Christ Pantokrator, Fresco from the Nativity of the Theotokos Church in Bitola, Macedonia (image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons).
I have used Ascension of Isaiah in both teaching and research for some years, both to illustrate the diversity of ancient christologies and to develop models for prophetic Christ-movements in the second century CE.
As a student of Martha Himmelfarb in the eighties, I had to learn how to balance traditional Jewish apocalyptic features of many so-called Old Testament Pseudepigrapha with their overt Christian features (or Christian manuscripts). With the Ascension of Isaiah, of course, the heavenly ascent, the sensory features of heavenly liturgy, and the visions of God, are all familiar from Jewish apocalyptic materials from Daniel to Third Enoch.[1] But these have to be balanced—considered together—with the christological functions of the text. And balancing in this case means not reverting to theories of Christian redactional levels, or labels of “Jewish Christianity,” or even the reification of a “Christian” (as opposed to a Jewish) stage.
Leaving behind the old redactional-stages approach (that has tempted many scholars through today), we are really forced to think about what “Jewish” and “Christian” should mean as identity or boundary-categories in the world of this text. Clearly it is too simplistic to lop off the Ascension section as “Christian” and call the Martyrdom section “Jewish,” since the Ascension participates in innumerable ways in a Jewish apocalyptic ascent framework, while the Martyrdom section is deeply enmeshed with the Ascension. The christological features thus seem to have developed within that framework—not through precise editorial additions but as part of a “continuous religious subculture,” as I described in a 2003 article, in which features we now call Christian came about as part of apocalyptic speculation and composition. What we see in Ascension of Isaiah, then, is a moment in evolution, Jewish but with interests in Christ.[2]
It is in this context, in fact, that I often use Ascension of Isaiah as a narrative version of the hymn in Paul’s Philippian letter (2:6-11). The hymn depicts Christ as bearing the morphē of God, then assuming other forms (and homoiōmata and schēmata) as he descends into the world to take on human appearance—what we would now call an early docetic christology. Then he is exalted, brought back to heaven as object of liturgical glorification from all beings. For New Testament students the Ascension of Isaiah, which likewise emphasizes divine forms and appearances (9:12-14; 10:9-11, 14-15, 20-31; 11:17), helps to bring to life the mythological details of the Philippians hymn. Obviously, there is no evidence that Ascension of Isaiah developed as a narrative retelling of Philippians 2, but they both evoke the same christological myth—and from within what we would properly call a Jewish apocalyptic matrix.
The other feature of Ascension of Isaiah that points to some kind of “continuous religious subculture” within Judaism is its prophetic context: not only the literary correspondence to the vision in the biblical Isaiah 6 but the details of a kind of prophetic religious culture in Ascension of Isaiah chapter 6. This is the scene in which Isaiah actually gets his vision, and it is situated not in the Jerusalem Temple nor on the banks of a river, nor following protracted weeping and fasting, as in many apocalyptic frame narratives, but in the course of a séance of prophets and their followers, immediately following liturgical incantation (6:9): “And while he was speaking with the Holy Spirit in the hearing of them all, he became silent, and his mind was taken up from him, . . . His eyes indeed were open, but his mouth was silent, and the mind in his body was taken up from him. But his breath was (still) in him., for he was seeing a vision. And the angel who was sent to show him (the vision) was not of this firmament, . . . but came from the seventh heaven. And the people who were standing by, apart from the circle of prophets, did not think that the holy Isaiah had been taken up.” (6:10-14, tr. Knibb 165). The passage clarifies that ascent does not take place in physical body, as in Book of the Watchers (1 En 14: 8-10), but as a kind of soul-departure in the context of trance.
