Tribute Thread For the Recently Raptured Faith

So your interpretation, based on what’s in the bible, of what witnesses to Jesus’s ascension actually saw is that Jesus’s physical body just vanished in front of them. Is that correct? I don’t understand your reasoning here. The accounts and graphical depictions of the various ascensions are all pretty similar with the person in question being bodily elevated into the sky towards heaven to sit with the gods (or God in the case of Jesus’s ascension and presumably Mary’s ascension too).What’s the difference between the notion that Jesus ascended to join the Christian God and the notion that Augustus or Heracles ascended to heaven to sit with Jupiter or Zeus? I’m not seeing any great distinction.

The Roman senator Numerius Atticus personally witnessed Augustus's ascension. Link

Not really:Acts 1:6-11

quote:

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After saying this, he was taken up into a cloud while they were watching, and they could no longer see him. 10 As they strained to see him rising into heaven, two white-robed men suddenly stood among them. 11 Men of Galilee, they said, why are you standing here staring into heaven? Jesus has been taken from you into heaven, but someday he will return from heaven in the same way you saw him go!

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Who are the two robed men in your view?
This sounds more like Jesus bodily rising upwards than just vanishing - No?And here are various images of Jesus ascension LinkI can't find anywhere that agrees with your interpretation of Jesus just vanishing. As far as I can tell you just invented that. Do you have a link or other source that comes to that same interpretation? But the ascension stories relating to Heracles and Romulus predate Christ and Augustus dies in 14AD so his probably does too. So I'm still lost as to the distinction you are making about the different ascension stories. If anything it seems that Christianity borrowed the idea of ascension from the Greeks and Romans.Edited by Straggler, : No reason given.

I’m talking about what the witnesses of the acension actually observed. Because you (and others) have been talking about eyewitness accounts in this thread. And about how convincing they are to you. So I’m trying to get your thinking on the eyewitness account of the ascension rather than speculation about where Jesus ended up at the end of it all.Nowhere in wiki is there ANY support for your notion that Jesus just vanished before their eyes. Can you link to anywhere that has that interpretation or is that something you invented?On the other hand pretty much every depiction of the ascension (which generally predate depictions of the crucifixion btw) shows Christ rising up into the sky. A lot of them also show the two figures in white, as angels.

quote:

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After he said this, he was taken up before their very eyes, and a cloud hid him from their sight.

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They were looking intently up into the sky as he was going, when suddenly two men dressed in white stood beside them. 11 Men of Galilee, they said, why do you stand here looking into the sky? This same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven.

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Are you suggesting that the description above and the overwhelming majority of pictorial depictions going back millenia are unreliable and unconvincing as to what actually occurred....?

OK. So we can disregard what was supposedly witnessed in terms of the physical act of ascension as simply hyperbole and metaphor. And we’ve now abandoned the ‘just vanishing’ hypothesis too it seems.Fair enough.But I do find it perplexing how you can put so much store in proclaimed-to-be-witnessed descriptions one minute and be so dismissive of them the next. It seems wholly inconsistent and utterly based on what you want to believe or find personally plausible. Apparently floating off into the clouds is a step too far for our miraculous and reanimated Jesus.I’d suggest that whatever motivated the ascension metaphor/hyperbole/fabrication may well of been at play in other areas that you are prepared to take as fact...

Googling ‘resurrection inconsistencies’ suggests that the various accounts differ pretty significantly.This is the first site that appears on that search LinkThe (un)reliability of witness accounts in the bible matters if your position is largely based on how convincing you find witness accounts in the bible.

Why is there something rather than nothing?If there is a god (aka the first something) he is asking himself that very question.