Abstract
In recent scholarship the emergence of belief in the resurrection of the body in the writings of the early Church has been linked to the experience of martyrdom and persecution. By contrast, this article seeks to treat the resurrection of martyrs in the writings of the apologists as part of a broader philosophically informed conversation about identity and change. Rather than seeing the writings of the apologists as contingent theology, it argues that writers like Tertullian and Athenagoras use the resurrection of the martyrs both to address anxieties about the persistence of identity, and to highlight the ethical importance of the functionality of the body.
In the third century, a Christian author known to us as the Athenian Christian philosopher Athenagoras wrote a defense of the idea of the resurrection of the body. 1 In contrast to those who argue that the resurrected body is purely ‘spiritual’ or pneumatic, Athenagoras describes resurrection as a process in which God ‘draw[s] together again dead bodies (or even those entirely decomposed) and restore[s] them again to the very same humans.’ 2 The very same matter that makes up each individual body now will be gathered up and returned to it in the future. The same pieces of hair, flesh, bones, and so on that cling to the person now would be scooped up and reassembled on Judgment Day. A hypothesis like this, of course, leads to a number of questions, including the decidedly sticky issue of what would happen to a Christian at the resurrection if her body was eaten by an animal after her death. 3 This seemingly hypothetical problem was anything but speculative for anyone who had read Ignatius of Antioch’s final missive, in which he expresses a longing to be consumed entire by the wild beasts so that no part of him remains. 4
The issue, of course, is digestion. According to ancient medical theories, digestion works when the body of the gourmet assumes the body of the thing that they were eating. Bodies are made up of other bodies, and you are what you eat. This theory of digestion poses few difficulties when humans eat animals and fish, but what would happen to the person whose improperly buried corpse was eaten by a lion? What would happen, moreover, if that lion was then eaten by another person? Would the identities of the two unfortunates be forever linked? 5
The difficulty is even more serious, Athenagoras tells us, in instances of direct and deliberate cannibalism. Greek mythology brims with stories of children being served to their unknowing parents. But it was not just the stuff of cultural taboo; cannibalism lurked, according to popular belief, at the borders of the empire and was known to have happened in moments of desperation. 6 When human flesh is nurtured by human flesh is it possible to separate them out again? Who would want to be raised from the dead to find themselves monstrously fused to another person? The concept was so outrageously repulsive that it disturbed even some of the wisest members of Athenagoras’s acquaintance. 7
Athenagoras explained that God had preordained certain foodstuffs for each species. As a consequence, animals cannot simply digest any kind of matter, but only the food that can properly be called ‘food’ ‘according to nature.’ That which was ‘contrary to nature’ would be expelled by the body, like fruit pips or corn kernels. 8 To humans, eating human flesh is like consuming cotton buds; it fills the belly but does not line the stomach.
Athenagoras is not the only Christian author to discuss this. The cannibal problem, or the ‘chain consumption problem’ as it is less salaciously known, is much discussed in the writings of other apologists like the North Africans Tertullian and Augustine, the Roman writer Tatian, and the Alexandrian Origen. 9 To modern ears, as to ancient ones, cannibalism, digestion, and bodily reconstitution are at least mildly repulsive. They invoke the basest bodily functions and tug at trans-historical anxieties about the treatment of corpses and the violation of the body. Just the idea that a body could be eaten by animals causes concern: we might think here of the high price that the occupants of Troy paid for the safe return of the corpse of Hector, or we could recall the outrage that Irish New Testament scholar John Dominic Crossan provoked when he suggested than the body of Jesus was not buried but was discarded and eaten by dogs. 10 The issue with Crossan’s hypothesis was not just the challenge to the resurrection narratives; it was the violation of Jesus’ body. The human response is only amplified when the consumers of human cadavers are not animals, but people. There is, as anthropologist Jonathan Marks has written, no greater taboo than cannibalism and, thus, the opponents of fleshy resurrection seek to elicit our disgust. 11 In the words of Celsus, a Roman opponent of Christianity, ‘corpses ought to be thrown out as worse than dung.’ 12
Resurrection of the Body in the History of Scholarship
