Will our bodies rise?

Clement of Rome fl. c. 96 ADFirst Letter to the Corinthians 24.1–4

Let us consider, beloved, how the Master continually shows us the resurrection to come, of which he made the Lord Jesus Christ the first fruits by raising him from the dead. Let us look, beloved, at the resurrection that happens at each season. Day and night show us resurrection: the night falls asleep, the day rises; the day departs, night comes on. Let us take the crops: how and in what way does the sowing happen?

Clement goes on to the seed and to the phoenix (chapter 25) as signs of the resurrection.

Athenagoras fl. c. 177 ADOn the Resurrection of the Dead 3.1–2

If at their first making he created human bodies and their elements when they did not exist, he will raise them just as easily when they have been dissolved, however that happens; for this too is equally possible for him.

Athenagoras answers the pagan objection about bodies eaten by animals or scattered.

Tertullian c. 155–c. 220 ADOn the Resurrection of the Flesh 63.1

So the flesh will rise: all of it, the very same, entire.

The same flesh, not another body.

Origen of Alexandria c. 185–c. 254 ADOn First Principles 2.10

Our bodies are to be thought of as falling into the earth like a grain. There is a principle lodged in them that holds the bodily substance together. However dead the bodies may be, and corrupted and scattered, at God's word that same principle, which is always kept safe in the body's substance, will raise them from the earth and restore and repair them, just as the power in a grain of wheat, after its corruption and death, repairs and restores the grain into the body of the stalk and the ear.

On First Principles 2.10, in Rufinus's Latin (the Greek of this chapter survives only in fragments, some of them quoted by Methodius against him). The abiding ratio, the body's form principle (in the Greek fragments its eidos), is what makes the risen body the same body, though Origen insists it rises spiritual, changed in glory. Quoted from the Lommatzsch witness in the store; the passage still wants a locked library section.

Methodius of Olympus d. c. 311 ADOn the Resurrection 1.35-36 (quoted in Epiphanius, Panarion 64)

God, it seems to me, has arranged the same for us. He saw man, the fairest of his works, ruined by the envious plots of spite, and in his love for mankind he would not leave him so, but dissolved him back into matter, so that in the remoulding everything faulty in him would melt away and vanish. ... What the statue's being melted down is there, that here is the body's dying and dissolution; and what the matter's being shaped again and adorned is there, that here is rising again.

Methodius answers Origen in a dialogue (the orthodox speaker is Eubulius). His image is a gold statue, marred by envy, melted down by its maker and cast again in its own form: dissolution is not loss, and the same work comes back without its blemishes. On the Resurrection survives complete only in an Old Slavonic translation; long Greek extracts, this one included, survive because Epiphanius quoted them against the Origenists in Panarion 64 (Migne PG 42). The library's Methodius texts are partly OCR and do not hold this passage.

Augustine of Hippo 354–430 ADCity of God 22.20-21

The sum of it is this: in the resurrection of the flesh, the size of our bodies will for ever have the measures that the pattern of youth, implanted in each body and still to be perfected or already perfect, once had, with fitting beauty kept in the proportions of every member. ... Only let there be no deformity, no weakness, no slowness and no corruption. ... Whatever has perished from living bodies, or from corpses after death, will be restored.

Augustine's last book works through the objectors' questions one by one: aborted children, bodies eaten or scattered, hair and nails, size and age (22.12-21). His settled answer: nothing of the body is lost to its Maker, defects are removed rather than preserved, and all rise at the measure of grown youth, about the age Christ reached.