| 143. Insufficiency of the Narrative of the Ascension. Mythical Conception of those narratives. | ||||
AMONG all the New Testament histories of miracles, the ascension least demanded such an expenditure of perverted acumen, since the attestations to its historical validity are peculiarly weak, not only to us who, having no risen Jesus, can consequently {P.862} have no ascended one, but apart from all prior conclusions and in every point of view. Matthew and John, who according to the common idea were the two eyewitnesses among the evangelists, do not mention it; it is narrated by Mark and Luke alone, while in the rest of the New Testament writings decided allusions to it are wanting. But this absence of allusions to the ascension in the rest of the New Testament is denied by orthodox expositors. When, say they, Jesus in Matthew (xxvi. 64.) declares before the high priest, that hereafter the Son of Man will be seen sitting at the right hand of God: this presupposes an exaltation there, consequently an ascension; when in John (iii. 13.) he says, no one has ascended into heaven but the Son of Man who came from heaven, and at another time (vi. 62.) tells the disciples that they will hereafter see him ascend where he was before; further, when on the morning of the resurrection he declares that he is not yet ascended to his Father, implying that he is about to do so (xx. 17.: there could hardly be more explicit allusions to the ascension; again, when the apostles in the Acts so often speak of an exaltation of Jesus to the right hand of God (ii. 33; v. 31; comp. vii. 56), and Paul represents him as ascended up far above all heavens (Ephes. iv. 10), Peter, as gone into heaven (1 Pet. iii. 22.); there can be no doubt that they all knew of his ascension. All these passages, however, with the exception perhaps of John vi. 62. where a "seeing the son of man ascend," is spoken of, contain only in general his exaltation to heaven, without intimating that it was an external, visible fact, that took place in the presence of the disciples. Rather, when we find Paul in 1 Cor. xv.5ff. ranking the appearance of Jesus to himself, which occurred long after the alleged ascension, with the Christophanies before this epoch, so entirely without any pause or indication of a distinction: w must doubt, not merely that all the appearances which he enumerates besides his own can have occurred before the ascension, but whether the apostle can have had any knowledge at all of an ascension as an external fact which closed the earthly life of Jesus. As to the author of the fourth gospel, in his metaphorical language, we are not compelled by the words in relation to the angels ascending and descending upon Jesus, i. 52., to ascribe to him a knowledge of the visible ascension of Jesus, of which he gives no intimation at the conclusion of his gospel. | ||||
Commentators have, it is true, taken all possible pains to explain the want of a narrative of the ascension in the first and fourth Gospels, in a way which may not prove inimical either to the authority of the writings, or to the historical value of the fact. They maintain that the evangelists who are silent on the subject, held it {P.863} either unnecessary, or impossible, to nan-ate the ascension. They held it unnecessary, say these expositors, either intrinsically, from the minor importance of the event; or extrinsically, on the consideration that it was generally known as a part of the Gospel tradition; John in particular supposed it to be known from Mark and Luke; or lastly, both Matthew and John omitted it as not belonging to the earthly life of Jesus, to the description of which their writings were exclusively devoted.1 But we must contend, on the contrary, that the life of Jesus, especially that enigmatical life which he led after his return from the grave, absolutely required such a close as the ascension. Whether it were generally known or not, whether it were important or unimportant, - the simple aesthetic interest which dictates even to an uncultivated author, that a narrative should be wound up with a conclusion, must have led every Gospel writer who knew of the ascension to mention it, though it were but summaril at the end of his history, in order to avoid the strange impression left by the first gospel and still more by the fourth, as narratives losing themselves in vague obscurity. Hence our apologists resort to the supposition that the first and fourth evangelists held it impossible to give an account of the ascension of Jesus, because the eye-witnesses, however long they might gaze after him, could still only see him hovering in the air and encircled by the cloud, not entering heaven and taking his place on the right hand of God. But in the ideas of the ancient world, to which heaven was nearer than to us, an entrance into the clouds was in itself a real ascent into heaven, as we see from the stories of Romulus and Elijah. | ||||
Thus it is undeniable that the above evangelists were ignorant of the ascension: but the conclusion of the most recent criticism, that this ignorance is a reproach to the first evangelist as a sign of his unapostolic character, is the less in place here, because the event in question is rendered suspicious not merely by the silence of two evangelists, but also by the want of agreement between those who narrate it. Mark is at variance with Luke, indeed, Luke is at variance with himself. In the account of the former it appears as if Jesus had ascended into heaven immediately from the meal in which he appeared to the eleven, consequently from out of a house in Jerusalem; for the phrases: he appeared with the eleven as they sat at meat, and upbraided them - and he said - So then after the Lord had spoken to them he was received up into heaven, have an immediate depend- {P.864} ence on each other, and it is only by violence that a change of place or a distinction of time can be introduced. Now an ascent into heaven directly out of a room is certainly not easy to imagine; hence Luke represents it as taking place in the open air. In his gospel he makes Jesus immediately before his ascension, lead out his disciples as far as Bethany, but in the Acts he places the scene on the mount called Olivet; this, however, cannot be imputed to him as a contradiction, since Bethany lay in the neighbourhood of the mount of Olives. But there is a more important divergency in his statement of time; for in his gospel as in Mark, we are left to infer that the ascension took place on the