Resurrection and Ascension inThe Ancient & Postmodern Worlds
Friday, October 1, 2010 at 7:51AM | by Otter 
The Ascension of Jesus: Apotheosis? Poetic Declaration of Pre-Existing Divinity? Historical Fact? Excellent Stagecraft?A friend's question:
- A few years ago I read Bart Ehrman's book Misquoting Jesus and somewhere in it he states how Jesus' ascension into heaven wouldn't have been a new concept to those of that day, because other ancient religions had myths and stories of their gods ascending into heaven too. I don't remember what I read exactly, but this was the gist of it. Is this true? If so, it makes the account of Jesus' ascension less credible.... thoughts?
It is true.
The ascent into heaven was a physical sign of "apotheosis," becoming a god, in ancient myth and religion. Heracles (Hercules), Aristaeus, and Asclepius are all described as "ascending" in Greek myth, a way of showing how their heroism or character had elevated them to (?semi-) divine status. (I should say that the cults of Heracles and Asclepius were noticeable mainly because they were unusual in involving an ascent. Most hero-cults did not. But the point is, it wasn't unheard of.)
The Egyptians had similar apotheosis, but most conspicuously the identification of the pharaohs with Osiris: I don't know whether they involved any imagery of ascent. 
Going Up: George Washington's Apotheosis.
The cults of the imperial Romans, however did: the apotheosis of the emperors actually set them in the Pantheon (often by an act of the Senate, of all things... but that's Rome for you. Just for fun, consider The Apotheosis of Washington, one of America's more striking slices of irony. Note the imagery of ascension set in a classical Roman / baroque mode. Very much in the Roman tradition.)
But I wouldn't let it worry you too much.
The fact that everybody mythologized it that way just means that the gospels and Acts have something to say about Jesus that had a common vocabulary in the ancient world. What was it that the ascension was trying to say? That Jesus was (a) god.
If you believe that, run with it and don't let Bart Ehrman steal your myths. He hasn't the right. Or the rite.
Response:
It all still bother me though. These last few years I have been reexamining my faith, and am unsettled by quite a few things - this being one of them. I was always taught Jesus' ascension into heaven was evidence he was above all gods, King of Kings.
Well, in a sense, that's the point of ALL ascension stories, right? "The best! The biggest! The goddest!"
So that's not wrong.
It's just that it's a language that's native to the ancient world, but it has to be "translated" into your language.
YOU had to be TOLD what it meant. The ancients knew, because they had plenty of ascension stories. And the Christians identified themselves with that particular ascension story, and not that of, say, Heracles.
I mean, who heard of anyone or any god doing this?
Right, a rhetorical question the answer to which is "Nobody" in the modern world and "Pretty much everybody" in the ancient world.
I also have the feeling that if I dug hard enough I would find stories of ancient gods rising from the dead. Am I correct in thinking this?
Yes.
Mithra, Osiris, Sol, Krishna...
I have been questioning the validity of the resurrection, and last Easter Sunday was hoping to hear something that would boost my faith. All I got was how we can know the resurrection is real because it is written in scripture. I left more discouraged and disheartened than when I arrived. I mean, is that all the pastor had?
If it was, it's a very plastic faith.
Even more startlingly, it's unbiblical. The New Testament insists over and over again that a faith rooted in a text is insufficient. Consider Jesus' words to the Pharisees: "You search the scriptures because you think in them you have eternal life.... but they testify of me." I once read online this bewildering exegesis of this text: "Jesus taught that the Scriptures were nothing less than the word of God. They were not just Moses' opinion or Isaiah's perspective."
Er... No.
Jesus is teaching that the scriptures themselves are insufficient for anything but suggestion. You have to have the living Word of God, Jesus himself, for any syllable of scripture to have the slightest meaning. Indeed John (who "wrote that you might believe") is at tremendous pains to call Jesus, not scripture, the Word of God. His dismissal of the Torah apart from Jesus would completely scandalize a church that could claim you know Jesus was raised because "scripture said so." If they ever bothered to really read it instead of merely confirming their prejudices with it. But I digress.
