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Ascent into Heaven in Luke-Acts: New Explorations of Luke's Narrative Hinge
Ascent into Heaven in Luke-Acts: New Explorations of Luke's Narrative Hinge
Ascent into Heaven in Luke-Acts: New Explorations of Luke's Narrative Hinge
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Ascent into Heaven in Luke-Acts: New Explorations of Luke's Narrative Hinge

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In comparison with other aspects of Jesus’ life and ministry, his ascent into heaven has often been overlooked within the history of the church. However, considering its placement at the end of the Gospel and the beginning of Acts—the only narrative depictions of the event in the New Testament—the importance of Jesus’ ascent into heaven is undeniable for Luke’s two-volume work. While select studies have focused on particular aspects of these accounts for Luke’s story, the importance of the ascension calls for renewed attention to the narratological and theological significance of these accounts within their historical and literary contexts. In this volume, leading scholars discuss the ascension narratives within the ancient contexts of biblical, Second Temple Jewish, and Greco-Roman literature; the literary contours of Luke-Acts; and questions of historical and theological significance in the wider milieu of New Testament theology and early Christian historiography. The volume sets out new positions and directions for the next generations of interpreters regarding one of the most important and unique elements of the Lukan writings.
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Release dateDec 1, 2016
ISBN9781506418964
Ascent into Heaven in Luke-Acts: New Explorations of Luke's Narrative Hinge

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    Ascent into Heaven in Luke-Acts - David K. Bryan

    Introduction

    David K. Bryan and David W. Pao

    Despite the voluminous amount of scholarship devoted to Luke-Acts in general, and Lukan Christology and theology in particular, one of the few areas that has received far less attention in the last fifty years is Luke’s dual narration of Jesus’s ascent into heaven in Luke 24 and Acts 1. Prior to the 1980s, ascension scholarship was heavily indebted to two key works. Victoriano Larrañaga, L’ascension de Notre-Seigneur dans le Nouveau Testament (1938, original thesis written in Spanish in 1934 and published in Spanish in 1943), focused heavily on the text of the ascension narratives in the Lukan accounts. Gerhard Lohfink’s Die Himmelfahrt Jesu: Untersuchungen zu den Himmelfahrts- und Erhöhungstexten bei Lukas (1971) form-critically compared the heavenly journey of the soul (Himmelsreise der Seele) and rapture (Entrückung) accounts in the Greco-Roman world with similar concepts in the Old Testament. Several monographs in the past few decades have further attended to the significance of the ascension in Luke-Acts. Mikeal Parsons’s monograph The Departure of Jesus in Luke-Acts: The Ascension Narratives in Context (1987) proposed a diachronic-synchronic approach to the ascension narratives and narrative-critically examined how the ascension narratives functioned as a closing and opening for Luke’s two works. Arie Zwiep built upon the diachronic developments of both Parsons and Lohfink in The Ascension of the Messiah in Lukan Christology (1997), arguing that Jewish rapture accounts—for example, of Enoch and Elijah—were the most appropriate framework within which to read the Lukan accounts. Most recently, Geography and the Ascension Narrative in Acts (2009), by Matthew Sleeman, situated the ascension and the book of Acts within recent advances in human and social geography.

    Luke’s two-volume work contains the only narrative depictions of the ascent into heaven of Jesus of Nazareth in the New Testament. However, a study of the Lukan ascent-into-heaven narratives by various scholars from various perspectives compiled in one volume has yet to be undertaken. The present work attempts to meet this deficit and is organized around two chief endeavors: (1) evaluation of the ancient contexts that may or may not have influenced Luke’s unique narrations of Jesus’s ascent and (2) assessment of the importance of the ascension narratives within Luke’s larger narratological and theological purposes. The overall focus here is on the importance of the ascension for Luke and his audience as opposed to the NT as a whole. For this reason, exploration of other ascension texts in the NT outside of Luke and Acts will not be the focus of this volume. Our overall hope is that this volume serves as a helpful resource for scholars and students alike and renews appreciation for and attention to the narrative, historical, and theological import of the ascent-into-heaven accounts for Luke and his audience.

    The present volume begins with Arie Zwiep’s assessment of ascension scholarship in the past, present and future. Beginning with his 1997 monograph as a terminus a quo, Zwiep synthesizes the state of scholarship on the ascension in the past twenty years into seven areas that have proved most influential and/or debatable. He then proposes a few avenues that require further attention—in particular, the Wirkungsgeschichte of the ascension narratives.