same day with the resurrection: whereas in the Acts it is expressly remarked, that the two events were separated by an interval of forty days. It has already been remarked that the latter determination of time must have come to the knowledge of Luke in the interim betwen the composition of the gospel and that of the Acts. The more numerous the narratives of appearances of the risen Jesus, and the more various the places to which they were assigned: the less would the short space of a day suffice for his life on earth after the resurrection; while the determination of the lengthened period which had become necessary to forty days precisely, had its foundation in the part which this number is known to have played in the Jewish, and already in the Christian legend. The people of Israel were forty years in the wilderness; Moses was forty days on mount Sinai; he and Elijah fasted forty days; and Jesus himself previous to the temptation remained the same length of time without nourishment in the wilderness. As, then, all these mysterious intermediate states and periods of transition were determined by the number forty: this number presented itself as especially appropriate for the determination of the mysterious interval between the resurrection and ascension of Jesus.J | ||||
As regards the description of the event itself, it might be thought admissible to ascribe the silence of Mark, and of Luke in his gospel, concerning the cloud and the angels, purely to the brevity of their narratives; but since Luke at the close of his gospel narrates circumstantially enough the conduct of the disciples-how they fell down and worshipped the ascended Jesus, and returned to the city with great joy: so he would doubtless have pointed out the information communicated to them by angels as the immediate source of their joy, had he known anything of such a particular at the time when he composed his first writing. Hence this feature seems rather to have been gradually formed in tradition, in order to render due honour to this last point also in the life of Jesus, and to present a confirmation of the insufficient testimony of men as to his exaltation into heaven by the mouth of two heavenly witnesses. | ||||
{P.865} As, according to this, those who knew of an ascension of Jesus, had by no means the same idea of its particular circumstances: there must have been in general two different modes of conceiving the close of the life of Jesus; some regarding it as a visible ascension, others not so. When Matthew makes Jesus before the tribunal of the high priest predict his exaltation to the right hand of the divine power (xxvi. 64), and after his resurrection declare that now all power is given to him in heaven and earth (xxviii. 18.); and nevertheless has nothing of a visible ascension, but on the contrary puts into the mouth of Jesus the assurance: "I am with you always, even to the end of the world," (v. 20): it is evident that the latent idea, on which his representation is founded, is that Jesus, doubtless immediately on his resurrection, ascended invisibly to the Father, though at the same time remaining invisibly with his followers; and that out of this concealment he, as often as he found it expedient, revealed himself in Christophanics. The same view is to be discerned in the apostle Paul, when 1 Cor. xv. he undistinguishingly places the appearance to himself of the Christ already ascended into heaven, in one series with the earlier Christophanics; and also the author of the fourth gospel and the rest of the New Testament writers only presuppose what must necessarily be presupposed according to the Messianic passage: "Sit at my right hand," Ps. ex. 1.: that Jesus was exalted to the right hand of God; without deciding anything as to the manner of the exaltation, or representing to themselves the ascension as a visible one. The imagination of the primitive Christians must however have felt a strong temptation to depict this exaltation as a brilliant spectacle. When it was once concluded that the Messiah Jesus had arrived at so exalted a position, it would appear desirable to gaze after him, as it were, on his way there. If it was expected, in acordance with the prophecy of Daniel, that his future return from heaven would be a visible descent in the clouds: this would naturally suggest that his departure to heaven should be represented as a visible ascent on a cloud; and when Luke makes the two whitc-apparclled angels, who joined the disciples after the removal of Jesus, say: this same Jesus, who is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as you have, seen Aim go into heaven (Acts i. 11.); we need only take the converse of this declaration in order to have before us the genesis of the conception of the ascension of Jesus; for the mode of conclusion was this: as Jesus will at some future time return from heaven in the clouds, so he must surely have departed theref in the same manner. | ||||
Compared with these primary incentives, the Old Testament {P.866} precedents which the ascension of Jesus has in the translation of Enoch (Gen. v. 24; comp. Wis. xliv. 16; xlLx. 16; Heb. xi. 5), and especially in the ascension of Elijah (2 Kings ii. 11; comp. Wis. xlviii. 9; 1 Mace. ii. 58), together with the Grecian and Roman apotheoses of Hercules and Romulus, recede into the background. Apart from the question whether the latter were known to the second and third evangelists; the statement relative to Enoch is too vague; while the chariot and horses of fire that transported Elijah were not adapted to the milder spirit of Christ. Instead of this the enveloping cloud and the removal while holding a farewell conversation, may appear to have been borrowed from the later representation of the removal of Moses, which however in other particulars has considerable divergencies from that of Jesus. Perhaps also one trait in the narrative of the Acts may be explained out of the story of Elijah. When this prophet, before his translation, is entreated by his servant Elisa that he will bequeath him a double measure of his spirit: Elijah attaches to the concession of this boon the condition: ifthou see?ne when I am taken from you, it shall be so to you; but if not, it shall not be so; whence we might perhaps gather the reason why Luke (Acts i. 9.) lays stress on the fact that the disciples beheld Jesus as he went up namely, because, according to the narrative concerning Elijah, this was necessary, if the disciples were to receive the spirit of their master. | ||||