Critical Analysis
The Jesus Seminar considers the New Testament accounts of Jesus' ascension as inventions of the Christian community in the Apostolic Age. They describe the Ascension as a convenient device to discredit ongoing appearance claims within the Christian community. New Testament scholar Rudolph Bultmann writes, " The cosmology of the N.T. is essentially mythical in character, The world is viewed as a three-storied structure, with the Earth in the center, the heaven above, and the underworld beneath. Heaven is the abode of God and of celestial beings- angels....No one who is old enough to think for himself supposes that God lives in a local heaven. " It is possible that the writer of Acts 1v9 reasoned that if Christ returned to Heaven then he must have ascended up into the sky to get there, so that is what he wrote Christ as doing.
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