    In the first of four chapters on various ancient contexts related to Luke’s portrayal of the ascension, Steve Walton (Jesus’s Ascension through Old Testament Narrative Traditions) contends that while Enoch and Elijah are two of the most prominent ascension narratives in the OT, it is the ascent of Elijah that is more pertinent for Luke’s Doppelwerk. Not only are there linguistic and verbal parallels between the ascent of Elijah and that of Jesus, but Luke also includes the bestowal of the Spirit and other elements that, when presented in concert with the larger parallels between Jesus and Elijah throughout the gospel, depict Jesus as both similar to and far greater than Elijah.

    Joshua Jipp (‘For David did not ascend into heaven . . .’ (Acts 2:34a): Reprogramming Royal Psalms to Proclaim the Enthroned-in-Heaven King) argues that Luke’s programmatic use of the Psalms functions both to depict Jesus’s messianic enthronement in the heavens and exercise continuing royal influence over the remainder of Acts. Peter’s Pentecost sermon and Paul’s address at Pisidian Antioch employ royal psalms to interpret Jesus’s resurrection and ascension as the installation of his Davidic Messiah as powerful king (46), an emphasis maintained in Acts via Luke’s use of the Psalms to proclaim the heavenly Messiah’s continued rule and enacting of the kingdom.

    The paucity of ascension narratives in the OT is replaced by an abundance in Second Temple Jewish and Greco-Roman literature. David Bryan (A Revised Cosmic Hierarchy Revealed: Apocalyptic Literature and Jesus’s Ascent in Luke’s Gospel) claims that many of the cosmological and hierarchical emphases found in Second Temple Jewish apocalyptic literature can also be seen in Luke’s narrative of Jesus’s ascent in Luke’s Gospel. Throughout the Gospel, Luke presents Jesus as the supreme authority in the cosmos, and the incorporation of the ascension at the Gospel’s conclusion affirms, for Luke’s audience, Jesus’s status at the apex of a revised cosmic hierarchy.

    The expansive ascension tradition in the Greco-Roman world calls for an assessment of the significance of ascent within religious communities (86). In particular, James Buchanan Wallace (Benefactor and Paradigm: Viewing Jesus’s Ascension in Luke-Acts Through Greco-Roman Ascension Traditions) demonstrates that Jesus’s ascent is less about his status and more about the benefits such status offered to his followers, just as the various ascents of Herakles, Romulus, and Roman Emperors served their constituents.

    Turning to the ascension within Luke’s own literary program, Stanley Porter (The Unity of Luke-Acts and the Ascension Narratives) surveys the textual and conceptual discrepancies that have sometimes led scholars to argue for a lack of unity within the ascension narratives themselves. He concludes that there is an inherent unity between the two accounts of Jesus’s ascent that, thus, argues for the unity of Luke’s two volumes, with the ascension narratives functioning as a hinge that connects two accounts with their own purposes and integrity (135).

    In light of increased attention to prophetic promises of the restoration of Israel (138) in Acts, David Pao (Jesus’s Ascension and the Lukan Account of the Restoration of Israel) asks how the ascension fits within such a theological program in Luke’s second volume. After briefly exploring the significance of the ascension and the restoration of Israel in Acts 1, Pao explains that the bestowal of the Spirit (Acts 2:33–36), the parousia (3:19–21), and the mission to the Gentiles (10:34–36) are all significant implications of the ascension that correspond with Luke’s wider theological program to proclaim the restoration of Israel in Acts.

    Building off of his recent monograph, Matthew Sleeman (The Ascension and Spatial Theory) reexamines the importance of spatial theory for study of the ascension. Indebted to the work of Soja and Lefebvre on thirdspace, Sleeman demonstrates how Jesus’s ascension is foundational and pivotal for reading space more widely across the Lukan narratives and how such an analysis can provide insight into the wider human productions of space (173).

    Moving from spatial theory to the world, Charles Anderson (Lukan Cosmology and Jesus’s Ascension) explores the centrality of the ascension in light of a Lukan cosmology that depicts the inhabited world as disordered and under the dominion of Satan. The ascension is the crux of the theo-cosmological vision of Luke-Acts . . . and it paradigmatically expresses the process of restoration of right order by means of the reversal of the current order (207), thus remapping the world for Luke and his audience.