Now, as much as this is the kind of fictional narrative that situates apocalyptic visions, it also remarkably captures a sort of shamanic séance performance as documented cross-culturally: (a) the preparation of the séance and its participants, both adept shamans and lay audience; (b) ritual—liturgical—stages that bring heightened experience; followed by ( c) the possession/ascension of various experts in the group; and (4) their subsequent disclosures (here actually inscribed: 6:16-17), which may have particular value for the community and its beliefs. I.M. Lewis would call this a “main-morality possession cult.” [3]
Let me add parenthetically here that I do prefer the term “shaman” to “prophet” on descriptive grounds, since “prophet”/navi is really an “emic” (or insiders’) term, lending traditional authority to a religious role. Certainly, Ascension of Isaiah embraces this traditional designation throughout the text. Also, I should say that shamanism, as a religious phenomenon, admits a great fluidity between possession by spirits, ascent accompanied by spirits, instruction from spirits, and so on. Christian exegetes tend to make weighty distinctions between possession and encounter that would not have made sense to the ancient insider. There were multiple ways to describe similar experiences with supernatural beings.
Ascension of Isaiah, then, seems to reflect an original Sitz-im-Leben in such a shamanic setting. I owe my realization of this setting to Robert Hall and Enrico Norelli, who both picked up on this witness to first-century prophetic guilds back in the early 1990s. [4] But where their interest lay in the scribal features of these prophetic guilds—Hall going as far as calling them “schools”—mine remain in their performative features. And this is where the Book of Revelation belongs in the discussion. For John of Patmos testifies that he too was “in the spirit on the Lord’s Day,” which indicates a possession state brought on by collective liturgical performance. And he too encounters a divine spirit—the anthropomorphic figure we might call the Lord-Angel—before he ascends to heaven in chapter 4. In the realm of possession, especially, Revelation is quite fluid: John alternately speaks to and is inhabited by the Lord-Angel throughout the text (esp. chaps. 1, 22).
The texts are clearly independent, but each comes from a prophetic/shamanic milieu steeped in Jewish apocalyptic tradition. And each seeks to orient that tradition, among other things, to revelations of Jesus’s heavenly nature, whether before birth (as in Ascension of Isaiah) or after death (as in Revelation). In neither case is it helpful historically, textually, or religiously to classify them as “Christian,” since their Christ-interests are idiosyncratic—indeed, many would say, oriented more towards the perpetuation of the Jewish apocalyptic tradition itself than any sort of participation in a broader “Christian” institution.
It is for these reasons—religious overlaps with the Book of Revelation—that I’ve been long inclined to assign Ascension of Isaiah to Asia Minor, probably in the second century—reflecting the sort of religious subculture with whom Ignatius of Antioch would not have gotten along.[5]
So to me, the really valuable features of this text are its docetic christology and its Jewish apocalyptic form and details; also, its evidence of a prophetic—or, better, shamanic—milieu; and in all these features its religious sympathies with the Book of Revelation.
David Frankfurter is the William Goodwin Aurelio Chair of the Appreciation of Scripture at Boston University.
NOTES
[1] I credit Martha for demonstrating the relevance of Ascension of Isaiah for Jewish apocalypticism in her Ascent to Heaven in Jewish and Christian Apocalypses (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 55-58, and for laying the groundwork in “Heavenly Ascent and the Relationship of the Apocalypses and the Hekhalot Literature,” Hebrew Union College Annual 59 (1988): 73-100.
[2] David Frankfurter, "Beyond 'Jewish Christianity': Continuing Religious Sub-Cultures of the Second and Third Centuries and Their Documents." In The Ways That Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, edited by Adam H. Becker and Annette Yoshiko Reed (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003), 131-43.
[3] I. M. Lewis, Ecstatic Religion: A Study of Shamanism and Spirit Possession, 3rd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2003).
[4] Especially Robert G. Hall, "The Ascension of Isaiah: Community, Situation, Date, and Place in Early Christianity," Journal of Biblical Literature 109 (1990): 289-306, and
Enrico Norelli, Ascension d'Isaïe (Turnhout: Brepols, 1993).
[5] See David Frankfurter, "The Legacy of the Jewish Apocalypse in Early Christian Communities: Two Regional Trajectories,” The Jewish Apocalyptic Heritage in Early Christianity, ed. James C. VanderKam and William Adler (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996), 132-42.