Scientific (historical) questions about Scripture episodes can lead to inconsequential answers at best, and completely wrong and misleading ones at worst— not because science is bad, but because it filters the object under discussion through the wrong categories.
Someone in one of the Facebook groups I participate in recently asked how we’re to understand Luke’s story of Jesus’ ascension, since trying to calculate his present location at a certain (assumed) rate of ascent obviously leads to absurdity. I responded that the only way for us in the 21st century to understand it, is obviously the way its audience was meant to understand it in the 1st century. We absolutely need to stop trying to read first-century, Iron-Age documents with Cyber-Age, scientific eyes!
Mark has no Ascension story, because his theological narrative doesn’t need one. (Some other time I’ll talk about why that’s the case.) It would be also be wrong to say (as I’ve read elsewhere) that Matthew, for his part, denies Jesus’ “ascension” when he has the disciples go to the mountain in Galilee that Jesus had specified, where Jesus meets and commissions them, saying only, “Behold, I am with you all days, even unto the end of the age” (Mt 28.20)— showing that he’s not going anywhere! (“Aha!”, shout the critics. “Contradictions!!— untrustworthy!! lies!! they made it up!!”)— But of course, setting the gospels at odds with each other in this way is foolish; they tell different stories simply because they’re making different but interlocking theological points. But it’s still wrong to try to harmonize— “Well, Matthew left that part out; Luke only completed the story!” No, we need to appreciate the profoundly literary and theological nature of our Texts. Historicism is not our friend!
The story of Jesus’ Ascension into heaven is found only in Luke/Acts, so we need to read it as part of Luke’s theology, not as a scientific description of something that would have been accessible to anyone with proper equipment.
“But it can’t be just an idea, right? Because Luke mentions the disciples actually gazing up into the sky!” Well, as I said, historicism is not our friend. In Luke’s narrative, the disciples’ gazing at the sky confirms the ascension; but the ascension itself is already a literary device that alludes to Daniel 7.13-14— there, Daniel was standing in the celestial throne room and saw the Son of Man being brought up in the clouds; here, the disciples are standing on earth seeing the Son of Man going up in the clouds. The prophet’s vision is celestial, the disciples’ vision is earthly, but both Daniel and Luke are describing the same exaltation of the Son of Man (and that’s the point!)— “Dominion, glory, and kingship were given to him; all peoples and nations of every language must serve him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that shall not pass away, and his kingship, one that shall not be destroyed” (Dn 7.14). When the “men” (angels) in Luke’s story then rebuke the disciples for gazing upward, this also serves Luke’s point that Christians are not to look for heavenly visions, but to get to work on earth.
But does this mean that the Ascension is “just a story” and that it “didn’t actually happen”? No, not at all— because first of all, there’s no such thing as “just” a story— “everything is story”, as Muriel Rukeyser said. But more importantly, we need to understand that the exaltation/ascension of the crucified and risen Son of Man is itself what St Paul calls “mystery”— not something unintelligible, nor something that just hasn’t been figured out yet (scientifically), but something of unfathomable depth that can’t be put into a mere definition like 2 + 2 or even e=mc^2. Mystery requires a story; only by a story can we be introduced to it! And the story of the “Son of Man” which the evangelists are telling has a history, which is Daniel 7. Daniel 7 is about the mystery of Israel, of what the Creator God is doing with his world through his people. But this is beyond fathoming; St Paul says, “creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God” (Rm 8.21). Mystery is what we call that fathomless reality of God’s interaction with humanity that is to be experienced ever more deeply by those who trust in what God has done in Jesus, by raising him from the dead and exalting him at his right hand. So, what the Gospel writers do, each in his own way, is introduce us to what Jesus himself called the “mystery of God’s regime” (Mk 4.11), or what St Paul called “the mystery of Christ among you, your hope of glory” (Col 1.27). They give us the apostles’ own experience of Jesus in the language of Daniel. This is what we get, as we come to understand each of the Four Gospels in its own specific terms.
In his masterful study of Mark entitled, Jesus’ Defeat of Death: Persuading Mark’s Early Readers (Society for New Testament Studies Monograph Series; Cambridge, 2003), Peter Bolt noted that Mark’s Transfiguration story has the form of a classical “apotheosis” narrative— the hero takes his best friends to a high mountain, the gods or great heroes of old appear and converse with him, a cloud comes, the cloud departs, and the hero is no longer there, but has been taken to the abode of the gods / heaven and deified, leaving his friends astonished at his disappearance. This story is told over and over in classical literature, and it was even told of some of the Roman emperors when Jesus, Paul, Mark, and Luke were alive. So it was well-known all over the Empire.