In the history of scholarship the commitment of orthodox writers like Athenagoras to the resurrection of putrified, potentially digested flesh has demanded explanation: why would these authors fight so hard to rehabilitate the utterly repulsive? In one form or another, the traditional answer has been the expression of persecution and martyrdom. Executed criminals were regularly denied proper burial: instead they were thrown into the Tiber, where they were eaten by fish; they were cast into pits to be eaten by stray dogs; and more than one would have lost a chunk of flesh to a ravenous lion or nondescript ‘wild beast.’ Thus, in the historical context of rampant persecution, indiscriminate executions, and the regular defilement of Christian bodies after death, Christians began to develop an eschatological vision in which the imperium of God would supersede that of temporal powers. The reality of distended bodies prompted Christians to wrestle with questions of bodily restitution. Thus Caroline Walker Bynum can write, quite matter-of-factly, that ‘The paradox of change and continuity that characterizes theological and hagiographical descriptions of the risen body seems to originate in the facts of martyrdom.’ 13
Certainly there is something to the idea that early Christian martyrdom stories envision the resurrection of the martyr as a moment of victory and restitution. But it was not necessary that martyrs wait until the resurrection to receive their resurrected bodies. Broadly speaking, like Jesus, Christian martyrs were believed to ascend directly to heaven at the moment of their death, their martyrdom serving as their passport to the throne of God. The extent to which the rapidity of the ascension of martyrs to heaven is part of an imitatio Christi hinges upon contemporary notions about resurrection as it was more generally construed. After all, if everyone ascends to heaven at death, the exaltation of the martyrs is decidedly less remarkable. In contrast to ordinary pious individuals, then, martyrs did not have to wait for a final judgment to catch their first glimpse of eternal life. They neither slept beneath the ground nor twiddled their thumbs in a pneumatic storage facility. On the contrary, the acta display a consistent belief in the translocation of the souls of the martyrs to the heavenly throne at the very moment of death. In the words of Robin Lane Fox, ‘The martyrs bypassed the long delays, the intervals of cooling and refreshment, the minor corrections and discipline, the years of waiting in Abraham’s bosom. They sped straight to Christ and his Father.’ 14
The promise of bodily resurrection entered into the grammar of martyrdom long before Jesus walked the dusty roads of Galilee. Throughout their examinations and tortures, the heroes of the Maccabeean revolt display confidence that their bodies will be restored to them in the resurrection (2 Macc. 7). This posthumous vindication and restoration is in turn linked to the notion of divine creation. One brother proclaims that he received his hands from heaven and can expect them back again (2 Macc 7:11). Their mother refers to God as the ‘Creator of the world’ (2 Macc 7:23). Rhetorically, their confidence in resurrection resists the king’s efforts to threaten and constrain them. The ultimate victory of the brothers is not threatened by dismemberment or disfigurement. In many respects it is not just the exercise of power but mythological accounts of the afterlife that are being subverted. Whereas Greek opinion maintained that proper burial was a pre-requisite for safe passage to Hades and that disfigurement in death imprinted itself on the shade of a warrior, the Maccabeean martyrs are confident that their God will be able to restore their bodies to wholeness. And, in this way, Greek might is thwarted by Jewish eschatology. 15
At the same time there was a diversity of opinion among the authors of martyrdom accounts about the nature of eternal life. Even as Polycarp is particularly concerned with fleshly resurrection, the Acts of Justin and Acts of Apollonius write about the judgment of the soul. In the Acts of Apollonius, the protagonist sums up his views of the afterlife and of what it means to be Christian, saying, to believe that the soul is immortal, to be convinced that there will be a judgment after death and that there will be a reward given by God after the resurrection, to those who have lived a just life, for their labors on behalf of virtue.
16
Nowhere in this description is there a straightforward reference to fleshly resurrection. On the contrary, the philosopher Apollonius is more concerned with the immortality of the soul. Similar moves are made in the second-century Acts of Justin, in which Justin articulates the resurrection in terms of Stoic doctrine about the world being consumed by fire: ‘for all those who live a good life there exists the divine gift even to the conflagration of the whole world.’ 17 There was a multiplicity of opinion about resurrection among the authors of martyrdom stories.