    Rather than understand the ascension as determining early Christian practice, Rick Strelan (The Ascension as a Cultic Experience in Acts) counters that it is the cultic practices of the first century that determined Luke’s narrative presentation of Jesus’s ascension. The liturgical experience of the Lord’s Supper and other Christian gatherings is reflected in Luke’s association of angelic presence, experience of the Spirit, teaching, and, ultimately, the heavenly status of Jesus with the ascension.

    In the concluding chapter, Douglas Farrow (What Is This Conversation You Are Holding?) provides a response from a theologian to the other essays in the volume. He challenges biblical scholars to remember Luke as a theologian while weighing in on the debates about context (whether Jewish or Greek) and the resurrection-exaltation complex. He is suspicious of the premise that Luke’s narrative should be seen primarily, let alone exclusively, as an expression of historical currents in his day. Farrow provides one possible voice within the spectrum of biblical and theological positions pertaining to both the ascension and the relationship between history and theology, and his chapter serves as a continued encouragement for further dialogue between biblical scholars and theologians, especially with regard to Jesus’s ascent into heaven.

    * * *

    Many people have made the present volume possible. We would like to thank Fortress Press for their willingness to take on this project and the work of the editors and staff who have brought it to fruition, especially Neil Elliott, Esther Diley, and Alicia Ehlers. Thanks must also be extended to all of the contributors to this project for their timely and quality work on this important subject. Finally, we are very thankful for the assistance of Sam Freney in the formatting of the volume.

    Main Body

    1

    Ascension Scholarship

    Past, Present, and Future

    Arie W. Zwiep

    Introduction

    In this contribution, I will review recent biblical scholarship on the Lukan ascension narratives, outline points of agreement and areas of ongoing debate, and briefly outline a possible agenda for future research.[1] I roughly take the work of Mikeal Parsons[2] and myself[3] as termini a quo. First, I will map some recent developments in textual criticism and their potential repercussions on the reconstruction of the initial text (Ausgangstext) of the ascension narratives. Second, since the study of Parsons, narrative criticism and literary approaches have become increasingly popular in Lukan studies, including the study of the ascension narratives. What are the issues that have emerged since Parsons? Third, both the ascension and the postmortem/ postresurrection appearances can be (and have been) interpreted in the context of Greco-Roman assumption and apotheosis traditions as well as in the light of Jewish rapture traditions and eschatological expectations. On what grounds do recent interpreters decide on the proper context? Fourth, defining the function of the ascension in the wider complex of resurrection, exaltation, and appearances has led to widely divergent christological assessments. Debates about first-century monotheism, the interconnectedness (or not) of the resurrection, exaltation, and ascension, the appropriateness (or not) of the term absentee Christology, and adoptionist tendencies have yielded a rich harvest of variegated, if not conflicting, reconstructions of Lukan Christology. Fifth, the problem of the chronology of the forty days has recently led to a new proposal that needs to be addressed. Sixth, from a literary perspective, new proposals have been advanced to establish the function of the ascension as integral to the narrative plot of Acts. Finally, an increasing number of scholars in the tradition of theological exegesis of Scripture attempt to describe the dogmatic or even ontological implications (or, perhaps more cautiously, claims) of the Lukan ascension narratives.

    The Text of the Ascension Narratives—

    the Debate Continued?

    The status of the words καὶ ἀνεφέρετο εἰς τὸν οὐρανόν (and he was carried up into heaven, Luke 24:51) and προσκυνήσαντες αὐτόν (worshipping him, Luke 24:52),[4] and hence, whether Luke’s finale describes the same event as in Acts 1 (and whether it recounts an ascension at all), is still a matter of dispute.[5] The defense by Parsons and Ehrman of the Western non-interpolations (nine places in which the Western text had allegedly preserved the original text) on the basis of an alleged scribal tendency—a reversal of the thesis defended by Eldon Jay Epp on a tendency of the Bezan scribe—has been taken up by Michael Wade Martin. While Parsons argued that the longer texts were added by the scribe of 𝔓⁷⁵ (the oldest known textual witness of Luke, now renamed Papyrus Hanna 1)[6] in order to heighten Luke’s Christology in response to gnostic influences,[7] and Ehrman, in a similar vein, explained the additions over against docetic voices,[8] Martin explains them as a response to separationist influences, that is, to the belief that the divine, spiritual Christ departed from the human, fleshly Jesus before Jesus suffered and died, leading to the belief by some that Jesus had only been raised spiritually.[9]

