The theme of the Ascension of Jesus Christ is one of the most JL important in the New Testament, yet during the present century, very little theological attention has been given to it. Most of the published work has been in the form of articles in theological journals and commentaries, though J. G. Davies' Bampton Lectures entitled He Ascended into Heaven, published in 1958, were devoted to the subject, and later, there appeared, also in English, U. Simon's The Ascent to Heaven in 1961. Even H. B. Swete's The Ascended Christ, which first appeared in 1910 and was subsequently published in several editions until 1916, expresses the hope that the work might awaken a response to a renewed sense of the importance of this great Christian festival. His earlier writing, The Apostles' Creed in 1894, contains a chapter on the Ascension which was a spirited reply to the German scholar Harnack, who asserted that the Ascension had no separate place in the primitive tradition, and whose views considerably influenced the thought of New Testament scholarship for many years to come. This article seeks to make an assessment of what the present writer considers to be a subject of the utmost importance, both in regard to its theological significance in the New Testament, and in its relevance for contemporary Christian experience. The Scriptures declare that Jesus of Nazareth was crucified, buried, and raised again the third day.

All intellectual activity implies some presuppositions. Thoughts can only be formulated in words and these words have been formed by the previous thought of the community whose language they are. Even the most radical scepticism can only be formulated in terms of presuppositions which are-for the moment—unquestioned. (See Michael Polanyi: Personal Knowledge, chap. 9, ‘The Critique of Doubt’, pp. 269–98.)

J. C. O'Neill is already well known for his strikingly original studies of various books of the New Testament, and his latest work, a commentary on Romans, is no exception. It is immediately obvious that this is a commentary with a difference, a commentary which argues a thesis, viz., ‘that the words of the epistle handed down to us were not written by one man, were not written at one time, were not written to one audience’. On the contrary, he suggests, Paul's original letter has been subjected to two sorts of corruption, each of which has added new material to the text. First, glosses have been copied into the text by mistake in later years. Second, interpolations have been added by later editors, usually from old traditions, in order to supplement the epistle and make it more suitable for general use (p. 14). Some of the interpolations which O'Neill claims to identify are of considerable length. For example, 10.16–11.32 is attributed in its entirety to a theologian of the second century. Indeed, out of chapters 9–14, containing 148 verses in the form of the letter that we know, O'Neill assigns only twenty-one verses to Paul.

For the Christian ‘Pentecost’ is a shorthand way of referring to the initial outpouring of the Spirit on the disciples of Jesus described in Acts 2, although of course the events of that historic day included a public address by Peter and the conversion and baptism of a substantial number of his hearers. The event is scarcely mentioned elsewhere in the NT. The narrative in Acts interprets it as the fulfilment of the prophecy of the baptism with the Spirit made by John the Baptist (Acts i.4f.), and there is one clear reference back to it in Peter's account of the conversion of Cornelius (Acts 11.15–17; cf. 10.47). Otherwise there is no specific reference to it anywhere in the NT, and there is an account of what appears to be a different bestowal of the Spirit by Jesus on ten of His disciples in Jn. 20.22. Luke's narrative is filled with problems of interpretation, and the lack of comparative material makes assessment of its historicity and significance all the more difficult. What we may be able to discuss with some hope of success is Luke's own understanding of the event, since we have the rest of his narrative in the Gospel and Acts as a context to aid us in discovering his interpretation.

It is not my intention in this paper to attempt a fresh exegesis or interpretation of a passage which in recent years has been much studied by New Testament scholars, but rather to draw attention to two unavoidable limitations in human thinking, shared by Paul and ourselves, which, I believe, go some way to explain the commentators' difficulties in dealing with ‘the unmanageable dimensions of the Christian verities’ found here. Paul makes some attempt to overcome these limitations by the use of a series of metaphors, apparently not always consistent with one another in strict logic, and we shall consider these individually in the third part of our study.