The Ascension of Jesus Christ: The Hidden Context

By Ezzat Hegazi

A single statement in Luke's Gospel opens an obscure gate to a galactically different view of exactly what happened to Jesus Christ at the end of his time on Earth. Contrary to our common understanding, Jesus's ascension into heaven happens to be the ultimate proof of his messiahship, so much so it made his enemies race against time to prevent it from being fulfilled at any cost. The real significance of Jesus's ascension was never made clear in the canonical gospels for it stood stubbornly against the very teachings of the Pauline Church. This book takes you on a short journey to see how Jesus's ascension was the exact antithesis of the belief about his rising from the dead and to hear about the story of Jesus Christ as it was most likely told by the earliest Judeo-Christians. It will also bring to light the real reason behind the persecution of the early Judeo-Christians, culminating with the murder of James the Righteous: it has everything to do with the early Judeo-Christians' steadfast belief in Jesus's ascension into heaven, against what was being publicized about Jesus.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tellwell Talent
• Release date: Mar 12, 2020
• ISBN: 9780228826002

Ezzat Hegazi

Ezzat Hegazi has a Ph.D. in Science from the University of Windsor, Canada, and works as a Research Science Consultant. In the last two decades he has been self-exploring comparative religions to search for the real story of Jesus away from all preconception influences. He published his first book four years ago about the different beliefs among the three Abrahamic religions concerning the second coming of Jesus Christ.

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The Ascension of Jesus Christ

Copyright © 2020 by Ezzat Hegazi

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Tellwell Talent

www.tellwell.ca

ISBN

978-0-2288-2599-9 (Hardcover)

978-0-2288-2598-2 (Paperback)

978-0-2288-2600-2 (eBook)

Dedication

To my lovely wife and our wonderful children

Introduction

We perceive the truth as false for one of two reasons. The first, we already believe something else is the truth, hence anything conflicting with it appears immediately as false. The second, we do not like what the truth stands for, hence we prefer to perceive it as false. Both cases make us victims: the former makes us victims of error, and the latter makes us victims of our own arrogance. The worst scenario is when we see our error unambiguously, but we still choose to perceive it as the real truth. It is then when we know deep inside that we are truly biased; we see what we want to see, and we hear what we want to hear.

If we opt not to reason on our own, then someone else will do that for us and will be happy to define the truth for us. The least we can do in this case is to check the validity of that definition and to scrutinize the claimed proofs by ourselves. We must be objective, open-minded, and intellectually honest in our scrutiny. Our goal is to filter out our own wishful thinking and look at the whole picture as it is. What comes after that in terms of accepting or rejecting what we see in the picture will determine how truly honest we are deep inside.

Jesus’s ascension into heaven is one of those subjects where someone else did the reasoning for us, making us believe that event was of no significance compared to Jesus’s resurrection from the dead. There is a good reason why we have been made to believe this, and our venture in this book is to dig up that reason and uncover the motive behind it. Our starting point will be to examine the proofs we have been given of Jesus’s resurrection account. Before long we will realize that Jesus’s ascension into heaven happens to be the very incident that opposes the belief in the risen Jesus, the fundamental building block upon which mainstream Christianity is built. We will realize that, contrary to what the New Testament teaches, the eleven disciples of Jesus, the ones who eye-witnessed the moment Jesus ascended into heaven, could never have agreed on anything Saint Paul later preached. By putting all the pieces together, we will clearly realize that Jesus’s ascension into heaven was the final and most compelling proof of his messiahship. It was the very proof that made the chief priests and Pharisees race against time to prevent it from being fulfilled at any cost.

The more we dig into the events surrounding Jesus’s ascension, the closer we get to the real picture of what exactly happened to Jesus at the end of his time on Earth. When we understand why the four canonical gospels were reluctant to mention Jesus’s ascension, we will immediately be in a position to identify which passages in the gospels had been modified, or even added, at later times. All of this will shed a rather different kind of light on the role that Saint Paul played in early Christianity and the real motive behind the doctrine he introduced.

