The Flesh Will Rise

What follows is not a whole book. It survives only as passages copied out by later writers under Justin’s name; the rest of the work is lost.

The word of truth is free. It carries its own authority, and it will not stoop to fall under anyone’s clever argument or to submit to the logical cross-examination of its hearers. It asks to be believed for its own nobility, and for the confidence owed to the one who sends it. And the word of truth is sent from God, so the freedom truth claims is not arrogance. Since it is sent with authority, it would not be right to require it to produce proof of what it says — for there is no proof beyond itself, and that is God. [b]

Every proof is stronger and more trustworthy than the thing it proves. What is disbelieved until proof is produced gains credit once the proof comes, and is then recognized to be what it was said to be. But nothing is stronger or more trustworthy than the truth. So a man who demands proof of the truth is like a man who wants it demonstrated why the things that appear to the senses appear at all. The test of what we take in through reason is sense; but of sense itself there is no test beyond itself. We bring what reason hunts down to the senses, and by them judge what sort of thing it is and whether what is said is true or false — and then we sit in judgment no longer, but give their verdict full credit. In the same way we bring everything said about human beings and about the world to the truth, and by the truth judge whether it is worthless or not. But the sayings of truth itself we judge by no separate test; we give full credit to truth itself.

And God, the Father of all, who is perfect intelligence, is the truth. And the Word, who is his Son, came to us, having put on flesh, revealing both himself and the Father, giving us in himself resurrection from the dead and eternal life afterward. This is Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord. He is therefore himself both the faith and the proof of himself and of everything else. So those who follow him and know him, holding him by faith as their proof, will find rest in him. But the adversary does not stop opposing many people, and he uses many different tricks to trap them — to lure the faithful away from their faith, and to keep those without faith from believing. So it seems to me that we too must arm ourselves with the teachings of the faith, which no weapon can pierce, and fight him on behalf of the weak.

Those who hold the wrong opinion say there is no resurrection of the flesh. Their reason is that it is impossible for what has rotted and dissolved to be restored to what it was. Besides being impossible, they say, saving the flesh would be no benefit to us. They run the flesh down, listing its weaknesses, and declare that it alone is the cause of our sins — so that if the flesh rises again, they say, our weaknesses rise with it. [c]

They work out clever arguments like this one. If the flesh rises, it must rise either whole and in possession of all its parts, or incomplete. If it rises incomplete, that argues a lack of power on God’s part, since some parts could be saved and others not. But if all the parts are saved, then the body will obviously have all its members. And is it not absurd to say that these members will still exist after the resurrection from the dead, when the Savior said, “They neither marry nor are given in marriage, but will be like the angels in heaven”? And angels, they say, have no flesh; they do not eat, and they do not have sexual intercourse. Therefore there will be no resurrection of the flesh. With arguments like these they try to pull people away from the faith.

And there are some who maintain that even Jesus himself appeared only as spirit and not in flesh — that he merely presented the appearance of flesh. These people are trying to rob the flesh of its promise. So first let us untie the knots they think cannot be untied; then we will set out in order the demonstration about the flesh, and prove that it has a share in salvation.

They say, then, that if the body rises whole and in possession of all its members, it necessarily follows that the functions of those members must exist too: the womb must conceive, the male must perform his part in begetting, and the rest of the members likewise. Let their whole argument stand or fall on that single claim. Prove it false, and their whole objection is gone. [e]

Now it is plain that the members which have functions have the functions we see in this present life. But it does not follow that they must be performing them from the start. To see this more clearly, consider it this way. The function of the womb is to conceive, and of the male member to make pregnant. But though these members are made for such functions, it does not follow that they perform them from the start — for we see many women who never conceive, the barren, though they have wombs. So pregnancy is not the immediate and necessary result of having a womb. And even women who are not barren abstain from sexual intercourse: some are virgins from the first, others from a certain time onward. We see men keeping themselves virgins in the same way, some from the first and some from a certain time; and by their doing so, marriage made lawless by craving is destroyed.

We find that even among the lower animals some have wombs and do not bear — the mule, for instance — and male mules do not father their kind. So among human beings and among animals without reason alike we can see sexual intercourse done away with, and that already, before the world to come.

And our Lord Jesus Christ was born of a virgin for no other reason than to destroy begetting by lawless craving, and to show the ruler that God can form a human being without human intervention. When he had been born and had submitted to the other conditions of the flesh — I mean food, drink and clothing — this one condition alone he did not submit to, the exercise of the sexual function. Of the cravings of the flesh he accepted some as necessary, and the others, which were unnecessary, he did not submit to. If the flesh were deprived of food, drink and clothing it would be destroyed; but deprived of lawless craving it suffers no harm.

And at the same time he foretold that in the world to come sexual intercourse would be done away with. As he says: “The children of this age marry and are given in marriage; but the children of the age to come neither marry nor are given in marriage, but will be like the angels in heaven.” So let those who do not believe not be amazed if in the world to come he does away with those acts of our fleshly members which are given up even in this present life.