Well, the shocking thing about the transfiguration story is that when the cloud departs, “suddenly looking around, [the disciples] saw no one with them any more”— so far, so good, eh? this is just what we expect— “but only Jesus” (Mk 9.8). Uh oh. Jesus is still there. He has refused his apotheosis. And that can mean one thing only: he will go back down the mountain to die, just as he told them in the immediately preceding episode. Jesus means business! He will not escape death, like the heroes in the classical apotheosis stories. And indeed the three disciples and Jesus discuss this very thing on their way back down. In Luke, the “heroes” (Moses and Elijah) discuss his “exodus, which he will accomplish in Jerusalem” (Lk 9.31). Interesting word, “exodus”. . . . .
Matthew and Luke do not deviate from Mark’s outline, but Luke ends his Gospel with a story that “completes” the “apotheosis” formula begun but aborted in the transfiguration narrative. He completes it in terms of Daniel 7, but on the way to doing so— unlike other ancient heroes— Jesus, the Son of Man, is crucified and dies. Luke’s purpose is to show that Jesus was indeed the Son of Man whom Daniel saw— and whom the disciples saw at the transfiguration— and that he was exalted precisely as Daniel had said— but that the way to such exaltation was not Hercules’ fantastic show of strength, nor Caesar’s impressive military and political exploits, but the Way of the Cross. In fact both Mark and Luke puts the Transfiguration (“apotheosis refused”) episode precisely at the beginning of their long treatment of the Way to Jerusalem (which is the way to exaltation)— in Mark, the whole of Section 2.1 (8.22–10.52), and in Luke, the entire middle third of his Gospel (Lk 9.51–19.44). On that journey Jesus explains and demonstrates by many parables and actions what he’s up to. He then arrives in Jerusalem and accomplishes his “exodus”, and is exalted in glory not by escaping death, but by dying.
That the Son of Man is enthroned precisely on the cross is the point affirmed in all three synoptic gospels when the High Priest asks, “You’re the Messiah?”, and Jesus answers, “I am; and you will see ‘the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Power,’ and ‘coming with the clouds of heaven’” (Mk 14.62). In fact, just to make sure we don’t miss the point, Matthew and Luke add a couple of words to Jesus’ response: “From now on [ἀπ’ ἄρτι] you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power and coming on the clouds of heaven” (Mt 26.64); “from this very moment [ἀπὸ τοῦ νῦν— lit., “from this now”] the Son of Man will be seated at the right hand of God’s power” (Lk 22.69). What the High Priest is going to see “from this very moment” onward is precisely Jesus enthroned— and he will see him on a cross!
Only after dying on a cross does Jesus, the Son of Man, complete his apotheosis by “ascending to heaven”, the place of God (cf, eg, Ps 115.16), fulfilling Daniel’s prophecy. But as the “men” (angels) of Acts 1.10-11 assure the disciples, precisely because God has exalted him, he now in a position to come again— not to “rapture” us (that idea is less than 200 years old), but to judge and to rule the nations forever. Meanwhile, the disciples are to bring the good news to all those nations that the Father has raised this man from the dead and appointed him as judge, so that they too might be included in his regime and share in the blessings of the messianic Age. That’s the story in Acts— see especially Acts 17.31— and especially in Romans and Galatians.
The discussion on Facebook was in the context of a debate about the value of “apologetics”. I asserted that usual kind of apologetics— the kind where we “prove the existence of God”, or (worse) the “historical truth of Genesis”— is pretty much worthless. Instead, my experience in Africa (and differently, in Utah and San Francisco) taught me that we need to train in this kind of “narrative apologetics”. We have to learn how to tell the story of Jesus, not as we have it in our own heads, but as the Gospel writers told it. But of course that entails learning what the story in the Gospels actually is. It’s not about finding a satisfactory scientific explanation for things like the Ascension; rather it’s about learning to understand the language in which the writer (in this case only Luke) told it, which is provided by Daniel 7. And it’s in each evangelist’s specific story of Jesus that we get the particular experience that he wants us to get.
God is like Jesus, but to understand Jesus, we need to inhabit the story Jesus inhabited, which is that of Daniel’s “Son of Man”.
A number of other things could be added. First, as i try to indicate in the article, our Scriptures are profoundly *literary* in ways that we can hardly appreciate any more, and we generally fail to take that into account in interpreting them.
There are not separate words for ‘heaven’ and ‘sky’ in any language but English that I know of; and in any case, certainly not in Luke’s Greek. Jesus went up to the *sky* in Luke-Acts, not to “heaven”. Yet this is metaphoric terminology, alluding to Daniel 7 among other passages, and everybody in the culture to which Luke was writing would have immediately understood how the metaphor worked and what it meant, and any but a Gentile neophyte would have caught the allusion to Daniel as well. That’s one reason becoming a Christian could take up to three or four years in the early church— people needed that long to acquire competence in the metaphoric world of the Scriptures; to let the symbolics of that world redefine their way of looking at the physical and social world.
