second half of the 2nd century

The resurrection of the body and the immortality of the soul: Tatian, Athenagoras and the dispute over the nature of the risen body

Against the Gnostics, who rejected bodily resurrection and saw the end as the return of the soul, freed from matter, to the Pleroma, the church writers of the 2nd century insisted on the resurrection of the flesh: the sermon attributed to Clement teaches that the reward of believers will be received in the flesh. Tatian asserted that the soul is mortal in itself and life after death is a gift of God; Athenagoras in his treatise On the Resurrection of the Dead argued that the resurrection accords with the nature of God the Creator and is required by the nature of man, who is man only in the unity of soul and body. According to Pelikan, Athenagoras's argument already points to the synthesis that Ambrose expressed: the philosophers' teaching on immortality is not false but incomplete without the resurrection. Later there was dispute over the identity of the risen body with the former one: Origen taught a purified spiritual body, Jerome insisted on the same hair and teeth, and the view that the body is identical became dominant.