Despite the diversity of thinking about the afterlife in stories about martyrdom, the second- and third-century Christian theologians who hashed out the specifics of fleshly resurrection invoke the martyrs in a fairly monolithic way. In the contest between advocates of spiritual and fleshly resurrection, the martyrs are a central example of the necessity of reanimating physical corpses and individualized matter. Tertullian, for example, can say quite straightforwardly that one reason that we must be restored again to the same body at the resurrection is because otherwise we would not be the same person, and if we were not the same person another would be rewarded for our martyrdom. Or, in his words: For how absurd, and moreover how unjust, and on both grounds how unworthy of God, for one substance to do the work and another to be checked off with the wages, this flesh being butchered in martyrdom while another receives the crown, and, the other way round, this flesh wallowing in foulnesses while another receives damnation.
18
Martyrdom, here, becomes a cipher for thinking about the resurrection of the body. But is martyrdom, as many like Bynum Walker have argued, the reason that fleshly resurrection gained popularity and eventually dominated other theories of the afterlife?
History of Scholarship
The difficulty with these theories is the ways in which they assume both that the resurrection of the flesh is an exceptional idea that necessitates explanation and that fleshly resurrection would never have become doctrine had it not been for the experience of persecution and martyrdom. 19 In the history of scholarship the roots of this idea can be traced to related ideas about the origins of apocalypticism and the idea of resurrection in Second Temple Judaism. Noting the prominence of belief in the immortality of the soul among ancient philosophers, Oscar Cullman argued that the resurrection of the body has its roots in the apocalyptic worldview and broader cultural world of Second Temple Judaism. 20 His thesis, straightforwardly stated, is that the ‘concept of death and resurrection is … incompatible with the Greek belief in immortality.’ 21 More specifically, scholars tend to understand the relatively sudden appearance of apocalyptically styled discussions of resurrection in the Hellenistic period as the religious by-product of either generalized or particular suffering. George Nickelsburg’s seminal work Resurrection, Immortality and Eternal Life in Intertestamental Judaism and Early Christianity begins with three chapters on religious persecution. 22 His chapter on resurrection ‘Unrelated to Persecution, Oppression and Injustice’ traces the exceptions, not the rule. Alan Segal agrees, seeing an investment in the resurrection of the body as an act of resistance by a marginalized, disenfranchised group. 23
In 19th-century scholarly circles, however, the matrix of motifs and ideas that make up ‘apocalyptic’ caused some embarrassment, if not outright disgust. 24 And thus some treated the resurrection of the body as the facile theological production of a beleaguered community. 25 When Christian writers insist on dragging the resurrected body into the eternal realm, their arguments were treated as part of the apocalyptic cultural and religious worldview that Christianity inherited from the Judaism(s) of its day and that was subsequently refined in the fires of grief and trauma. 26
For Platonists, the idea of resurrected flesh is so metaphysically sticky that pristine dispassionate philosophical discourse could not possibly have generated it. As a result, when early Christians deny the possibility of a resurrected body or appeal to Stoic notions of a nonphysical ‘spiritual body’ they are presented as more committed to the intellectual ideas and scientific findings of their day. This division ignores the manifold evidence for notions of embodied afterlives in various ancient Greek and Roman literary traditions and the diversity of ancient Jewish views of the afterlife. 27
It is not only scholars of Christianity who treat discussions of the afterlife in this way. Classicists have sometimes explained the increase in speculation about the afterlife in Late Antiquity as the byproduct of the increasingly turbulent political affairs of the period. 28 As the Roman world collapsed, it is sometimes argued, the marginalized subject could hope only ‘to return to the world-beyond-this-world which is his home, to the god-beyond-the-god-of-this-world which is the true god, to awaken part of himself which is from the beyond and to strip off his body which belongs to this world.’ 29
Even those, like John Gager, who disagree with the idea that bodily resurrection is a sign of alienation, continue to position the development of this idea within the framework of Christianity’s path to power; he argues that ‘as mainstream Christianity moved by stages from a small sectarian cult at the fringes of Roman society to an international religious institution of great social, political, and economic power, we would expect … a shift from symbols of alienation to symbols of integration.’ 30 Gager helpfully shows that resurrection is not always the eschatology of the oppressed, but the linear argument he develops is difficult to reconcile with either the diversity of ancient views or the enduring interest in more ‘spiritualized’ ideas of the resurrection. 31 Moreover, we should ask, is interest in the resurrection of the flesh always merely a projection of a group’s socio-political status?