Taking the story of the Ascension literally— as if “Jesus went up at about 5 miles per hour to the blue sky”— would be like saying to a Shawn Mendes fan who was yammering on a little too excessively about his girlfriend, that he sounded pretty much ‘Lost in Japan’. Your Mendes fan wouldn’t think that you thought he was wandering around in Tokyo looking for his hotel; he would recognize that, by an allusion to Mendes’ song, you were telling him he was a little too hung up about his girlfriend. (See this site if you need to review the lyrics.)
For a fundamentalist, though, the Bible isn’t a work of literature written by the subtlest masters, but just a book of plainspoken reportage that any simpleton can read and understand, no different than the newspapers. But taking it that way would be like interpreting that statement to the Mendes fan as actually meaning that he was, in fact, physically wandering around Tokyo. Even worse— it’d be like taking Shawn Mendes himself as talking about wandering around Tokyo. But that so-called “literal” interpretation would in fact be altogether false, a complete misunderstanding, and indeed would not actually be a “literal” interpretation at all, since that was never Mendes’s actual meaning in the first place!
The metaphor of ‘ascending to the sky and there being enthroned at the right hand of God’ is a way of conveying that Jesus has been exalted to supreme authority as God’s viceroy. Understanding that, we see that Luke, who says Jesus “was lifted up while they were looking on, and a cloud received Him out of their sight” (Ac 1.9), and Matthew, whose Jesus says, “All authority is given to me in the sky and on the ground, and behold, *I am with you all days*”— that is, I am *not* apart from you!— are actually saying the same thing. If we take these accounts on a verbal level only, they appear to be contradictory. But to interpret them that way is to *mis*interpret them. They are both saying, Jesus has been exalted to supreme authority.
We often have no choice but to use metaphor— or at least, sometimes it’s our most efficient way of communicating— but as long as everyone understands what the metaphors are about, that’s fine. The problem isn’t that we have to use metaphors, but that we can lose their literary context and end up falsifying them by literalizing them.
We do a great disservice to the ancients when we say things like, “the ascension makes sense in a first-century world, in which people believed heaven was above the dome of the sky”. The ancients understood well enough— and actually often better than we do— the difference between a metaphor or a symbol, the ineffable reality it communicated, and the physical reality that has been made metaphorical. And not just the ancients. Even today, when an Orthodox Christian receives Communion, she knows perfectly well that she’s partaking of bread and wine; it’s just that she also knows that God has “shown this bread to be the precious Body. . . . and this Cup to be the precious Blood of our Lord and God and Savior Jesus Christ”, as St Basil the Great puts it in his Anaphora. In the same way, the sky is “shown” to be the place where God is enthroned— this selfsame physical sky— not because God is physical and physically dwells at a distance of so many meters above us, but because the universe of things is already a transparent metaphor of transcendental meaning. The ancients were not at all as “literalistic” or “primitive” as we often seem to imagine.
As i said, though, for a fundamentalist, the Bible isn’t a work of literature written by the subtlest masters, but simply a set of plainspoken reports about the surface of the past. But because the Bible *was* written by the subtlest masters, to treat it as “literal/historical”, plainspoken reportage absolutely misses what those subtlest masters were talking about, altogether. *That* is the problem of what is called “evangelicalism”, of Christianism, as opposed to Christianity.
Yet there’s another temptation to avoid here. Once we realize that the Bible isn’t to be taken “literally”, we’re often drawn to esoteric “Bible Codes” or other kinds of “secret meanings”. This is a wrong turn. If we want to know what the masters themselves were talking about in writing the Texts they did, our task is to become conversant with the way *they* thought. And this we learn from the language itself of those who wrote it. Every word of the New Testament either alludes to or quotes something from the Old, and much of the Old itself is already drawing upon earlier books in the same way, as later prophets allude to earlier prophets or to the Torah, and so forth. There are no “secret meanings”, but there is a web of allusions, literary figures, and structural devices to which we need to become sensitive.
But of course, we can read the Bible on a naive level. Paul Ricoeur speaks of the need for a “secondary naiveté”, where we return to the text after having done all our homework, just to read it— and we must do that as we set our children on the path of spiritual maturity. But to mature is to grow in the ability to pull all this together as we descend deeper and deeper into texts of bottomless depth, which reveal the fathomless mystery of life in a universe that has Jesus the Messiah as its ultimate meaning. For as John put it—
In the beginning was the meaning,
and the meaning was toward God,
and God was the meaning. (Jn 1.1).