Sam Harris, one of the original “New Atheists”, created a minor media kerfuffle last week with some comments about Donald Trump in an online interview. Harris has been a long time critic of Trump so that doesn’t really interest me much. But he also made a snarky comment about Jesus floating off into space and believers looking for heaven in telescopes that set off a corresponding kerfuffle among certain internet Christian apologists who spent considerable bandwidth assuring their audience that they possess a rather more sophisticated view of the matter.
I’m not going to link to all that. With the efficiency of the YouTube algorithm judicious searching will present you with more than enough. This post isn’t really about online kerfuffles which we have with us always. I am interested in this singular peculiar episode. The Ascension of Jesus.
The account only appears in two spots in the scripture although it became very important later on in the Church.
Luke 24:51
While he was blessing them, he withdrew from them and was carried up into heaven.[** you do not have permission to see this link **]
- ** you do not have permission to see this link **Other ancient authorities lack “and was carried up into heaven”
Acts 1: 9-11
When he had said this, as they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. While he was going and they were gazing up toward heaven, suddenly two men in white robes stood by them. They said, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.”
So what are we to make of this? It is generally thought that Luke and Acts were composed by the same author. The presence of textual variations in Luke’s account may indicate that the original story was rather minimalist. Note also that in Acts Jesus ascends bodily but the angels simply appear out of nowhere.
My fascination grew out of an interest in ancient cosmology. The ancients were rigorous empiricists. Walk outside. What do you see? Forget hundreds of years of scientific observations confounding common sense. You’re standing on a flat disk covered by a luminous dome. Right? Water and mist seek the lowest level but sometimes mysteriously fall from the sky. Caves are entrances to a deeper dark and mountains bring us closer to the sky. This sky contains bright objects which hover over us and whose regularities guide us. (Remember it took thousands of years for civilization to become sophisticated enough not to trust the evidence of our senses!)
This ancient, venerable view of reality has come to be called the “three-tiered cosmos” and variations appeared all over the ancient world. (For a graphic of the Hebrew version look ** you do not have permission to see this link **.) This is the cosmology assumed in the Old Testament and I think is the cosmology assumed by the writers of the gospels. How so? The Greeks proved the earth had to be a sphere in the 5th century BCE and the writers of the NT would have been educated in Greek culture. How could they not know the updated view? Well not only were they following the traditions of the OT, the Synoptics anyway were thoroughly apocalyptic. The apocalyptic tradition is suffused with the older view. There is a portion of the Book of Enoch written in the 2nd century BCE that details the mechanics of the motions of the Sun and Moon in the heavens of the three-tiered cosmos.
What is frustrating is that there are very few glimpses of the cosmological viewpoint of the NT. But there are hints. Consider the second temptation of Jesus recorded in Matthew (the third in Luke). Satan takes Jesus up to the top of a high mountain to see all the kingdoms of the world. How would that work exactly? Unless you had some idea that the earth was flat? Note the times in the gospels when Jesus goes up on a mountain to be closer to God? Interesting if you believed that the top of mountains were closer to heaven which is located above us.
The Church Fathers, educated in Greek philosophy, realized the embarrassment of a literal reading of these stories and early on began began to allegorize them or interpret them mystically. But for me the question is not so much how subsequent generations of Christians should deal with these stories but sussing out the viewpoint of the folks who created these stories. Here we get a glimpse of an older, more primeval view of reality. So in the end, while Harris was being a smart-a**, he wasn’t wrong.
Stephen said
Sam Harris, one of the original “New Atheists”, created a minor media kerfuffle last week with some comments about Donald Trump in an online interview. Harris has been a long time critic of Trump so that doesn’t really interest me much. But he also made a snarky comment about Jesus floating off into space and believers looking for heaven in telescopes that set off a corresponding kerfuffle among certain internet Christian apologists who spent considerable bandwidth assuring their audience that they possess a rather more sophisticated view of the matter.I’m not going to link to all that. With the efficiency of the YouTube algorithm judicious searching will present you with more than enough. This post isn’t really about online kerfuffles which we have with us always. I am interested in this singular peculiar episode. The Ascension of Jesus.
The account only appears in two spots in the scripture although it became very important later on in the Church.