Well, they say, if the flesh rises, it must rise the same as it falls; so if a man dies with one eye, he must rise one-eyed; if lame, lame; if he was missing some part of his body, in that part the man must rise deficient. How thoroughly blind they are in the eyes of their hearts! They have not seen blind men on earth given their sight back, and the lame walking, at his word. Everything the Savior did, he did first of all so that what was spoken about him in the prophets might be fulfilled — “that the blind should receive their sight and the deaf hear,” and so on — but also to lead people to believe that at the resurrection the flesh will rise whole. For if on earth he healed the sicknesses of the flesh and made the body whole, much more will he do it at the resurrection, so that the flesh rises perfect and entire. That is how those dreaded difficulties of theirs are cured. [i]

But again, among those who say the flesh has no resurrection, some assert that it is impossible; others that the flesh is so vile and contemptible that it is not fitting for God to raise it; and others that it never received the promise in the first place. [j]

Take first those who say it is impossible for God to raise it. It seems to me I should show that they know nothing. In words they profess to be believers, but their deeds prove them unbelieving — more unbelieving than the unbelievers. For all the nations believe in their idols and are convinced that anything is possible to them. Their own poet Homer says, “The gods can do all things, and easily” — and he added the word “easily” to bring out how great the power of the gods is. Set beside them, many seem to have less faith than they do. If the nations believe that their gods, which are idols — “which have ears and do not hear; they have eyes and do not see” — can do all things, though they are only demons, as the Scripture says, “The gods of the nations are demons,” how much more ought we, who hold the right, excellent and true faith, to believe in our God!

And we have proofs of his power. First, the making of the first man: he was made out of the earth by God, and that by itself is evidence enough of God’s power. Then anyone who watches how things happen can see how human beings are generated one from another, and can wonder even more that from a little drop of moisture so grand a living creature is formed. Certainly if this were only recorded in a promise and never seen carried out, it would be far harder to believe than the other; but actually happening under our eyes has made it believable. And in the matter of the resurrection too the Savior has shown us things actually done, which we will speak of shortly.

For now we are demonstrating that the resurrection of the flesh is possible, and we ask the children of the church to forgive us if we bring in arguments that seem to come from outside, drawn from the natural world. We do so, first, because to God nothing is outside — not even the world itself, since it is his own workmanship — and second, because we are conducting our argument so as to meet unbelievers. If we were arguing with believers it would be enough to say that we believe; but as it is we must proceed by demonstrations.

What has been said is already quite enough to show that the resurrection of the flesh is possible. But since these men are so exceedingly hard to convince, we will bring forward a still more convincing argument — one drawn not from faith, since they are outside its reach, but from their own mother, unbelief: I mean, of course, from the reasons the natural world itself supplies. If we prove to them by such arguments that the resurrection of the flesh is possible, then they certainly deserve great contempt if neither the declarations of faith nor the arguments of the world can persuade them.

Now those who are called natural philosophers say different things. Some, like Plato, say the universe is matter and God. Others, like Epicurus, say it is atoms and the void. Others, like the Stoics, say it is these four: fire, water, air, earth. It is enough to mention the most widespread opinions. Plato says that all things are made out of matter by God and according to his design. Epicurus and his followers say that all things are made out of the atom and the void by some self-regulating action in the natural movement of bodies. The Stoics say that all things are made of the four elements, with God pervading them.

But different as they are, there are some points all of them hold in common. One is that nothing can be produced out of what does not exist, and nothing destroyed or dissolved into what has no existence; and that the elements out of which everything is generated stand indestructible. If that is so, then on the principles of every one of these philosophers the remaking of the flesh will appear possible.

For if, as Plato says, there is matter and God, both of these are indestructible, and God occupies the position of a craftsman — a potter, say — while matter occupies the position of clay or wax or something of the sort. What is formed out of the material, an image or a statue, can be destroyed; but the material itself, the clay or the wax or whatever kind of material it is, cannot. So the artist shapes the clay or the wax into the form of a living animal; and if his handiwork is destroyed, it is not impossible for him to make the same form again by working up the same material and fashioning it afresh. So on Plato’s account it will not be impossible for God — himself indestructible, and with indestructible material to hand — to make the thing anew after what was first formed of it has been destroyed, and to make the very same form just as it was before.

And on the Stoics’ account too: the body is produced by the mixture of the four elementary substances, and when the body has been dissolved into the four elements, those elements remain indestructible. So it is possible for them to receive the same fusion and composition a second time, from the God who pervades them, and to make again the body they made before. It is as if a man made an alloy of gold and silver and bronze and tin, and then wished to break it up again so that each metal stood by itself: having mixed them once more, he can, if he pleases, make the very same alloy he made before.

Again, on Epicurus’s account, the atoms and the void being indestructible, it is by a definite arrangement and adjustment of the atoms as they come together that everything else is produced, and the body itself along with the rest. In the course of time the body is dissolved, and dissolved again into the atoms it was produced from. And since those remain indestructible, it is not at all impossible that by coming together again and receiving the same arrangement and position they should make a body of the same kind as the one they produced before. It is as if a mosaic worker made the figure of an animal out of small stones, and the stones were scattered by time or by the man who set them: he still has the scattered stones, and he may gather them together again, and having gathered them, lay them out in the same way and make the same figure of an animal. And will God not be able to collect the decomposed members of the flesh again and make the same body he formerly made?

So I have demonstrated well enough, in answer to men of the world, that the resurrection of the flesh is possible. And if the resurrection of the flesh is not found impossible even on the principles of unbelievers, how much more will it be found to agree with the mind of believers! [m]

But keeping to our order, we must now speak about those who think meanly of the flesh and say that it is not worthy of the resurrection or of the heavenly order — first because its substance is earth, and besides because it is full of every kind of wickedness, so that it forces the soul to sin along with it. These people seem not to know the whole work of God: how man came to be and was formed at the beginning, and why the things in the world were made. For does not the word say, “Let us make man in our image and after our likeness”? What kind of man? Plainly he means fleshly man; for the word says, “And God took dust of the earth and made man.” It is evident, then, that the man made in the image of God was made of flesh.

Is it not absurd, then, to say that the flesh which God made in his own image is contemptible and worth nothing? That the flesh is a precious possession to God is plain, first from its being formed by him — if the image is worth anything at all to the one who formed and made it — and besides, its value can be gathered from the making of the rest of the world. For that on account of which the rest is made is the most precious thing of all to the maker.