On the Resurrection of the Dead 4

They say that many bodies of those who die miserably in shipwrecks and rivers become food for fish, and that many of those who die in wars, or who for some other harsher reason or turn of events are left unburied, lie exposed as food for any animals that come upon them. When bodies are consumed in this way, and the parts and particles that make them up are broken up among a great multitude of animals and united through nourishment with the bodies of those that feed on them, they say, first, that it is impossible to separate them; and to this they add a second difficulty, harder still. When animals fit for human food have fed on human bodies, and these bodies have passed through their stomachs and been united with the bodies of the animals that ate them, it is absolutely necessary, they say, that the parts of human beings that became food for those animals should pass into other human bodies, since the animals nourished in between pass on the nourishment they received to the human beings whose food they became. Then they add, in the manner of tragedy, the eating of children dared in famines and fits of madness, and children eaten by their own parents through the plots of enemies, and that famous Median table and the tragic feasts of Thyestes, and they string together other such calamities contrived among Greeks and barbarians. From these they establish, as they think, that the resurrection is impossible, since the same parts cannot rise with one body and with another as well: either the bodies of the first persons cannot be reconstituted, since the parts that made them up have passed to others, or, if those parts are given back to the first, the bodies of the later persons will be incomplete.