In this way thinking about the resurrection is subordinated to a secondary role in the history of ideas. It becomes a responsive mode of thought clouded by grief. It is a contingent doctrine. To be sure, increased interest in the afterlife often corresponds to the experience of political pressure, social marginalization, and outright persecution. 32 In these contexts, the restitution of the body at the resurrection can function as a means of resisting efforts to control bodies through violence and torture. 33 Desperation generates a concern about the end of the world, the fate of the individual, and the possibility of divine justice. But the historical impetus for thinking about resurrected bodies does not render those thoughts irrelevant or contingent.
The distinction between dispassionate philosophical inquiry about the fate of the soul and a historically generated frenzy of speculation about the afterlife of the body not only ironically and self-consciously imitates a Platonist cosmology, but also serves to discredit the work of those who think about bodies. Such a suggestion almost comically rehearses ancient philosophical binaries about reason and passion, philosophy and history, souls and bodies. 34 Early Christian speculation about the resurrection of the flesh functions, in part, as a response to the experience of martyrdom, but martyrdom is not the impetus for belief in the resurrection of the flesh. 35 Moreover, those authors who scrutinized the mangled body of the martyr work did so within a broader philosophically informed conversation about bodily continuity and identity. Historical events provide a focusing lens but they do not create the conversation. 36 The martyr’s body was not merely something to intellectually trip over, it was an example with which Christian apologists actively reasoned and that formed part of the ethical program of the resurrection.
The Resurrection of the Martyred Body in the Work of the Apologists
With all of this in mind we can turn to the use of the martyred body in early Christian discussions of the afterlife. While the martyred body did calcify a number of key suppositions for Christian apologists and theologians who thought about the resurrection of the body in general, they also served as a cipher for broader conversations about identity in general. To refer back to the earlier quotation from Tertullian, the concern here is not martyrdom in particular, but identity in general. Tertullian assumes that we need all of the matter that we had before in order to be ourselves. The rest of this article will focus on two sets of interlocking concerns: the question of bodily integrity and the preservation of bodily functionality in the resurrection. In order to appreciate the conversation about resurrected martyrs, it is also important to discuss why it is that integrity and functionality mattered at all to early Christians.
Even before Athenagoras mentally dissected the cannibal, there was a conversation among ancient philosophers about the continuity of identity of inanimate objects. No one has to die or be eaten by cannibals for change to threaten the nature of the self. Even the most mundane bodily alterations shake the foundations of our identity. They worried about identity and change without ever thinking of reanimated corpses. The classic philosophical example is the case of the ship of Theseus. 37 The Athenians, we are told, preserved the ship in which the heroic Theseus had sailed, by removing and replacing old planks with new ones. They installed the new hardware in such a way that the structure of the original ship was retained. We are invited to consider, is this the same ship? Is it form or matter that provides the ship with its identity?
What was theoretical for an agency-less ship was of pressing importance in the case of the human person: both the human body and its memories were mutable, ever changing, and unstable. The notion was first introduced by means of a joke by the fifth-century BCE playwright Epicharmus. His fiscally irresponsible character uses the argument that as he has grown into an entirely new person he thus cannot be considered responsible for the debts incurred by a prior individual. The central idea, mulled over by later generations of philosophers, is that in the same way that a pile of pebbles is numerically distinct when more pebbles are added to it a person grows and is replaced by a new person as they change. 38 The Growing Argument, as it came to be known, highlighted the fluidity of the human person over time. 39 It is for this reason that Heraclitus wrote that a person cannot step into the same river twice. 40 Change is a process in which the self constantly dies and is replaced. 41
The issue of material continuity and the preservation of identity should trouble us every day of our lives. We are all at every moment of our lives in a state of bodily flux. We start small and, over the course of our lives grow taller, bigger, and, eventually, as our skeletal structure compresses, shorter. In between we expand and contract: we ingest foreign matter as nutriment, it forms part of our bodies, and it is ‘lost’ to us when we expend it as energy and discard it in excretion. In his defense of the resurrection Athenagoras turns this to his advantage: he appeals to the instability of human identity as a means of normalizing the idea of resurrected bodies. Discontinuity between the body as it is now and the reconstituted celestial body, he says, is not a problem, because ‘a certain discontinuity is observed concerning the permanence of humans,’ because we ‘inherited discontinuity from the beginning by the will of the Maker.’ The transitory state of the human condition, something that greatly troubled his philosophical counterparts, becomes a foreshadowing of eschatological change.
