With Tertullian, The Resurrection Doctrine Evolved Once More

If you read my last post you saw that the second century Church Father, Justin Martyr (d. 165 CE), vehemently rejected the idea that the soul leaves the body at the moment of one’s death. Justin believed that the soul would stay in the body until the resurrection of the body (the revivified fleshy body not the transformed, heavenly body of Paul’s theology). The body and the soul would be raised together in the Second Coming; at the establishment of the New Kingdom in Jerusalem. In his view, anyone who did not hold this view was not a “real Christian”.

Well, third century Church Father Tertullian (d. 240) must not have been a real Christian because he taught that the soul does leave the body at one’s death.

Bart Ehrman: For all these [first and second century] Christian authors who imagine a future resurrection of the flesh [a revivified body of flesh and blood], there is always the question, what will happen in the meantime, starting as we have seen, with Paul. Now, a century and a half later, the imminent return of Jesus that Paul expected turned out to be not so imminent after all, and Tertullian looks on Paul as ancient history. It is thus no surprise that Tertullian works out a scenario of what will transpire at death.

In Tertullian’s view, at death the soul separates from the body, and different souls go to different places. Only the souls of Christian martyrs, killed for their faith, go immediately and directly to paradise. All other souls, whether good or wicked, go to Hades, an actual space, enormous, located inside the earth. Hades as two divisions, one for the righteous souls who receive temporary rewards and one for the wicked who are punished, all in anticipation of the permanent destinies to come at the resurrection of the dead.

These tactile experiences of reward and punishment [feeling pain] are possible because souls can experience pain and joy apart from the body. …Punishments are first experienced by the soul in Hades and only later by the body at the resurrection.

All people [believers and unbelievers] will return to the same body they had in life, in the same state and the same age when they died. Those who are righteous will be raised body and soul to the level of perfection of the angels. The wicked will roast forever.

Such views of the afterlife came to be refined and accepted as orthodox by writers of the third and fourth Christian centuries, even though they differed from anything found in the teachings of Jesus, Paul, or Revelation. The soul, like the body, could experience both pleasure and pain, and in fact would experience one or the other immediately after death. This teaching of postmortem rewards and punishments, to be followed eventually with a resurrection [of the revivified, flesh and blood body], came to be the standard view of the Christian Church by the third century, just as it still is for many Christians today.

—Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife, p. 249-250

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End of post.