This book is divided into three parts: In the first part, we will examine the proofs given by the canonical gospel of Jesus’s resurrection from the dead. I will demonstrate, step by step, some of the irregularities in those proofs and explain how they were introduced to eclipse the original purpose behind Jesus’s ascension into heaven. I will show you what the original sign was that Jesus had really foretold, as it could never have been the sign of Jonah as preached in the canonical gospels. In the second part, I will explain briefly how the canonical gospels became the combined product of two different accounts about Jesus and what exactly happened to him at the end according to the earliest tradition. In the third part, I will further elaborate on some key aspects related to Jesus’s ascension, starting with the martyrdom of Stephen, its correlation to James the Righteous, the role Paul had in it, and end by looking at the Habakkuk Pesher, one of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The only references used here will be the New Testament (particularly the gospels) and the Old Testament (the Tanakh), both as translated in the New International Version (NIV), in addition to a couple of the early Christian writings and one of the Dead Sea Scrolls, where underscores have been added by the author to emphasize phrases of significance.

Our journey throughout this book will obviously pass through many barbed territories, almost all of which are completely misaligned with the picture the mainstream church has been portraying for two millennia. Rest assured I have no intention of offending anyone whatsoever, neither do I have any hidden agenda of any sort in this book. After all, whatever I prove here can in no way shake the solid foundation of the well-established, heavy-weight Christian church. With this book I aim only to open a window which has been kept shut and covered for all these centuries in the hope that the view from that window will now be seen clearly. For, although the view of the superb ethical values of Christianity has not been obstructed, the view related to our real salvation has been completely blocked. It is entirely up to us to choose whether to peek through this hidden window or to simply keep it closed and covered.

PART 1

Ascension versus Resurrection Points of View

For those of us familiar with the Bible, we know that Jesus Christ ascended into heaven at the end of his ministry; nothing is new here! However, not all of us know the real reason behind his ascension. The Gospel of Luke (24:51 NIV) tells us that the eleven disciples witnessed the moment Jesus Christ was lifted into heaven. But, at the same time, it also tells us (24:11) that the disciples were very quick to deny the news of Jesus’s resurrection from the dead and considered it mere nonsense. In contrast, the moment Jesus was risen from the dead was not recorded by any of the four canonical gospels. This already evokes a thought that if Jesus had foretold of only one sign to be witnessed, this sign would have been his ascension into heaven and not his resurrection from the dead.

To substantiate the resurrection view, the cornerstone of mainstream Christianity, the writers of the canonical gospels had to engage passages from the Old Testament and present them as proofs that must be taken for granted. However, a more objective scrutiny reveals that there are not only major flaws in those proofs but also clear indications that they were mere modifications of accounts originally relating to Jesus’s ascension. This first part of the present work will take a closer look at this issue with the aim to unearth the original accounts buried within the narratives of the canonical gospels. Inevitably, we will end up realizing that the ascension view held by the eleven disciples of Jesus is the exact antithesis of the traditional resurrection view that is influentially endorsed by the church.

1.1 The Hidden Conflict

The incident in which Jesus ascended into heaven is mentioned only briefly in the canonical gospels. Only two of the gospels come across it—Luke (24:51) and Mark (16:19)—while the other two, Matthew and John, fall short of describing how Jesus departed at the end of his lifetime. Other than the gospels of Luke and Mark, the entire canonical New Testament has no reference to how Jesus was lifted into heaven except in Acts (1:1–11), which is now believed to have been written in the second century at the earliest (Smith and Tyson 2014).

The gospels, however, do include a few other passages describing Jesus as being in heaven one way or another. For example, John 3:13 states, No one has ever gone into heaven except the one who came from heaven. Another example is in Matthew (26:64) and Luke (22:69) which talk about the Son of Man sitting at God’s right hand. Such examples are of special significance here, and will be addressed as we move on, since they are connected to the ascension of Jesus but were presented within different contexts.

In addition, most scholars concede that the last twelve verses