For Aristotle the issue of growth and ingestion had more serious implications. He took it as axiomatic that two bodies cannot coexist in the same space. If this is true, how do we explain digestion? The quandary led to him to posit that continuity is connected not to matter but to ‘form.’ 42 The nutritional matter does not accede to the matter of a person, it accedes to their form, their eidos. By form, Aristotle means the defining characteristics of a thing, and he compares the form of the body to a tube through which water is poured. The tube may grow larger when additional water is supplied, but it nevertheless supplies the structure and shape of the thing. In the same way, the body may grow larger when additional nutrition is added to it but the fundamental structure and form remain the same. 43 The form is, thus, self-preserving and structural, and that form exists regardless of whether or not additional matter is supplied to it. 44 The body can expand or wither, but its structure and form remain the same.
It is precisely to this theory of form as the guarantor of identity that the third-century Christian writer Origen appeals, in his defense of the resurrection of a ‘spiritual body.’ Calling back to Heraclitus and Aristotle, he notes that body may change, such that it is not the same for two consecutive days, but that identity is guaranteed because ‘because the form (eidos) characterizing the body’ remains the same. 45
Resurrection, however, was not just a question of collecting together disparate matter into its appropriate parts. For those second- and third-century Christian thinkers embroiled in heated debates about the possibility and nature of a resurrected body, functionality was an unavoidable concern. To anyone familiar, even in a superficial way, with ancient philosophy, the notion that a functionless body part could be ideal would be deeply ethically problematic. A great deal of the conversation about the self in antiquity is ethical in character. In his first book of the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle famously argues that every human being has an individual τέλος (a ‘goal’ or ‘purpose’). Every characteristic activity (ἔργον), he argues, has as its goal a specific τέλος. He provides, as examples, first a series of professions, the flute-player, the craftsman, and the leatherworker, and asks, ‘If a kind of person (say, a craftsman) has a τέλος, should not a human being qua human being also have a τέλος?’ The question is intensified by his second set of examples, parts of the body, out of which he draws the question: if the parts of the body (the eye, the hand, or the foot) have a τέλος, should not the whole body also have a τέλος? 46
Aristotle’s concern, in the Nicomachean Ethics, is the ethical order that should undergird human conduct, and the orientation of this conduct towards εὐδαιμονία (human flourishing or happiness). He suggests at the very beginning of his treatise that human flourishing would be clearer if we could first identify the function (ἔργον) of a human being. 47 His argument is that because ‘all things that have a function or activity, the good and the “well” is thought to reside in the function,’ 48 and because the human function is ‘an active life of the element that has a rational principle,’ 49 therefore the human good is the activity of the rational part of the soul performed well, which is to say, in accordance with virtue. 50 His argument that εὐδαιμονία resides in the function develops a strain of earlier Platonic thought, but it also highlights an assumption that will be axiomatic for philosophy: parts of the body are oriented towards a specific purpose or goal. 51 If they are not oriented towards a goal his whole philosophy, and, indeed, the whole justification for human flourishing, crumbles.
The same interest in purpose reappears in Christian theories of the resurrection, but is often overlooked because, as famous as it is, the theory and its primary source, the Nicomachean Ethics, are classified as ethics rather than metaphysics. Living the ‘good life’ by following virtue is the chief concern of ancient philosophy. The idea that parts of one’s self are useless and fulfill no purpose raises questions about the value of those parts and one’s ability to truly flourish.
This raises questions for the heavenly body: why have genitals in heaven (or limbs, or a digestive system) if they no longer have a purpose? Why put the martyred body back together only to have it slumped listlessly in the heavenly throne with which it was rewarded? Put in the terms of Tertullian opponents to the resurrection, What, they ask, will then be the use of the cavity of our mouth, and its rows of teeth, and the passage of the throat, and the crossroads of the stomach, and the gulf of the belly, and the entangled tissue of the intestines, when there will no longer be a place for eating and drinking? … [In resurrection] why would we have loins, being conscious of semen, and the other genitals in both sexes, as well as the enclosures of conception, and the fountains of the breast, when sexual intercourse, and pregnancy, and the nurturing of infants shall cease? Ultimately, what will be the use of the entire body, when clearly the whole is free from use?
