He was strongly opposed to the teaching of some of his Christian contemporaries who wished to interpret the idiom of resurrection
as an allegorical description of that Christian experience by which «a man, having come to the truth, has been reanimated and revivified to God, and, the death of ignorance being dispelled, has
as it were burst forth from the
tomb of the old man».35 Tertullian was adamant that the resurrection was in the future and to be understood in physical, fleshly terms («I pronounce that the flesh will certainly rise again»).36 In order to forestall those who could contend the impossibility of such a hope on the grounds that the decayed corpse would have long since wasted away to nothing, he pointed out that quite recently, in his city,
skeletons some five hundred years old had been unearthed in a remarkable state of preservation.