Tertullian, On the Resurrection of the Flesh 1

The confidence of Christians rests on the resurrection of the dead; we are believers in that, and this truth compels us to believe. God reveals the truth, but the crowd ridicules it, thinking nothing survives death—and yet they pay their respects to the dead, and at great expense, following their customs and timing their feasts so that they presume the very people they claim feel nothing still desire food. I will laugh at the crowd even more when it atrociously burns the dead, only to gorge on them afterward, both earning and offending with the same fires. Oh, the piety playing with cruelty: does it sacrifice, or does it insult, when it burns the cremated? Plainly, even the wise sometimes join their opinion to the crowd's. The Epicurean school teaches that nothing exists after death. Seneca says the same—that everything ends after death, even the soul itself. But the philosophy of Pythagoras and Empedocles is no lesser authority. The Platonists, by contrast, claim the soul is immortal; indeed, they even affirm it is reborn into bodies—though not the same ones, and not only human ones—so that Euphorbus is reckoned into Pythagoras, and Homer into a peacock. They have certainly proclaimed the soul's rebirth into a body; a changed quality is more tolerable than a denied one: at least struck, even if not reached by truth. Thus the age, even when it errs, does not ignore the resurrection of the dead.