The Resurrection

● The thought of a resurrection of the dead was particularly difficult for the ancient worldly-wise Greeks to accept. Thus when the apostle Paul spoke to the Athenian philosophers on Mars’ Hill they listened attentively until he mentioned the resurrection. (Acts 17:31-34) In the Octavius of Minucius Felix of the early third century C.E., there is an interesting defense of the resurrection in chapter 34: “But who is so foolish or so brutish as to dare deny that man, as he could first of all be formed by God, so can again be reformed; that he is nothing after death, and that he was nothing before he began to exist; and as from nothing it was possible for him to be born, so from nothing it may be possible for him to be restored?”—The Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 4, p. 194.