Luke 24:51
While he was blessing them, he withdrew from them and was carried up into heaven.[** you do not have permission to see this link **]
- ** you do not have permission to see this link **Other ancient authorities lack “and was carried up into heaven”
Acts 1: 9-11
When he had said this, as they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. While he was going and they were gazing up toward heaven, suddenly two men in white robes stood by them. They said, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.”
So what are we to make of this? It is generally thought that Luke and Acts were composed by the same author. The presence of textual variations in Luke’s account may indicate that the original story was rather minimalist. Note also that in Acts Jesus ascends bodily but the angels simply appear out of nowhere.
My fascination grew out of an interest in ancient cosmology. The ancients were rigorous empiricists. Walk outside. What do you see? Forget hundreds of years of scientific observations confounding common sense. You’re standing on a flat disk covered by a luminous dome. Right? Water and mist seek the lowest level but sometimes mysteriously fall from the sky. Caves are entrances to a deeper dark and mountains bring us closer to the sky. This sky contains bright objects which hover over us and whose regularities guide us. (Remember it took thousands of years for civilization to become sophisticated enough not to trust the evidence of our senses!)
This ancient, venerable view of reality has come to be called the “three-tiered cosmos” and variations appeared all over the ancient world. (For a graphic of the Hebrew version look ** you do not have permission to see this link **.) This is the cosmology assumed in the Old Testament and I think is the cosmology assumed by the writers of the gospels. How so? The Greeks proved the earth had to be a sphere in the 5th century BCE and the writers of the NT would have been educated in Greek culture. How could they not know the updated view? Well not only were they following the traditions of the OT, the Synoptics anyway were thoroughly apocalyptic. The apocalyptic tradition is suffused with the older view. There is a portion of the Book of Enoch written in the 2nd century BCE that details the mechanics of the motions of the Sun and Moon in the heavens of the three-tiered cosmos.
What is frustrating is that there are very few glimpses of the cosmological viewpoint of the NT. But there are hints. Consider the second temptation of Jesus recorded in Matthew (the third in Luke). Satan takes Jesus up to the top of a high mountain to see all the kingdoms of the world. How would that work exactly? Unless you had some idea that the earth was flat? Note the times in the gospels when Jesus goes up on a mountain to be closer to God? Interesting if you believed that the top of mountains were closer to heaven which is located above us.
The Church Fathers, educated in Greek philosophy, realized the embarrassment of a literal reading of these stories and early on began began to allegorize them or interpret them mystically. But for me the question is not so much how subsequent generations of Christians should deal with these stories but sussing out the viewpoint of the folks who created these stories. Here we get a glimpse of an older, more primeval view of reality. So in the end, while Harris was being a smart-a**, he wasn’t wrong.
Ancient Hebrew cosmology was one that always seemed to me as viewing the universe as a sort of snow globe — a flat Earth encased in a hard shell upon which the celestial bodies were affixed. While the Greeks moved past that view early on, the Hebrews seemed to be chained to it by their holy texts. And that view seems to carry over into the NT.
But I could be wrong. I often am.
On what point are you asserting that Harris was right?
If you’re going to take all the NT literally, as the fundamentalists assure us it must be, then you should break out the telescopes.
I would add as a follow up to my post that I think its fine to interpret the scriptures other than literally but if you’re going to do that it would seem to obligate you to provide your methodology to determine which part is literal and which is not. The Resurrection is the most astounding claim being made. Why isn’t that allegorical or mystical?
My point though is that the NT writer seems to have meant it literally. Jesus bodily ascended through the firmament into Heaven. No fair interpreting it allegorically simply because science makes it look silly now.
JAS said
It would have been a dramatic exit.
Yeah but none of the movies I can recall had the guts to end with Jesus floating off into the clouds. You have to wonder why Luke didn’t just leave well-enough alone at the end of the gospel and not add the expanded material in the sequel. He wouldn’t be the first author to succumb to that temptation!
So what are the possibilities? I’ve heard it suggested that having Jesus ascend bodily was a response to tendencies towards docetic views like some of the later resurrection episodes. Jesus was magic but he wasn’t a spirit. He was a real human. The forty day thing might be an attempt to establish an official resurrection appearance cutoff. Maybe the church was still getting people claiming private revelations from Jesus and they wanted to limit that.
In his letters Paul equates his experience of the resurrection with that of the disciples but this forty day cutoff would seem to consider Paul’s experience as qualitatively different than the disciples, even though Paul is the hero of Acts!
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