    In general, however, text editors[10] and commentators continue to regard the longer ending of Luke 24:50–53 and Acts 1:2, 9–11 as original and the Western text as secondary.[11] In The Living Text of the Gospels, textual expert David Parker devotes a brief paragraph to the issue, and, himself having a slight favor for the shorter readings, concludes that the debate [between Ehrman, Epp, and Zwiep] illustrates how seriously theological issues must be taken in studying the history of the text.[12] In a 2004 reprint of his 1981 article, Epp—who started the debate about tendency criticism in Acts—simply noted in response to Parsons that he had found no reason to modify the position taken in this essay.[13]

    The Narrative of the Ascension

    Narrative criticism—the study of the dynamics of how a story is told—was a relative newcomer to NT studies when Mikeal Parsons published his work on the narrative function of the ascension narratives in 1987.[14] Today, almost three decades later, narrative analysis and literary approaches have become part and parcel of the exegete’s toolbox.[15] Literary approaches to Luke-Acts are flourishing and have enriched our understanding of the author’s literary strategy and ideology, the genre of Luke and Acts and its implications, their unity (or not)[16] and so forth.

    Two more immediate insights gained by a literary approach to the ascension stories are the recognition that (1) Luke 24 and Acts 1 have different narrative functions which need to be acknowledged as such (so Parsons) and that (2) the theme or motif of ascension in the opening chapter of Acts is subordinate to a broader concern of the implied author. This had already been observed by Charles Talbert, who claimed that Acts 1 was really about the legitimacy of the apostolate,[17] but it was reemphasized by Nelson Estrada. Working from a social-scientific perspective, he argued that the main focus of Acts 1–2 is on the apostles, not on Jesus, the Spirit, or other groups or individuals mentioned.[18] As a promoter of the apostles, Luke intended to show how they had been transformed from followers of Jesus to respected leaders of the Christian community, a change that, in terms of social-scientific theory, can be described as a ritual of status transformation. Acts 1:3–11, in Estrada’s model, marks the separation stage of the ritual: In this stage, the initiands are ushered by the ritual elder into seclusion and training (233). Jesus’s leadership role as a broker between God and the people is being transferred to the apostles and the apostles are being initiated into their new role, as in the Elijah-Elisha narrative. The ascension marks the complete separation of the apostles from their leader very much like Jesus was separated from John the Baptist (his ritual elder) in Luke 4:1–3. As Estrada understands it, the forty days, often associated with trials and testing, recall Jesus’s wilderness experience.[19]

    In the past two or three decades, the study of intertextuality has taken different directions.[20] Literary interpreters have always been alert to the influence of other texts upon Luke’s narrative presentation. That the Elijah-Elisha narratives have been constitutive for Luke-Acts and the ascension narratives has been argued, time and again, by Thomas Brodie.[21] Other scholars argue for a background in the prophetic traditions of the OT and the Book of Psalms.[22] An allusion to the finale of Sirach (Sir 50:20–22) in Luke 24:50–53, portraying Jesus as the culmination of Israel’s life and worship,[23] has also long been recognized.[24] On closer scrutiny, once we are on the track of Sirach 50, the parallel may even be stronger when the immediate context is taken into account, as the reviser of the apparatus in the outer margin of NA²⁸ seems to have done.[25]

    While not completely ruling out the impact of Sirach 50, Kelly Kapic investigated the connection between benediction and ascension and argued that Luke portrays the ascending Christ as the fulfillment (or, in Kapic’s terms, the personification) of Aaron’s benediction (Lev 9:22–23; Num 6:24–26).[26] Since whenever the theological idea of blessing shows up in Luke, the suggestion of God’s particular presence always seems to be implied, she concluded that, paradoxically, the ascension is affirming both the presence and absence of Christ.[27]

    A Greco-Roman and/or Jewish Context of Understanding?

