On the Resurrection
Athenagoras, On the Resurrection (fragment)
Athenagoras of Athens
A fragment on the raising of the dead. Fitting that it, too, will rise.
- Catch rate
- 240 / 255
- Base research
- 44
- Stat total
- 118
Base stats
Every stat is a checkable fact about the actual book, not a designer's mood. Bars are drawn against the highest value any book reaches.
Why these numbers
The game's own explanation, as a reader sees it in the backpack.
A scrap of the treatise on the resurrection — barely a book yet, so the least Stamina there is.
A little-known fragment — very slow to the floor.
Development
A book develops as it is read — the fragment becomes the work, the work becomes the corpus.
Moves learned
By levelling up. A book that develops keeps what it knew and learns the rest on its new schedule.
| Lv | Move | Type | Cat. | Pwr | Acc | PP |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | On the Resurrection | Eschatology | Argument | 55 | 100% | 15 |
Read it: What Is Impossible With Men
The passages the Scriptorium holds on screen, word for word from a public-domain translation. Written in Koine Greek.
“For if, when they did not exist, He made at their first formation the bodies of men, and their original elements, He will, when they are dissolved, in whatever manner that may take place, raise them again with equal ease: for this, too, is equally possible to Him.”
Athenagoras, On the Resurrection of the Dead 3 (trans. Pratten, ANF 2, public domain).
“That same power can reunite what is dissolved, and raise up what is prostrate, and restore the dead to life again, and put the corruptible into a state of incorruption.”
Athenagoras, On the Resurrection of the Dead 3 (trans. Pratten, ANF 2, public domain).
“It is surely far more probable, yea, most absolutely true, to say that what is impossible with men is possible with God.”
Athenagoras, On the Resurrection of the Dead 9 (trans. Pratten, ANF 2, public domain).
“Would any one have believed, unless taught by experience, that in the soft seed alike in all its parts there was deposited such a variety and number of great powers… of bones, and nerves, and cartilages, of muscles too, and flesh, and intestines? For neither in the yet moist seed is anything of this kind to be seen.”
Athenagoras, On the Resurrection of the Dead 17 (trans. Pratten, ANF 2, public domain).
“Man, therefore, who consists of the two parts, must continue for ever. But it is impossible for him to continue unless he rise again.”
Athenagoras, On the Resurrection of the Dead 15 (trans. Pratten, ANF 2, public domain).
“Although all human beings who die rise again, yet not all who rise again are to be judged… seeing that all are to rise again, those who have died in infancy as well as others, they too justify our conclusion that the resurrection takes place not for the sake of the judgment as the primary reason, but in consequence of the purpose of God in forming men.”
Athenagoras, On the Resurrection of the Dead 14 (trans. Pratten, ANF 2, public domain).
“For the resurrection is a species of change, and the last of all, and a change for the better.”
Athenagoras, On the Resurrection of the Dead 12 (trans. Pratten, ANF 2, public domain).
Athenagoras of Athens again, writing after the Plea — so after about A.D. 177. Twenty-five chapters, generally reckoned the first complete Christian treatment of the resurrection.
Notice the shape of the argument in chapter 3. He does not begin by asking whether God CAN raise the dead. He points out that God has already done the harder thing: he made the body out of nothing in the first place. Rebuilding is easier than building.
Chapter 14 is the tender one. Athenagoras refuses to make the resurrection merely a delivery system for judgment — because infants die, and they rise too. If judgment were the whole reason, they would have no reason to rise at all.
Chapter 17 is the argument from embryology: nothing in the seed looks anything like a skeleton, and yet. Justin makes the same move. It has lasted eighteen centuries because it does not depend on any particular biology being correct.
It does not all age equally. Chapters 4–8 answer the objection that bodies get eaten, and they answer it from the physiology of the day — an account of digestion that later science does not sustain. That is not a flaw in Athenagoras so much as the price of arguing from the book of nature at all: the evidence available at any moment is provisional.
Compare Clement’s phoenix. Athenagoras ARGUES from nature and gets a detail wrong; Clement REPORTS a piece of received natural history that was never observed. Reasoning from creation is what Paul does at Lystra and at Athens, and it is worth doing — as long as the conclusion stays inside the bounds Scripture sets. Athenagoras’ does: the God who made the body can remake it.