Immortality and resurrection

Consider the end of each of the emperors who have lived before: they died the death common to everyone. If death led to complete insensibility, that would be a windfall for all the unjust. But since consciousness remains for all who have lived and eternal punishment is laid up, do not neglect to be persuaded and believe that these things are true. Let necromancy persuade you, and divinations through uncorrupted children, and invocations of human souls, and those whom the magicians call dream-senders and attendant spirits, and everything done by people skilled in such practices—that souls remain conscious even after death. Consider also people seized and thrown about by the souls of the dead, whom everyone calls demon-possessed or mad; the oracles you recognize, such as those of Amphilochus, Dodona, and Pytho, and all others like them; the teachings of your writers Empedocles, Pythagoras, Plato, and Socrates; Homer’s pit and Odysseus’s descent to inspect these things; and all who have said similar things. Receive us in the same way you receive them, for we trust God no less than they do, but more. We expect to receive back our own bodies even after they have died and been placed in the earth, because we say that nothing is impossible for God.