    What were the literary models that shaped Luke’s narrative presentation? Given the overwhelming number of stories of gods, heroes, emperors, and wise men ascending to heaven in the Hellenistic (Greco-Roman) world, it is not surprising to see that scholars such as Sjef van Tilborg, Peter Pilhofer, Dieter Zeller, John van Eck, Gary Gilbert, Deborah Thompson Prince, and others argue most emphatically for a Greco-Roman context.[28] Prince, for example, sets out to disentangle the various conceptions of postmortem apparitions in Greco-Roman literature as a context for Jesus’s appearances in Luke 24.[29] How is it that Jesus is described in both somatic and spiritual terms? She distinguishes four categories of postmortem appearances in Greco-Roman literature—disembodied spirits, revenants (people coming back to life), heroes, and translated mortals—and compares them with Luke 24, concluding that the picture of Jesus that emerges in Luke 24 surpasses all expected modes of post-mortem apparitions by virtue of the fact that it draws upon them all and distinguishes itself from them all.[30] The ascension (Luke 24:51) was inconsistent with traditions of disembodied souls, heroes, and revenants, but consistent with translation and apotheosis traditions.[31] The possible impact of Jewish rapture traditions, however, she does not consider.

    Craig McMahan, to give a second example of a Greco-Roman understanding, compares the three recognition scenes in Luke 24 (Luke 24:1–12, 13–35, 36–53) with similar scenes in Homer’s Odyssey and demonstrates how the literary motifs of testing, deception, foretelling, and recognition in both cases move the plot forward from ignorance and deception to recognition.[32] The full recognition of Jesus’s true identity occurred at the end of the Gospel with Jesus’s ascension into heaven: Such a climactic disappearance would have been regarded in the Greco-Roman world as a sure sign of divinity. In fact, the ascension is quite possibly the ultimate recognition token, evidenced by the fact that immediately after Jesus disappears, the disciples worship (προσκυνήσαντες) him.[33]

    While not denying that Luke’s readers would have appreciated the comparison with Greek heroes and Roman emperors ascending to heaven—unquestionably, they would have understood these stories to press home the message that more than Heracles is here—another group of scholars looks into biblical and early Jewish rapture stories as a possible background for interpreting the ascension.[34] In practice, most of these scholars hold that Luke was inspired by both Greco-Roman and biblical-early Jewish ascension stories.[35] In my own work on the ascension narratives, I have argued for a "more Jewish than Greco-Roman background, that is, Jewish rapture traditions provide a more adequate context of understanding than Greco-Roman assumption stories (while not denying the formative impact of the latter)—the ascension corresponds with the biblical and early Jewish rapture traditions on a more structural level, especially with respect to what I have called the rapture-preservation paradigm":[36]

    The large contours of this narration scheme are as follows. The rapture is usually announced in advance in some revelatory experience, either as a divine word of instruction or as a remark by the author. In preparation of the event to come, the rapture candidate is commanded to instruct those that stay behind to ensure that his teachings will not perish. This period of final instructions is not infrequently a period of forty days (forty being a quite conventional biblical number of course). The highly standardized description of the rapture is usually conjoined with a remark about the local and temporal termini ad quem of the raptured person’s preservation in heaven and his envisaged role in the endtime drama, not infrequently with an eschatological return implied.[37]

    This narration model is attested by early Jewish traditions about Elijah, Enoch, Ezra, Baruch, Moses, Melchizedek, and some more Jewish saints.[38] If a Jewish rather than a Greco-Roman context is in view, the element of worship (προσκύνησις) is likely to carry a somewhat different connotation than is the case in the apotheosis tradition, in which this element is more straightforwardly indicative of divinization/deification (see below). In a Jewish-monotheistic context, human beings such as Enoch and Elijah were believed to have been translated to heaven, but this evidently did not entail belief in a divine status, at least not in the period relevant to Luke-Acts: the monotheistic principle would strongly discourage such speculations.

    This line of interpretation has been picked up by various recent Lukan scholars[39] and has now also found its way into the revised apparatus of textual references in the outer margin of NA²⁸. In Acts 1:2, the apparatus makes reference to 2 Baruch 76:4, where Baruch is promised to be taken up to heaven after forty days[40] (a notion completely absent in Greco-Roman ascension texts). At verse 9, apart from a (new) reference to Mark 16:19, references to the OT and early Jewish rapture traditions have been added: 2 Kings 2:11 (Elijah); Sirach 48:9 (Elijah); 1 Enoch 70:1s (Enoch); 2 Baruch 76 (Baruch).[41] Surprisingly, references to 4 Ezra 14 (Ezra) have not been adopted. At any rate, knowledge of the Jewish rapture stories is likely to deepen the reader’s understanding of Luke’s underlying narrative strategy and give more immediate access to his theological concerns.

