An Introduction to the Ascension of Isaiah

The Ascension of Isaiah is a text from the Roman Mediterranean, often dated to the second century CE, that has left its fingerprints in a wide range of contexts and that enjoys a rich ongoing life in the Ethiopic Christian tradition. The text narrates the prophet Isaiah’s execution by Manasseh and recounts Isaiah’s vision of future events. Although it is often described as an apocalypse, the Ascension defies simple categorisation. As a result, it invites capacious conversation about the categories that modern scholars use to understand ancient texts and about how scholars study texts with expansive histories across historical, linguistic, and religious contexts.

The text we know as the Ascension of Isaiah is often divided by modern scholars into several major sections, and often these major sections are reconstructed as source divisions. The two major units are chapters 1–5, the account of Isaiah’s martyrdom, and chapters 6–11, a visionary tour of the seven heavens, narrated in the voice of Isaiah. The division between these two sections has some basis in the literary contours of the text and in the manuscript reception. Modern scholars propose various hypotheses for development of the text and some identify a number of smaller source units.

The material we know as the Ascension of Isaiah has circulated among a wide range of audiences and in a variety of forms. We find corresponding material in a number of languages: Greek, Ethiopic, Latin, Slavonic, and Coptic. The most extensive text appears in Ge’ez (or classical Ethiopic). This text seems to have been translated into Ge’ez sometime in late antiquity.  It incorporates chapters 1–11, including both the martyrdom and the vision (and titling both as separate elements). The Ethiopic text is the only one to preserve the work in this form. But it is not clear that all readers who encountered this material in late antiquity encountered it in the same form as the extant Ethiopic text, either in terms of overall scope or in terms of specific textual detail. The extant Greek fragment (Papyrus Amherst 1, dating from the fifth or sixth century CE) contains only 2:4–4:4, and might never have included material from the vision. There are two distinct Latin versions. One, preserved in a sixth-century palimpsest, resembles the Greek and Ethiopic manuscript evidence; it includes material from 2:14-3:13 and 7:1-19, and thus spans both the martyrdom and the vision. The second Latin version, reflecting a rather different text, often parallels the Slavonic version. This second version, in both Latin and Slavonic, includes only the vision. To make matters more complicated, the Slavonic version exists in two textual forms, one of which abridges the other. There is also a Greek work known as the “Legend of Isaiah” (extant in at least two manuscripts from the twelfth century onward) which rewrites, rearranges, and expands an earlier form of the Greek Ascension (covering both the martyrdom and the vision).  Smaller fragments also exist in Coptic (in both the Sahidic and Bohairic dialects). In short, we seem to have what Umberto Eco has called an “open text,” taking various forms—expanded, contracted, rewritten, reframed— for different audiences, in varied languages and historical periods.

This forum seeks to open up a capacious conversation about this textual constellation. Our four contributors share their insights about how the Ascension of Isaiah illuminates and complicates broader conversations about religion in the Mediterranean world of the first few centuries CE. Meghan Henning focuses on the dualistic rhetoric of the Ascension in order to illuminate how the features of “apocalyptic” literature work for readers, illuminating dynamics of embodied perception, gender, and the portrayal of evil beings. Warren Campbell focuses on the Greek manuscript Papyrus Amherst 1, arguing that attention to material texts can help scholars move beyond simplistic categorizations of the Ascension (or other texts) as “Jewish” or “Christian.” Emily Gathergood offers a rich reading of Jesus’ birth in Ascension 11, demonstrating how the text’s cosmology and christology challenge traditional accounts. David Frankfurter concludes the panel by arguing for a deeper contextualization of the Ascension in a range of practices that one might describe as “shamanic,” which invites reconsideration of the social contexts in which the Ascension or the Book of Revelation might have been written. Taking different approaches, each of these contributions shows how the Ascension of Isaiah invites more nuanced and creative engagement with scholarly categories. As result, they invite fruitful further conversation about the often-neglected Ascension and show how it can enrich a wide range of conversations about religion in the ancient Mediterranean world. I am grateful to each of these excellent scholars for generously sharing their expertise as part of this forum.

Jeremiah Coogan is a historian of early Christianity whose research focuses on Gospel reading, material texts, and late antiquity. His forthcoming monograph, Eusebius the Evangelist (Oxford 2022), analyses Eusebius of Caesarea’s fourth-century reconfiguration of the New Testament Gospels as a window into broader questions of technology and textuality in early Christianity and the late ancient Mediterranean. His current book project investigates how early Christians deployed literary and bibliographic categories to conceptualise similarities and differences between Gospel texts.