52
Tertullian’s response to these questions at once dismisses the line of inquiry, while simultaneously seeking to reassign the purpose of the named body parts. On the one hand, he flatly states that the organs of the body will be ‘liberated from their functions’ in the resurrection. 53 On the other, he develops a novel set of uses for the teeth and genitals. Teeth, he writes, do not only chew food, they also guard the tongue. And, in the first gesture towards aesthetic purpose that will fully take root with Augustine he remarks that they are pleasing to the sight. 54
The genitals, on the other hand, seem to stoop even lower in the hierarchy of bodily processes. He redefines the nether regions in scatological terms: There are holes in the lower regions of man and woman (inferna in viro et in femina), in which no doubt flow sexual pleasures; but why are they not rather regarded as filters for the discharge of natural fluids (excreta)? Women, moreover, have within them a place for semen to gather; but are they not for the secretion of those sanguineous tissues that their more sluggish sex is inadequate to disperse?
55
Tertullian’s logic here has caused some confusion. The excreta are the byproducts of digestion, in ancient conceptions, defecation. In his commentary on this passage, Taylor Petrey notes the ancient medical commonplace that women’s bodies were cooler than those of men as a means of understanding why sanguinous tissues (menstruation or afterbirth) gather in the womb, but he concludes with respect to the excreta, ‘It is not clear how defecation is meant to raise the status of the “lower regions” for his readers, especially since these functions too would cease in the resurrection. The tension persists in trying to find a noble purpose for these parts.’ 56
The tension can be slightly eased by augmenting this reading with two other ancient medical convention about women’s bodies: first, the more general idea that menstruation was for women, a means of evacuating accumulating nutrients; 57 and second, the unusual idea that the womb has the potential to become a repository for filth and parasites. According to the Hippocratic text On Diseases, tapeworms, which are associated with fecal matter, are formed in the fetus in utero. 58 While the association is complicated, there is some medical precedent for seeing the womb as a repository for fecal matter. The strange relationship between the life-giving womb and the filthy detritus of the human condition that characterizes Tertullian’s tense and difficult relationship with bodies thus predates Tertullian himself. 59 By supplanting human generation with the notional purposes of digestive filtration, Tertullian is able to redirect the functions of the genitals towards the morally and aesthetically complicated issue of eating.
The crowning moment in Tertullian’s argument for non-functioning body parts fuses together the issues of form and function. In a clear, almost dismissive reference to the classic example of the Ship of Theseus, he argues against his opponents that if they will concede that a reconstituted ship is, by virtue of its structure, the same ship as it originally was, surely they should allow the hypothetical benefactor of the ship’s restoration to retire the ship from service without also demanding that the ship be dismantled? If a rich and generous owner, while granting to his private sentiment or his public reputation the boon of the ship’s restoration and that alone, has expressed the wish for it to work no more, will you say that it has no need of its original structure, from now on to be inactive, since thus it beseems the bare salvation of a ship without work to do? … And you will have no right, on the ground that the members will in future be inactive, to deny the possibility of its existing anew: for it is feasible for a thing to exist anew and none the less be inactive. But it cannot be said even to be inactive, if it does not exist. Moreover, if it exists, it will be possible for it also not to be inactive: for in God’s presence nothing can be inactive.
