn to other things, and by your tricks and show of words keep us from paying close attention to the question. “What!” you will say. “Was the question not about the resurrection of the flesh and the punishment of the devil?” True; and that is why I ask for a brief and honest answer. I raise no question about your declaration that it is this very flesh in which we live that rises again, without the loss of a single member and without any part of the body being cut off; those are your own words. But I want to know whether you hold, as Origen denies, that bodies rise with the same sex in which they died, so that Mary will still be Mary and John will be John; or whether the sexes will be so mixed and confused that there will be neither man nor woman, but something that is both or neither. I want to know, too, whether you hold that the bodies remain incorruptible and immortal, and, as you shrewdly suggest following the apostle, spiritual bodies forever; and not only the bodies, but actual flesh, with blood flowing in it and passing through channels in the veins and bones, such flesh as Thomas touched. Or do you hold that little by little they are dissolved into nothing, and reduced to the four elements from which they were made? [a]

This you ought either to confess or to deny. You should not say what Origen also says, but insincerely, as if he were playing on the weakness of fools and children: “without the loss of a single member or the cutting off of any part of the body.” Do you suppose that what we feared was that we might rise without noses and ears; that we would find our genitals cut off or maimed, and a city of eunuchs built up in the new Jerusalem?