Pastors like the one you describe have a very spiritless (literally) view of the Gospel. (In seminary we would say clever things like, "He has a weak pneumatology.") That is, they don't see the real proof of the resurrection where Paul or the gospel writers saw it: in the ongoing life of the Holy Spirit in the Church, evidenced in miraculous lives, radical love, and transforming deaths of converts.
I could show you the passages: Galatians 1-3 is a great start. The entire book of 1 Corinthians is another.
Instead, I expect your pastor sees Christianity as the story of sinners plucked from judgment. Groovy. But since judgment is entirely beyond your ken, you have no basis for claiming that this kind of Christianity is true.
Or putting it another way, "Which is easier to say: Your sins are forgiven, or Take up your mat and get outta here?" If it's true that Christianity proclaims the forgiveness of sins (and it is) it's equally true that biblical Christianity demonstrated its authority to do so through the miraculous sign, radical love, and transformative death of Jesus and the apostles.
And since these things came through Jesus, in their view, he and not Heracles (whose virtues were extraordinary), it is the ascension of Jesus that matters to them.
Reader Comments (4)
Glad you’re back at it, Otter.
I really like the direction here:
I wish the church did a better job with this kinda stuff. By “this kinda stuff,” I am mostly referring to Otter’s point that the church ought know and articulate the proper resting place for faith, but I also think it wouldn’t hurt for churches to know/teach history more thoroughly. For many believers, it’s unnerving to hear ancient tales of incarnation, supernatural births, resurrections, ascensions and so forth when one has supposed for many years that these stories are unique to Christ and Christianity. It can feel really threatening.
I don’t think, though, that these ancient “competing stories” are functionally different than the contemporary competing claims we encounter regularly these days. Jesus claims to be the Way, and he makes the claim that many extraordinarily good things will come of it if I believe and follow him. But some of our fellow twenty-first century contemporaries (religious leaders, political leaders, psychologists, talk show hosts) also make extraordinary claims about what can happen (personal transformation and/or fulfillment, world peace, social change) if I believe and follow them. I’m not sure the claims of Jesus are less credible because other, similar claims exist. When I look around, I see a myriad of divergent paths leading forward and from each one a different voice calls, “THIS is the way, walk in it!" Does the existence of other paths mean that Jesus is not the Way? or does the multitude of other voices mean I cannot recognize his voice as that of my Shepherd?
I’m pretty sure my opinions about what scripture is and what it isn’t diverge substantively from Otter’s, and I suspect we weigh the historicity of biblical events quite differently, but I admire his grasp on certain essential components of faith that are regularly overlooked: Have you seen the power of the risen Christ in his body, the church? Have you, yourself, put your finger in his hands and side? If so, believe!
On another note--Otter, did the hero cults ascribe particular dates to the ascensions of Heracles and Asclepius? If so, what are they?
Otter, this post reminded me of Rob Bell's Nooma video, You. That video has proven to be very helpful to me of late as I try to navigate through my constantly evolving faith experience.
IJR
IJR, I like Rob Bell. I knew him slightly at Wheaton. I was an R..A. in his dorm in his Freshman year when he sang for a young band of hipsters. Good video. I like his influences.
Susan, to the best of my knowledge, those ascensions took place in "mythic time," and had no particular date ascribed to them. If anybody knows differently, I'd love to learn about it.
This is a good point, Sooz. And it's not just the church, but I think the speed of modern culture.
I find that students of all races and faiths are having more and more difficulty understanding the relationship between their history and their present. An entire classroom of maybe 35 African American students, only ONE of whom has heard of Frederick Douglass? Half of whom believe that Martin Luther King Jr. put an end to slavery in the Civil War?
Yet all of them will insist "Black is beautiful," and I think this is very like Christianity's habit of perpetuating a message the roots of which it grasps only dimly.
After years of wondering about the question, I have come to agree with Nicholas Carr: Google is making us stupid. Or stupider. We've evolved in such a way that knowledge means little to our opinions, which can be formed in quick searches and skims over relevant information. We're good at that, but there's a lot lost.
And I'm not sure we can go back, but education has its work cut out for it. Maybe especially for Christians.