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2.1.2 - A History of Christianity in the Apostolic Age
Primitive Jewish Christianity
The New Beginning - The Ascension & Exaltation
This is the most explicit account of the ascension to be found in the New Testament. The Gospels, with the exception of the appendix of Mark, contain no record of it. [The textus receptus of Luke 24:51-52 is untrustworthy, for the words are wanting in the best manuscripts, and are bracketed by Westcott and Hort. The Gospel of John, though it does not record the ascension, refers to it indirectly by anticipation in 6:62 and 20:17.]
But the exaltation of Jesus to the right hand of God, from whence he is to come again, forms an integral part of earliest Christian tradition, and is referred to in many passages. [Acts 2:33, 5:31, 7:56, 9:5; Eph 1:20, 1 Tim 3:15, Heb 1:3, 10:12, etc. Also in Jesus' apocalyptic discourses recorded in the Synoptic Gospels.]
Of course, such exaltation presupposes an ascension, but the stress is commonly laid upon the former rather than upon the latter. Indeed, it may fairly be assumed from the silence of Matthew and Mark, that in the earliest form of the Gospel tradition, the ascension was not reported at all, and that Luke, in his account, follows, as in so many cases, an independent source.
It may well be that in the beginning the act of ascension was looked upon as of minor importance; given the resurrection and the exaltation, the ascension followed as a matter of course, and testimony to the event was quite superfluous.
We may perhaps go still further, and say that originally the disciples did not draw a sharp line of distinction between the numerous sudden departures of Christ, when he "vanished from their sight," and such a final departure as is recorded in the first chapter of Acts.
The latter may have been marked off from the others as unique and of especial significance only after reflection upon the exaltation of Christ and upon his second coming, both of which were so prominent in the minds of the early believers. [Compare the words "This Jesus which was received up from you into haven shall so come in like manner as ye beheld him going into heaven" (Act 1:11), where the manner of the ascension is emphasized. One might almost think that these words were the result of refection upon the second coming.]
We should hardly expect, after what has been said, to find any very exact data as to the length of time during which the risen Jesus appeared to his disciples. Matthew's account implies a period of at least some days; [this is true also of the Gospel of Peter] John's involves a week, and with the appendix some time longer; while the Book of Acts, which represents at this point the latest stage of development, fixes the time at forty days.
The accounts given in the appendix of Mark and in Luke's Gospel necessitate but a single day, and all events recorded by the latter seem on their face to have taken place within that time. This, however, cannot be pressed, and we are not justified in asserting that in the Acts Luke contradicts, either intentionally or unintentionally, his account in the Gospel. He may have come into possession of new information since writing his earlier work, but had he regarded it as contravening the statements of that work, he could hardly have let those statements go uncorrected. [Luke's words in Acts 1:2 seem really to indicate that he regarded the account fiven in his Gospel as covering the entire post-resurrection period. Whether the "forty days" mentioned in the Acts represent a common and widespread tradition among the early disciples we do not know. The absence of all reference to the number of days in other early documents argues against the general prevalence of such a tradition, and it is interesting to notice that the author of the Epistle of Barnabas was not acquainted with it, or at least did not accept it, for he says in chap. 15 "wherefore also we keep the eighth day with joyfulness, the day also on which Jesus rose form the dead and was manifested, and ascended into heaven" (the passage is mistranslated in the Edinburgh and American editions of the Ante-Nicene Fathers). Here the ascension is distinguished from the resurrection and yet put on a Sunday, either the Sunday of the resurrection, as seems probable, or on some subsequent Sunday. In either case Barnabas disagrees with the first chapter of Acts, unless the "forty days" mentioned there are to be taken simply as a round number.]
There is thus no adequate ground for denying that the manifestations of the risen Jesus continued for at least some weeks, as recorded in the first chapter of Acts, and a s a matter of fact the appearances referred to by Paul in the fifteenth chapter of First Corinthians can hardly be crowded into a shorter period.
Used by permission of the publisher.
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