What Does the Ascension of Isaiah Do?

First, I want to thank Jeremiah Coogan, Julia Lindenlaub, Eva Mroczek and the BRANE Collective for creating and organizing this text lab and others like it. This is such a wonderful idea, and I am so happy to be a part of this rich conversation.

I like to think about apocalyptic rhetoric far more than I like to think about apocalypses: that is, what is a particular text doing vs. what is this text? So when I think about Ascension of Isaiah my question is: What is this particular text doing for readers and audiences?

When you read this text it is hard not to be struck by the images of the prophetic or scribal community that sees itself as an elite group of angel-like saints, in special proximity to Isaiah, eating special food in the desert (compare with Ps 77:24-25; Gospel of Ebionites, 4Ezra), and as conduits for correct speech that is enabled by the Angel of the Holy Spirit. These righteous prophets are juxtaposed with the pseudo prophets who act out violently against them (Ascen. Isa. 2.11-12). I (along with Tobias Nicklas) have made arguments previously about the self-understanding of the group behind the text, building on the work of David Frankfurter.[1] But I am still left wondering- what does this mean for audiences as the text is passed along? How do these identity categories “work” for audiences?

More recently, I have been thinking about these questions, about how the dualistic rhetoric works in the text, and specifically thinking about three main motifs in the text: verbs of sense perception or emotional cues, gender dynamics around the retelling of the birth narrative, and evil spaces and entities.

1)    Verbs of Sense Perception and Emotional Cues

     In his recent Enoch seminar paper (May 2021), Robert Hall focuses on the phrase that occurs in 1:2 and 1:6—“the words that the prophets saw.” Hall used this as a jumping off point to think about the intersection between Ascension of Isaiah and Wisdom literature. But as I reread Ascension of Isaiah it strikes me that the image of the prophets seeing words is also, at its heart, sensory—it works rhetorically by appealing to the sense perception of the audience. I think here Aristotle’s discussion of the anthropological mechanics behind visual rhetoric (ekphrasis) is particularly helpful for understanding how ancient rhetoricians understood sense perception to interact with visual rhetoric: sensory perception impresses a mental image on the soul, just as a seal is stamped into wax; the soul then calls up the same images and emotions each time it encounters the same word, phrase, or image.[ii]

The framing of the text around “the words the prophets saw” is revisited throughout Ascension of Isaiah, drawing attention to those who do and don’t perceive. In chapter six the story hinges on those who do and do not hear. There is an odd scene in 6:6 where somebody happens to leave a door opened while Isaiah is talking to king Hezekiah, and the result is that the forty prophets and sons of prophets were able to hear “the voice of the Holy Spirit” coming out of Isaiah. There is a sharp contrast a few verses later in 6:16-17 when Isaiah has his vision and Hezekiah, his son, and the remaining prophets all hear it, but the leaders, the eunuchs, and the people do not hear. And of course, in Isaiah’s vision, perception is power. As Isaiah travels through the various heavens he hears and sees praise for the Glorious one whose glory he cannot see (10.3). Isaiah’s own seeing and hearing is paralleled only by the Lord and the angel of the spirit, whom we learn in the next verse (10.4) “beheld all and heard all.”

Isaiah’s powers of super-perception are most dramatic in the final scenes of the Ascension when Jesus goes incognito and becomes a shape shifter. If you read nothing else in the Ascension of Isaiah, chapters 10 and 11 are recommended: not because that is where the most blatantly Christian material occurs, but because I am reasonably sure they are the basis for Star Trek Deep Space Nine. As incognito Jesus descends through the heavens he changes shape to look like the angelic and then human beings in each realm, giving passwords to the door keepers of each heaven (except the firmament where he doesn’t have to give a password because the evil angels were too distracted by their own violence to notice someone was passing through). This elaborate covert operation plays upon the fundamental contrast of perception in the text: Isaiah sees and knows all of this, relaying it to the audience who now shares his super perception, while the weeping angels and Satan are flummoxed when Jesus returns because they can’t figure out how he descended without them noticing it (11.24). In the Ascension of Isaiah sense perception plays upon a particular apocalyptic heartstring—we who hear the text have not only bested Satan, but the angels too. For the Ascension of Isaiah’s audience, it seems that the persuasive rhetoric is working to convince hearers that they are part of an in group, and one that can gain access to special knowledge, perhaps even without having to live in the desert eating wild herbs.

