WHO HAS ASCENDED TO HEAVEN? (JOHN 3:13)

At last, here is a biblical contradiction given in Jim Meritt's list (cited in the blog-site “Answering Christianity”) that seems to have some validity. In John 3:13, it states that Jesus was the only one to ascend into heaven. But in II Kings 2:11, it states that Elijah ascended into heaven.

I will have to admit that the II Kings passage clearly says that Elijah was taken up into heaven bodily without dying. And Mr. Meritt could also have cited other cases where someone ascended to heaven either bodily or in a vision. These are listed in Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament:

    Enoch (Genesis 5:24; Hebrews 11:5)

    Moses (Exodus 24:9-11; 34:29-30)

    Isaiah (Isaiah 6:1-3)

    Ezekiel (Ezekiel 1; 10)

And of course after Jesus' ascension, one could add Stephen (Acts 7:55-56), Paul (II Corinthians 12:1-4) and John (Revelation 1:10, etc.) to the list.

So, if there is an answer to this contradiction it must lie in one's interpretation of John 3:13 instead. It reads “No one ever went up into heaven except the one who came down from heaven, the Son of Man whose home is in heaven.” (NEB) Unfortunately, that verse immediately confronts us with three difficulties:

1. A number of ancient manuscripts do not contain the underlined words, and so textual critics are divided as to whether they are original or added by a later scribe. This uncertainty, however, has no appreciable effect on the immediate question at hand.

2. Secondly, translators differ as to where the quotation marks in this extended passage should be properly placed. There was no such guiding punctuation in the Greek original. Thus, it is equally possible that these were Jesus' words being quoted or that they are the comments of the author of the gospel account, the apostle John. In either case, the words are divinely inspired, but the question does have an effect on how we understand the passage.

3. And then there is the related problem regarding the verb tense. Raymond Brown, in his exhaustive two-volume commentary on John's Gospel notes, “The use of the perfect tense ["has gone up"] is a difficulty for it seems to imply that the Son of Man has already ascended into heaven.” Of course, if John is writing these words at a later date, then he is merely reflecting back on Jesus' ascension.

I thought that perhaps consulting other translations would clarify the meaning in John 3:13, but all the versions I looked at parroted the very literal NEB translation shown above. In a case like that, it is sometimes helpful to look at looser paraphrases to see what they have to say. In fact, the Living Bible reads, “For only I, the Messiah, have come to earth and will return to heaven again.” (Note that it assumes that the words are spoken by Jesus.) Now it is always a danger to take at face value Bible paraphrases since they are the product of individuals, not groups of Bible scholars. This applies to the Living Bible (Kenneth Taylor), Phillips Modern English Bible (J.B. Phillips), and The Message (Eugene Peterson), etc. They should probably be better viewed as commentaries, not translations.

So the question is: Is the Living Bible correct in seeing that the uniqueness of Jesus lies not in his ascension, but in the fact that he is the only one to have come down from heaven and then ascended? Let us look at other sources to see if they agree:

The Jerusalem Bible has a note for this verse saying that it alludes “to the ascension, which will both show that Jesus really came from heaven and also establish the Son of Man on his glorious throne.”

The Bible Knowledge Commentary states: “No one has ever gone into heaven and then come back to earth, able to give clear teaching about divine matters. The one exception is Jesus who is the Son of Man.”

Borchart, in his commentary on John, says, “For John, with his postresurrection perspective, the Christian gospel was the only way to salvation because Jesus alone descended and 'has ascended' to heaven.” “To understand about heavenly realities, therefore, the God-given means is through 'no one but the one...who has descended from heaven.'”

Leon Morris adds, “Jesus now makes it clear that He can speak authoritatively about things in heaven, though no one else can. No man has ever ascended into heaven (Prov. 30:4). But He has come down from there.” Therefore this verse speaks to His uniquely heavenly origins. Morris notes that it may imply that “no man has gained the heights of heaven...directed against those Jews who taught the possibility of great saints attaining heaven [by efforts of their own righteousness]. Here the heavenly origin marks Jesus off from all the rest of mankind.”

R. Brown says others think that it denies that up to that time anyone had gone up to heaven to know heavenly things, and so the descent of Christ is being stressed instead. He adds that “there are various interpretations of vs. 13, but it means at least that Jesus is the only one who has ever been in heaven because he came down from heaven” and “his association with heaven is much more profound than what had been given by a vision.” He also notes that in Proverbs 30:3 the author denies possessing divine revelations when he asks, “Who has ascended to heaven and comes down?”

Finally, the above comments should be checked against the immediate context of John 3. In that chapter Nicodemus is questioning Jesus regarding his teachings. And so Jesus responds (or John makes appropriate comments at this point) that only he, Jesus, can authoritatively speak of divine things since only he came from heaven (and will return to it) to reveal these truths to mankind.

Thus, there is practically universal agreement that the statement made in v. 13 only makes sense if it refers to the uniqueness of Jesus in both knowing the secrets of heaven first-hand and then coming down to earth so that he could accurately share them with us. This provides a final motive behind this passage: it can be seen as a diatribe against the so-called revelations found in several apocryphal books written between the time of the OT and NT, such as the books of Enoch.