60
Tertullian’s essential argument, however, finds its basis in the unknowable plan of the omnipotent Aristotelian God. It might seem, after so much argumentation, that Tertullian is reflexively collapsing into the trite explanation that ‘all things are possible with God.’ But in fact he uses Aristotelian metaphysics to prove that the parts of the body are not useless even if they do not function as they did before. For Aristotle God is ‘the unmoved mover’ (ὃ οὐ κινούμενος κινεῖ ); the one responsible for the locomotion of everything in the cosmos, including the eternal rotation of the heavenly things. 61 Granting that, Tertullian argues, would it even be possible for the resurrected bodies to be inactive? 62
Athenagoras takes a different approach. 63 Like Tertullian, he maintains that body parts are integral for providing continuity of identity. But in constructing his argument Athenagoras greatly expands upon a theme, touched in Tertullian, that the flesh and the individual parts of the body must be resurrected for the sake of justice. 64 Earthly judgment, writes Athenagoras, is insufficient and incapable of meting out punishment in a just fashion. In the temporal courtroom the most heinous criminal has only one life to give, but in the eternity of God’s justice punishment can be more fairly distributed. 65 In making this argument Athenagoras appeals to an often-overlooked feature of the early Christian conversation about immortality, namely, the necessity of a hell-bound body for the distribution of justice. 66
On Judgment Day the entirety of a person—all of his or her flesh—must be present before God for judgment, and for reward or punishment. If they have no flesh they are not a person, and if they do not have the same flesh there is no continuity of personhood. It would be, as Tertullian says, ‘unjust’ if one flesh, the earthly flesh, did the ‘work’ of attaining resurrection through martyrdom while a different flesh received its rewards. 67 Tertullian is explicit that continuity is guaranteed by the resurrection of the substance of the members of the body and denies that the functions of these members are important. But Athenagoras might disagree, writing, ‘The living being will be purely the same if everything is the same which serve as its parts.’ 68 The preservation of the material substance of the body is a concern, but the continuation of functions is equally important. 69 Without them the resurrected person cannot be said to be the same person that was alive. Moreover he is unwilling to give up integrity, substance or function; he writes: ‘God knows the nature of human bodies both in their entirety and in every part and particle.’ 70
Athenagoras’s discussion of the importance of the body as the actor in the exercise of virtue goes much further than a mere eschatological evaluation of deeds. The embodied practice of virtue, what we might call the purpose of the whole body, has an eschatological orientation. Anticipating a much later caricature of atheism, he writes, For if there is never to be a judgment on the deeds of humans, then they will have nothing greater than irrational beasts; or rather, they will fare more miserably than these [beasts] in subordinating the passions and having given heed to piety, justice, and every other virtue. Then the life of beasts or savages is best, virtue is senseless, the threat of judgment a huge joke, to cultivate pleasure is the greatest good, and the common doctrine and law of all will be that which is beloved to the unbridled and lecherous, ‘Eat, drink and be merry’ [1 Cor 15:32]. For the end of such a life is not pleasure, according to some, but complete insensibility.
71
The teleological goal of virtue is, quite clearly, the final judgment. But this orientation does not demand living like a resurrected body; it demands living in accordance with virtue. For Athenagoras, moreover, only that flesh which ‘contributed to life and the labors in life according to nature’ is integral to the soul. 72 But for Athenagoras, in a manner akin to Plato, reproduction (but not sexual desire) is necessary and natural. As natural parts of the person the reproductive organs must be inseparable from the soul, and thus must be present in the resurrection. 73
If we were to ask Athenagoras, ‘Why, if the reproductive parts are natural, is there is no reproduction in heaven?’ his answer might be that unnatural sexual desire has been eliminated through the erasure of the humors. The elimination of the humors (which do not contribute to life and its labors and thus are not integral to the self) not only calcifies the otherwise unstable body into a fixed form, it eliminates those biological imbalances that necessitated the emission of semen, menstruation, and childbearing. 74 He likens this eschatological moment of transformation to the changes produced in the body when it eats, drink, and ages, describing the resurrection as the final stage of bodily change. 75 By describing the eschatological eradication of the humors in this way, Athenagoras appealed to the worn philosophical question of the ‘Growing Problem.’ If the reader was willing to grant the continuation of bodily identity despite the flux elicited by ordinary bodily changes, why protest the resurrection’s erasure of those fluctuating elements of the flesh altogether? Some flesh was essential to the self, but those parts ‘without purpose’ could ‘have no place among the things created by God.’ 76
If we were to press Athenagoras on whether or not the reproductive organs are oriented towards a specific goal now that they are function-less, he might respond that the ultimate telos of the body parts, to produce virtue through the exercise of self-restraint, remains constant. It is just that the temptation towards vice no longer exists. Resurrecting the body is about restoring the conduits and architecture of virtue and for Athenagoras as for many others there was no greater example of virtue than the martyr. To abandon the resurrection of the flesh would be to abandon not just one’s individual identity but the very substance that merited salvation.