    N. T. Wright has voiced a different opinion.[42] The ascension story, he maintains, is not to be assimilated to the strange story of Elijah in the Old Testament, but is to be related to Daniel 7, the vision of the exaltation of one like a son of man to the ancient of days:

    The ascension is not a mere solution to a problem about what happens to a body of this new sort. It is, for Luke as much as for Paul, the vindication of Jesus as Israel’s representative, and the divine giving of judgment, at least implicitly, in his favour and against the pagan nations who have oppressed Israel and the current rulers who have corrupted her.[43]

    It may be objected that, while there is undisputable linguistic evidence that the Elijah tradition rings through in Luke-Acts, there is no clear evidence of the role of Daniel 7 in the ascension narratives, in contrast with, for example, the commission scene at Matthew 28:16–20 (which is, to be sure, not an ascension text). And there are good reasons to deny that the ascension of Jesus marks his exaltation (sessio ad dexteram) in the first place (see below).

    The Geography of the Ascension

    In his doctoral dissertation on the geography of the ascension, Matthew Sleeman seeks to establish the function of the ascension for the rest of Acts by focusing on notions of space and place.[44] What are the implications of the fact that Jesus has gone to heaven? Does that make him absent and inactive? Does Luke advocate an absentee Christology?[45] Building on the work of human geographer Edward Soja, Sleeman attempts to define the role of spatiality in the narrative’s theology in terms of the Sojan category of thirdspace as an integral part of the book.[46] Thirdspace stands for a creative reconfiguration of first space (empirical space, physical spatiality) and second space (perceived space, how space and place are articulated), which leads to a new vision of (social) reality—a new perspective or worldview, so to speak. Applied to the ascension, Sleeman contends, "the ascension is the moment of spatial realignment in Acts (cf. 1:1–2a), and Acts as a narrative cannot be understood without ongoing reference to the heavenly Christ.[47] From the ascension onwards, the followers of Jesus have been positioned under heaven-as-Christ’s-place, that is, under a Christological heaven.[48] Jesus’s presence in heaven—whether conceived of as a located space or not—gives the narrative of Acts a distinctive thirdspatial orientation. . . . That Jesus is no longer physically present on earth means that they become necessary witnesses. There is no means by which to access Jesus other than through their testimony."[49]

    In response to Sleeman’s criticism of my claim that Luke’s rapture Christology almost automatically implies an absentee Christology,[50] I would argue that the case for the (undeniable) present activity of Jesus in Acts should not rest on the (act of) ascension as such (in my view, a more careful definition of terms is needed), but on the ascended and exalted status of the risen Lord by virtue of the resurrection-exaltation. The notion of (third)space already plays its part from day one, so to speak. In Luke-Acts as a whole, it is perfectly clear that Luke counterbalances the risks or disadvantages of an absentee Christology by his firm affirmation that Jesus is now seated at the right hand of God (i.e., in a position of authority) and from there exercises his power over history in various ways. To Luke, Jesus is absent but not inactive.[51]

    That most of the divine interventions in Acts are christological (effected by Christ) has been persuasively argued by Sleeman, although his interpretation of Paul’s Damascus Road experience[52] is open to criticism. Luke seems to make a clear qualitative distinction between the (visionary) experience of Paul and the post-resurrection appearances to the apostolic witnesses—he calls Paul’s experience a heavenly vision (οὐρανιος ὀπτασία, Acts 26:19), that is, an event of a different order than the crudely materialistic apostolic Christophanies in Acts 1, even though it is the same Lord who appears.[53]

    The Christology of the Ascension

    Although the uniqueness of Luke’s ascension story is generally acknowledged, there is no unanimity on its christological implications.

    Is the ascension an expression of Christ’s heavenly exaltation (traditionally called his sessio ad dexteram Dei)?[54] Does it mark his divine identification with the God of Israel?[55] Does it constitute the climax of Luke’s Jesus story at the expense of the resurrection?[56] If so, how does Luke relate to the early Christian resurrection kerygma, which marked the resurrection as the point of transition? Did Luke extend Christ’s exaltation over a period of forty days? Although most biblical scholars today would no longer see the ascension as a part of the states of exaltation of classical reformed theology,[57] the continued use of exaltation language for the ascension without proper qualification is bound to create confusion. According to Kevin Anderson, for instance, resurrection, ascension, and exaltation need to be taken together: Luke has portrayed both the resurrection and ascension of Jesus within a continuum of exaltation (though the resurrection being the primary focus), with a conscious blurring of the distinctions.[58] But this seems to be reading a Johannine conceptualization into Luke-Acts (John speaks of Jesus’s glorification in terms of a process, as part of the descent-ascent scheme) and is not easily matched with ascension and exaltation imagery in first-century Jewish texts. Lohfink especially has argued that the proper form-critical distinctions should be made: ascension, rapture, ascent, and heavenly journey, to mention only a few.[59] The notions of ascension and exaltation especially need to be distinguished, or at least clearly defined.[60]

