Chapter 31. The Imperishability of the Body Is Confirmed by Christ. There Will Be an Intermediate Kingdom.
Chapter 31
1. Certain people who are thought of as orthodox believers go beyond the plain order for the promotion of the just. They are also ignorant of the methods of disciplining themselves for imperishability. They harbor within themselves heretical thoughts. For heretics hold God’s handiwork in contempt and do not admit salvation for their flesh; and they despise God’s promise and pass over and beyond God altogether in their thinking. They assert that as soon as they die, they pass over and beyond the heavens and the Creator and go to Mother [Wisdom] or to their imagined Father. Now they reject total resurrection and, as far as they are able, put it out of existence. It is strange they do not know the order of resurrection, since they refuse to understand that if things were as they say, the Lord, in whom they profess to believe, would certainly not have risen on the third day. Instead, when he expired on the cross, he would directly have departed on high, leaving the body on earth. But as it is he stayed three days in the place where the dead were, just as the Prophet says of him: “The Lord remembered his holy dead, who had previously fallen asleep in the earth, and he went down to them to liberate them and save them.”
And the Lord himself said: For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the whale, so will the Son of man be in the heart of the earth. And the Apostle says, But in saying “He ascended” what does it mean but that he had also descended into the lower parts of the earth? David, too, prophesied of Christ, Thou hast delivered my soul from the depths of Sheol. Moreover, when he rose on the third day, he appeared first to Mary and said to her: Do not hold me, for I have not yet ascended my Father; but go to the disciples and say to them: “I am ascending to my Father and to your Father.”
2. Consequently, if the Lord observed the law for the dead, so that he might be the Firstborn of the dead and sojourned until the third day in the lower parts of the earth, and then rose in the flesh that he might show the prints of the nails to the disciples, and in that manner ascended to the Father, how are they not confounded who assert that the lower parts are this world of ours, and that their inner man leaves the body here below, while it ascends to the supercelestial place? For since the Lord departed to the midst of the shadow of death, where the souls of the dead were, and then rose bodily, and after the resurrection was taken up, it is evident that also the souls of his disciples, on account of whom the Lord wrought these things, will go to the invisible place determined for them by God and will sojourn there until the resurrection, awaiting the resurrection. Then they will receive their bodies and rise integrally, that is, bodily, so that just as the Lord rose, they also will come to the vision of God. For a disciple is not above his teacher, but every one when he is fully taught will be like his teacher. Consequently, as our Teacher did not directly fly away but awaited the time of his resurrection as appointed by the Father, which was also disclosed by Jonah, and then rose after three days and was taken up, so we too ought to await the time of our resurrection appointed by God, which was foretold by the Prophets, and on rising thus be taken up, [that is] all whom the Lord will deem worthy of this.