You Already Have the Resurrection: The Letter to Rheginus
Near the end of the New Testament, two men get named and condemned for a single idea. Hymenaeus and Philetus, the writer of 2 Timothy warns, “say that the resurrection has already taken place, and they destroy the faith of some.” We never hear their side. Their teaching spreads “like gangrene,” the letter says, and then it drops them. In 1945 a jar came out of the Egyptian sand holding, among much else, a short letter from a teacher to a student named Rheginus, and its thesis is the sentence the church had warned against. Not that the resurrection will come. That it has. The Treatise on Resurrection is a sustained second-century argument for that position, it runs under two thousand words, and it turns out to be one of the warmest things in the whole library. Let’s walk through it and ask what living from it might look like. ...