    Also contested is how and to what extent the ascension and/or exaltation of Jesus compromises early Jewish and Christian belief in monotheism.[61] David Litwa has argued that the notion of deification draws from a Hellenistic (read: not solely Jewish) context.[62] When the early Christians ascribed divinity to Jesus, they depicted him with the traits of Mediterranean deities such as Heracles and Romulus. This entailed notions of corporeal immortalization, worship, and heavenly ascent.

    The problem, however, lies in the definition of what such notions as ascension and worship mean and imply.[63] Elijah, in OT and early Judaism, does ascend to heaven but is never treated as a deity. Litwa expressly ignores the form-critical distinctions made by Lohfink, myself, and others when he speaks of the ascension of Jesus in relation to the exaltation imagery of Psalm 110:1.[64] This is what Luke (different from the later ending of Mark [16:19]) expressly does not do. If the early Christian authors (including Luke) apply deification language to Jesus, it is in the context of his resurrection and heavenly exaltation, not in relation to his ascension.

    A related question about Luke’s Christology concerns the issue of adoptionism, especially how the ascension relates to Acts 2:36 (or vice versa): Therefore let the entire house of Israel know with certainty that God has made him both Lord and Messiah (ὅτι καὶ κύριον αὐτὸν καὶ χριστὸν ἐποίησεν ὁ θεός), this Jesus whom you crucified. Is this a flashback to Acts 1? And does verse 32 (τῇ δεξιᾷ οὖν τοῦ θεοῦ ὑψωθείς) suggest that the ascension is identified with the session at the right hand? Is this verse perhaps a relic of an adoptionist perspective? According to C. Kavin Rowe, Acts 2:36 fits Luke’s conviction that Jesus had been Lord from the beginning (from the womb), given that Luke applies the Κύριος title to all stages of Jesus’s career.[65] The present author has disputed this:

    In Acts, it is crystal clear that the resurrection-exaltation complex acts as a catalyst for christological reflection, and this seems to be in line with the early Christian belief that Jesus was exalted to God’s right hand at or immediately after his resurrection from the dead. Although it would be inaccurate or patently wrong to say that, in early Christology, Jesus’ pre-Easter career was considered to be non-messianic, it is a historical fact that the early Christian community marked his death and resurrection as a dividing line, a point of no return, the apocalyptic turn of the ages. In the tradition of the early church, Luke rewrites his story (history) in the light of its (well-known) finale. For him, to say that God made Jesus both Lord and Christ is materially identical with saying that Jesus was exalted by God in/at his resurrection. The meaning of κύριος gets its shape and contours through the narrative, through the completed narrative, that is.[66]

    To explain why Luke speaks about Jesus as Lord (κύριος) from the very start, in the said article, recourse is taken to Paul Ricoeur’s notion of retroactive realignment of the past (réalignement rétroactif du passé), a rewriting of the past by hindsight.[67]

    Apart from the question whether the Lukan ascension texts demand a Greco-Roman or an early Jewish context of understanding (or both), scholarly opinion continues to be divided on the nature of the post-resurrection appearances in Luke-Acts. Scholars who separate the exaltation from the resurrection and mark the ascension as the occasion of Jesus’s heavenly exaltation often interpret the appearances of the risen Lord as appearances on the road, appearances in some quasi-earthbound state in which Jesus was risen but not yet exalted.[68] If, as other scholars hold, the exaltation is to be located at, or is at least closely associated with, the resurrection at Easter Sunday, the appearances are more likely to be understood as appearances of the already exalted Lord from heaven, the ascension simply concluding the last of a series of departures to heaven.[69]

    The Chronology of the Ascension

    According to Acts 1:3, the appearances took place during forty days,[70] and according to the conventional reading, this special period closes with the ascension. However, Henk Jan de Jonge has recently challenged the communis opinio.[71] He argued that the forty days of appearances were viewed by Luke as having taken place after the ascension and, therefore, do not conflict with Luke’s timetable at the end of his gospel, where Jesus makes three appearances on

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