At the time of Jesus» death there was an earthquake (as not in the other gospels) and «many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised, and coming
forth out of the tombs after his resurrection they entered into the holy city [note the Jewish expression] and appeared to many (27:52 - 3).
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.