At stake in so much of this question was the issue of identity: what aspects of a person were integral for the preservation of individual personhood? As intelligible as this concern might seem, it would be a mistake to assume that everyone in the ancient world was as concerned with the preservation of individual personhood as we are. As Christopher Gill has written, ancient thinkers are not committed to the notion of an individual self in the way that moderns are. A number of New Testament scholars have argued that in 1 Corinthians 15, Paul, following the Stoics, thinks of the resurrection as process of transformation into a spiritual or pneumatic body that is then subsumed into divine pneuma. If this reading is correct, then the individual Christian would likely lose all sense of individual consciousness in the resurrection.
For later writers interested in martyrdom, however, individual identities had to be preserved for the purpose of Justice. The vision of the heavenly altar in Revelation 6 shows the souls beneath it calling out for justice. In a double reference to the day of execution and the Last Judgment, the martyrs of the Passion of Perpetua and Felicity invited the crowd to ‘take careful note of what we look like so that you will recognize us on the day.’ 77 And both Cyprian and Origen agree that enthronement, reign, and judgment with God in the heavenly tribunal are the rewards of the faithful martyred dead. 78 Most pointedly of all, Tertullian insists on the preservation of identity for the judgment of the persecutors: ‘I see so many rulers, whose reception into the heavens was publicly announced, with … their own heads groaning now in the lowest darkness … governors of provinces, too, who persecuted the name of the Lord, in fires more fierce than those with which they raged against Christians.’ 79 Once again martyrdom and persecution serve as ciphers for the virtuous and the wicked. The emphasis on judgment and justice necessitates, as Petrey has written, ‘a theory of the soul that makes it inseparable from the body.’ 80
Finally, we should note the ways in which the resurrection of the body serves as a moral exemplar for early Christian audiences. In the writings of Tertullian and Pseudo-Justin the idea of resurrected celibacy creates a bodily ideal that glances backwards beyond its eschatological starting point to the practices of the present age. 81 In a manner reminiscent of Plato’s language of ascent, Tertullian writes that the fasting body rises more quickly than the plump one because ‘more speedily will lighter flesh rise; longer in the sepulcher will drier flesh retain its firmness.’ 82 Similarly the ‘slender flesh’ of the ascetic will slip through the gates of heaven with ease. In an analogous way, and for the same reasons, Tertullian advises his audience to focus their attention on martyrdom rather than sexual desire. 83
Conclusion
What then can be said about the relationship between martyrdom and the development of the idea of resurrection of the body among early Christians? In the first place, the conversation about martyrdom and resurrection is about more than ad hoc and occasional grief-struck responses to persecution, vengeance, and trauma. The experience of martyrdom provokes theological reasoning that is not merely contingent or derivative, it is sophisticated and elegant. What the ‘Ship of Theseus’ was to Greek philosophers, the martyr was to Christian apologists. While this argument might seem to be a rather slender exercise in hair-splitting, it has profound implications for how we think about the development of the idea of the resurrection of the flesh. Resurrection is as at home in the so-called ‘logical’ discussions about identity as it is among ‘emotional’ responses to grief and persecution. And while we should contest the evaluation implicit in this most Platonic of binaries, it is important to note the rhetorical effects of categorizing any theological position as an expression of trauma.
Second, while the history of martyrdom and the history of the idea of fleshy resurrection are interwoven, they move together in a world informed by philosophy and ancient science. Previous scholarship has placed this conversation squarely within the realm of metaphysics. But the resurrection of the flesh does not only tug on the underpinnings of the cosmos and anthropology, it also gestures to the oft-neglected ethical importance of the functions of the parts of the body.
For Christians resurrection can function as an act of resistance to structures of oppressive power. But even where it achieves this goal it is part of a broader conversation about the very nature of who we are and how our identities survive change. In this context the role of the martyr is to magnify and sharpen: as ciphers of virtue, as paradigms of bodily fortitude, and also, quite paradoxically, as emblems of human frailty, capturing both the heights of enfleshed human potential and the fleeting reality of that same flesh.
Footnotes
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.