I), that there were with him some who should not taste
of death till they had seen the kingdom of God--that is, that the
kingdom should come during their generation. And in the same chapter,
verse 10, it is said of Peter and James and John, who went up with Jesus
to the Mount of Transfiguration and heard him say that he would rise
again from the dead, that "they kept that saying within themselves,
questioning one with another what the rising from the dead should mean."
And at all events the Gospel was written when this belief, the basis and
_raison d'etre_ of Christianity, was in process of formation. See Matt.
xxii. 29-32; Mark xii. 24-27; Luke xvi. 22-31; xx. 34-37; John v. 24-29;
vi. 40, 54, 58; viii. 51; xi. 25, 56; xiv. 2, 19. And, above all, that
passage in Matt. xxvii. 52, which tells how at the resurrection of
Christ "many bodies of the saints which slept arose."
And this was not a natural resurrection. No; the Christian faith was
born of the faith that Jesus did not remain dead, but that God raised
him up again, and that this resurrection was a fact; but this did not
presuppose a mere immortality of the soul in the philosophical sense
(see Harnack, _Dogmengeschichte_, Prolegomena, v. 4). For the first
Fathers of the Church themselves the immortality of the soul was not a
thing pertaining to the natural order; the teaching of the Divine
Scriptures, as Nimesius said, sufficed for its demonstration, and it
was, according to Lactantius, a gift--and as such gratuitous--of God.
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