469
Had any man ever ascended to heaven before Jesus?
Jesus: “No man hath ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of man which is in heaven” ([John iii, 13]).
Then that story about Elijah is a fiction, is it?
In regard to the resurrection and ascension Thomas Paine says: “As to the account given of his resurrection and ascension, it was the necessary counterpart of his birth. His historians having brought him into the world in a supernatural manner, were obliged to take him out again in the same manner, or the first part of the story must have fallen to the ground. The wretched contrivance with which this latter part is told exceeds every thing that went before it. The first part, that of the miraculous conception, was not a thing that admitted of publicity; and therefore the tellers of this part of the story had this advantage, that though they might not be credited, they could not be detected.... But the resurrection of a dead person from the grave, and his ascension through the air, is a thing very different as to the evidence it admits of, to the invisible conception of a child in the womb. The resurrection and ascension, supposing them to have taken place, admitted of public and ocular demonstration, like that of the ascension of a balloon, or the sun at noon-day, to all Jerusalem at least. A thing which everybody is required to believe, requires that the proof and evidence of it should be equal to all, and universal; and as the public visibility of this last related act was the only evidence that could give sanction to the former part, the whole of it falls to the ground, because that evidence never was given.... It is in vain to attempt to palliate or disguise this matter. The story, so far as relates to the supernatural part, has every mark of fraud and imposition stamped upon the face of it. Who were the authors of it is as impossible for us now to know, as it is for us to be assured that the books in which the account is related were written by the persons whose names they bear; the best surviving evidence we now have respecting this affair is the Jews. They are regularly descended from the people who lived in the times this resurrection and ascension is said to have happened, and they say, it is not true. It has long appeared to me a strange inconsistency to cite the Jews as a proof of the truth of the story. It is just the same as if a man were to say, I will prove the truth of what I have told you by producing the people who say it is false” (Age of Reason, pp. 10, 11).
“The story of Jesus Christ appearing after he was dead is the story of an apparition, such as timid imaginations can always create in vision, and credulity believe” (Ibid, 161).
“Supernatural Religion” says: “The whole of the evidence for the Resurrection reduces itself to an undefined belief on the part of a few persons, in a notoriously superstitious age, that after Jesus had died and been buried they had seen him alive. These visions, it is admitted, occurred at a time of the most intense religious excitement, and under circumstances of wholly exceptional mental agitation and distress. The wildest alternations of fear, doubt, hope and indefinite expectation, added their effects to oriental imaginations already excited by indignation at the fate of their Master, and sorrow or despair at such a dissipation of their Messianic dreams. There was present every element of intellectual and moral disturbance. Now must we seriously ask again whether this bare and wholly unjustified belief can be accepted as satisfactory evidence for so astounding a miracle as the Resurrection? Can the belief of such men, in such an age, establish the reality of a phenomenon which is contradicted by universal experience? We have no evidence as to what actually occurred. We do not even know the facts upon which they based their inferences. We only know that they thought they had seen Jesus and that they, therefore, concluded that he had risen from the dead. It comes to us as bare belief from the Age of Miracles, unsupported by facts, uncorroborated by evidence, unaccompanied by proof of investigation, and unprovided with material for examination. What is such belief worth? We have no hesitation in saying that it is absolutely worth nothing” (pp. 1048, 1049).
The Rev. Dr. Phillip Schaff, one of the most eminent evangelical Christian scholars of this country, in his “History of the Christian Church,” makes this candid admission regarding the resurrection and ascension of Christ:
“Truth compels us to admit that there are serious difficulties in harmonizing the accounts of the Evangelists, and in forming a consistent conception of Christ’s resurrection body hovering as it were between heaven and earth, and a supernatural state, of a body clothed with flesh and blood and bearing the wound prints, and yet so spiritual as to appear and disappear through closed doors and to ascend visibly to heaven.”