Greek Questions to Christians

Contents

Reading pages: 1.0–2.10 · 3.1–3.26

1. 1.0The Greek questions: whether there is an incorporeal being, what God is and how he makes, whether what is made can be imperishable, and how the dead can rise if their flesh has been eaten by others.
2. 2.1The Christian answers that the Greek questions are not true logical difficulties, and gives a series of short proofs that there is an incorporeal reality, beginning with the fact that reasoning itself is not the work of body.
3. 2.2The soul, which gives life and thought to the body and knows truth, exists by itself; God is called incorporeal and uncreated not because he belongs among incorporeal creatures but because he is beyond both body and the incorporeal.
4. 2.3God's existence is known from the order and endurance of creation and from the teaching of the prophets, the Lord, and the apostles, confirmed by miracles.
5. 2.4God made, sustains, and will renew the world by his will, decided before creation; that he made one sun when he could have made many shows that he acts by will.
6. 2.5Short arguments that the incorporeal is better than body and that the soul is incorporeal and exists by itself.
7. 2.6God differs from the soul as Creator and Master from creature, and as what is beyond being from what is.
8. 2.7God makes without instruments, since what he wills comes to be at once; and he knows his works by reason, needing no deliberation, since he neither gains nor loses knowledge.
9. 2.9What is imperishable by another's will is not unoriginated: God alone has immortality by nature, while imperishable creatures, composed of originated elements, remain originated.
10. 2.10Created things perish not through anyone's badness but by the limit God sets, which brings perishing to individuals while preserving the kind.
11. 3.1Bodies eaten by fish or by other bodies are dissolved into their elements, from which God, who has already raised Christ, can re-create them as he created them in the beginning.
12. 3.2Since the parts of time are earlier and later, time is not eternal, and neither is the world that exists in time.
13. 3.3Disbelief in the resurrection rests either on the impious denial of God's power or on the ridiculous claim that imperishability would not benefit the risen.
14. 3.4God creates by command, and the dead need nothing but his command to rise.
15. 3.5The poet's line that God finds a way for the unexpected tells against disbelief in the resurrection.
16. 3.6The re-creation, ending all disputes about God, crowns creation; denying it makes creation itself evil.
17. 3.7The resurrection is impossible only in the relative sense in which all things are possible for God; and without the hope of the future, piety and impiety would not differ.
18. 3.9Since individual human beings are created, so is humanity and the world; an eternal world would admit no re-creation, but the world is not eternal.
19. 3.11Imperishable life is the divine goal for which humanity was made, and the martyrs' willingness to die confirms the truth of the resurrection.
20. 3.13The Greeks' contradictions among themselves show that reality is not measured by what they believe.
21. 3.14Against eyewitness testimony to Christ's resurrection the Greeks offer only a puzzle, not a proof, and no syllogism can overturn what has been shown to have happened.
22. 3.15Those who wrongly hold the sun to be eternal, though its positions change, are no reliable judges of the resurrection.
23. 3.16The sun's changing position shows it once did not exist; those ignorant of this cannot be trusted against the resurrection, of which Christ is already the firstborn.
24. 3.17If God can raise any dead person he can raise all, even one eaten by fish; his works are not to be measured by human reasoning.
25. 3.18Christ could not be Lord of the dead if he lacked power to raise them.
26. 3.19God who made mortal bodies has equal power to make them imperishable.
27. 3.20It is absurd to reject the attested resurrection while believing in the transmigration of souls into ants.
28. 3.21Transmigration contradicts the Greek view that God makes by his being, and denying that God's works perish would deny that human beings are his work.
29. 3.23God cannot be the cause both of our coming to be and of our perishing merely by his being.
30. 3.24Since bodies return to their elements, it is not impossible for them to be formed again from them.
31. 3.25God, master of every limit, can make human beings come to be without perishing.
32. 3.26Twenty-three short arguments for the resurrection: God's irrevocable gifts, his power to remake as he made, the dead lying in potency in the elements, the justice owed to martyrs, and the failure of all Greek opposition to the teaching.