Ad hominem: fathers press pagans with their own revivification stories — Theophilus, Aeneas, Pliny

The fathers argue for the resurrection of the flesh when they confront pagans, using examples—though some might call them fables—of revived figures. Of Antioch (To Autolycus book 1): You believe, he says, that Hercules, whom the flame consumed, lives; and that Aesculapius struck by lightning was restored to life: what madness is it to refuse to give faith to those things which God speaks?

So Aeneas of Gaza, a Platonic Christian philosopher flourishing in the fifth century after Christ under the emperors Zeno and Anastasius, in his Dialogue on the Immortality of the Soul and the Resurrection of Bodies, which he titled Theophrastus, under Theophrastus's person: Do you think, he says, that this earthly body is to be resuscitated? But that would be like a miracle, seeing that it has flowed apart and been dispersed. And one part indeed has been filed by fishes, another torn by birds; and those animals in turn have been caught and consumed by others, so that not even any vestige of the human body remains. And he answers under Axitheus's person. Pliny also recounts some who revived after being carried out (Natural History book 7, chapter 52). These are arguments to the person, which press no one other than him who believes such things.