(c) The office of the Ascended Jesus as Prophet is not so explicitly mentioned in the NT as His Priesthood and Kingship. Yet it is clearly im- plied. His prophetic or teaching office did not cease at the Ascension ; on the contrary. He there- after teaches more plainly ; not, as formerly, in pro- verbs (Jn 16-*) ; the teaching is through the gift of the Spirit, who was to teach us all things (14^®), and guide us into all the truth, not speaking from Himself, ' for he shall take of mine and shall declare it unto you' (16'^'*)- This is illustrated by the outpouring of the gift of prophecy upon the infant Church ; ' the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy' (Rev lO'''). Now the Ascension is intimately connected with the gift of the Spirit. The Ascension was not a mere spectacle to reassure the disciples, but the mode by which we are given a new life. Until Jesus was glorified it was not
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ASCENSION
possible for the new mode of His presence to take effect (Jn 7^^ 16" ; cf. Lk 24'*^). Hence the necessity of our Lord's death : otherwise the grain of wheat could not bear fruit ( Jn 12-^). The Ascended Christ became a life-giving Spirit (1 Co 15''^). The con- nexion between the Ascension and the gift of the Spirit is also seen from the fact that the last words of Jesus (Ac 1*) were that the disciples should re- ceive power when the Holy Ghost should be come upon them, and so they would be Jesus' witnesses in all the world. This explains to us the purport of the words ' after he had spoken to them,' in the Appendix to Mk. (16'«).
(«/) Another Avork is referred to in He 6^°. The Ascended Christ has entered within the veil on our behalf as a Forerunner {irp68pofJLos [see FORE- RUXXER]), to prepare a place for us (Jn 14"-; for the ' manj^ resting-places,' see Swete, Asc. Christ, 105 ff.), that we may sit with Him on His throne (Rev 3-').
i. Interval between the Resurrection and the Ascension. — In Ac P Jesus is said to have appeared to the disciples 'by the space of forty days' (5l TuxepCov TeaaapcLKoi'Ta). This interval has been usually taken as exact, and when the Festival of the Ascension was instituted, in the 4th cent.,^the sixth Thursday after Easter was selected for the purpose {Ap. Const. V. 20 ; cf. viii. 33, ed. Funk), and has been so ob- served ever since. But St. Luke's words do not necessarilj' imply an exact period of forty days, and there have been other calculations. In the Third Gospel he describes all the events which took place after the Resurrection till the 'parting' of •24^^ (see above, § 1), without any note of time, and the deduction has been drawn that when he wrote the Gospel he supposed that all the post-Resurrec- tion appearances which he describes took place on Easter Day itself, but that he learnt a more ac- curate chronology before he Avrote Acts (cf. art. Acts of the Apostles, V. 1). This is scarcely credible, and assumes that the Gospels are what the\- never claim to be — chronological biographies, like modern 'Lives.' This view makes St. Luke get in all the events which happened after the evening meal at Emmaus (v.^^), including the return journey of the two disciples 7 or 8 miles to Jeru- salem, before nightfall, for none of the authorities suggests that the Ascension took place at night. In Lk 24 we have a series of events foreshortened (probably because the author had already planned Acts), and no note of time is suggested.
There are, however, some indications that the words ' forty days ' were not always taken exactly. ' Barnabas ' makes the Ascension take place on a Sunday (§ 15) ; l)ut he does not say that it was the same Sunday as the Resurrection ('the eighth (lay ... in which also Jesus rose from the dead, and, having been manifested, ascended up to heaven '). He mentions the ' eighth ' rather than the ' first' day because it follows the seventh day or Sabbath, of which he is treating ; he hints at the replacement of the Jewish Sabbath by the Christian Lord's day, but only obscurely. "With tiiis we may compare the fact that in the Eilcssene Canons (4tii cent.) the Ascension Avas commemorated on Whitsunday, and so in the PUrjrimarie of ' Silvia ' ( Etheria), tliough in that work the fortieth day after Easter was observed for another purj)ose ; see the l)resent writer's art. ' Calendar, Tlie Christian,' in DCG i. 261<\ This i.s some conliriiiation of the suggestion that the Ascension took place on a Sunday. Tiiere are also some speculations of an extravagant nature, such as the Valentinian idea that the interval between the Resurrection and the Ascension was 18 months, or that of certain Ophites that it was II or 12 years, or that of Eusebius in one place {Dem. Evang. viii. 2) that it was as long as the Ministry before the Crucilixion ; see Swete,
Ap. Creed, p. 69 f. All that we can deduce from these facts is that, while the Ascension may have taken place on the Thursday, it may also have happened on the following Sunday, or on any day between or close to these dates.