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The word corruption has two meanings. For it signifies all the human
sufferings, such as hunger, thirst, weariness, the piercing with
nails, death, that is, the separation of soul and body, and so
forth. In this sense we say that our Lord's body was subject to
corruption. For He voluntarily accepted all these things. But
corruption means also the complete resolution of the body into its
constituent elements, and its utter disappearance, which is spoken of
by many preferably as destruction. The body of our Lord did not
experience this form of corruption, as the prophet David says, For
Thou will not leave my soul in hell, neither wilt Thou suffer Thine
holy one to see corruption.
Wherefore to say, with that foolish Julianus and Gaianus, that our
Lord's body was incorruptible, in the first sense of the word,
before His resurrection is impious. For if it were incorruptible it
was not really, but only apparently, of the same essence as ours, and
what the Gospel tells us happened, viz. the hunger, the thirst, the
nails, the wound in His side, the death, did not actually occur.
But if they only apparently happened, then the mystery of the
dispensation is an imposture and a sham, and He became man only in
appearance, and not in actual fact, and we are saved only in
appearance, and not in actual fact. But God forbid, and may those
who so say have no part in the salvation. But we have obtained and
shall obtain the true salvation. But in the second meaning of the word
"corruption," we confess that our Lord's body is incorruptible,
that is, indestructible, for such is the tradition of the inspired
Fathers. Indeed, after the resurrection of our Saviour from the
dead, we say that our Lord's body is incorruptible even in the first
sense of the word. For our Lord by His own body bestowed the gifts
both of resurrection and of subsequent incorruption even on our own
body, He Himself having become to us the firstfruits both of
resurrection and incorruption, and of passionlessness. For as the
divine Apostle says, This corruptible must put an incorruption.
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