2)    Gender dynamics around retelling of birth narrative

     The emphasis on perception comes into play as well for me when I analyze what is happening with Mary in this text. Mary’s sense perception is the mechanism through which Jesus is able to enter the world as a human. In chapter 11 the text seems to share the purity concerns of the Protevangelium of James, answering the question of how Jesus got from the 7th heaven to human form. After a lot of awkwardly repetitive verbal constructions that seem to be designed to make us absolutely confident that Joseph did not touch Mary: “And after two months when Joseph was in his house, and his wife Mary, but both alone, it came to pass, while they were alone, that Mary straightway beheld with her eyes and saw a small child, and she was amazed” (11.7-9). Here Mary perceives Jesus into the world, and so in this scene, from the perspective of this text Mary has quite a bit of power.  This power is short lived for Mary, though. In 11:17 Jesus sucks the breast, but the text tells us that he only does this so that he would not be recognized---this is all part of his secret agent act, like the shape shifting and the passwords. This makes perfect sense in the weird world of Ascension of Isaiah, but if we compare this passage to other nativity narratives that mention Mary nursing as an act of nutritive sustenance and motherhood (see for example Protevangelium of James, or Book of Mary’s Repose 7), then here Mary is stripped of rather substantial maternal power (her maternal power in later texts will be so great as to persuade Jesus to free the damned).[iii]

3)    Evil Spaces and Entities

     The primary power struggle of this text though occurs between Satan, who is identified as the “prince of this world” at the outset of the text in 1.3, and Isaiah. Satan worship is associated with witchcraft and divination and Isaiah’s withdrawal from Jerusalem, contrasted with the righteous devotion of the prophetic community (2:5-11). In the firmament (the first heaven) Sammael and his hosts are struggling. The angels of Satan, we are told, are envious of each other and are in a battle that will span from the beginning of time until Satan is destroyed by the one Isaiah sees coming from the seventh heaven (7.9-12).

     Ultimately, Sammael Satan saws Isaiah in two with a tree saw (by the hand of Manasseh), but Isaiah emerges as the victorious martyr, neither crying nor weeping but chatting with the Holy Spirit the entire time. In this text it is clear that violence and torture are the purview of Satan and his followers, while the righteous ones, like Isaiah, are calm and composed.  Isaiah’s martyrdom scene has the mixed physiognomy that is common for martyrdom texts: he is the hyper-masculine ideal of composed speech, not weeping, eyes fixed on God, while his body is effeminate, being torn in two with a saw and leaking all over the place.[iv] Isaiah points to his own bodily weakness when he damns Belchira, claiming that Belchira is as weak as “the skin of my flesh”---Isaiah describes his own broken body as an emblem of his enemies, in a kind of apocalyptic “I know you are but what am I?” that trades upon ancient discourses of gender and the disabled body (5.9, 5.14). Satan and his angels wage violence and appear strong and will ultimately be defeated, while Isaiah appears weak but is truly strong.

So what do we make of all this Satan and hell stuff? Many of the other texts I study that describe hell do not usually contain robust depictions of a Satan figure. And while the Ascension of Isaiah mentions hell and Gehenna a number of times,[v] there is little detail about these places, or even really a lot of detail about what is going on in each of the heavens. The primary difference between these texts is that while the tours of hell are concerned with who populates different otherworldly spaces and the power that is exerted over them there, the Ascension of Isaiah is more concerned with the key figures who pass through otherworldly spaces and the power they exert.

     The audience then is not meant to identify with the angelic beings, or the righteous saints, but with Isaiah who while on earth received a special vision that enabled him to ascend. All of the spatial imagery in the text is directly tied to the dichotomous vision of a conflict between Isaiah vs. Satan, prophets vs. pseudo prophets. In this spatial schema, the audience, who presumably identifies with “those who hope in Jesus Christ crucified” are meant to also relate to the self-deprecating practices of this group as they “flee from desert to desert” (4.13). This does not necessarily mean that the audience is living in the desert themselves, or eating wild herbs (though some may have been). But I do think that these images are appealing to the senses and are emotionally persuasive, invoking the rhetoric of penitential prayer.[vi] In this reading the dualistic imagery, the language of sense perception and the self-deprecating practices of the righteous prophets would draw upon emotions of grief that are designed to move audiences to penitential prayer themselves—for at least some audiences, I think, this would seem like the only viable emotional response.

Meghan R. Henning is Associate Professor of Christian Origins at the University of Dayton.

[1] David Frankfurter, “Beyond ‘Jewish Christianity’: Continuing Religious SubCultures

of the Second and Third Centuries and Their Documents,” in Adam H. Becker and Annette Yoshiko Reed, The Ways That Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003), 131–43.

[ii] Aristotle Mem. rem. 450 AB; Rhet. 2.2–11.

[iii] For more detailed discussion of Mary’s redemptive work in hell see chapter four of Hell Hath No Fury: Gender, Disability, and the Invention of Damned Bodies in Early Christian Hell (Yale University Press, 2021).

[iv] As Candida R. Moss has argued, these composite performances of masculinity do not necessarily transcend cultural norms, even when performed by female martyrs; Ancient Christian Martyrdom: Diverse Practices, Theologies, and Traditions (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 32.

[v] Punishments of hell, 1:3; Beliar and his hosts dragged into Gehenna, 4.14; impious are consumed by fire, 4.18 (as if they never existed); Jesus is told with regard to his descent: “but to Hell thou shall not go,” 10.8.

[vi] Cf. 4Ezra. See Angela Kim Harkins, “Ritualizing Jesus’ Grief at Gethsemane” JSNT 41.2 (2018): 177–203.