Many ordinary Christians in the second century understood that just as Jesus had truly died and in his ‘resurrection’ come back to life on the third day, so they too would die and then ultimately ‘arise’ or come back to life in their same body. But Valentinian teachers, or at least some of them, did not accept that the animate element and the intellect (spirit) were capable of death; nor that the material body was capable of ultimate preservation. From these assumptions they concluded that the words ‘arise’ and ‘resurrection’ must not refer to a process of death and revivification, but to an upward movement in a different, more abstract or metaphorical sense—in which the soul and intellect escape from material existence, and then ‘ascend’ or change into another state of existence. It is the intellect’s escape and change of condition that are the main topic of the Treatise on Resurrection.