Abstract: While later Creedal Christians have come to view “the Ascension” recorded in the first chapter of Acts as a conclusive corporeal appearance of the Resurrected Lord, earliest Christians do not appear to have conceived of this appearance as “final” in any temporal or experiential sense. A careful investigation of canonical resurrection literature displays a widespread Christian belief in continued and varied interaction with the risen Lord relatively late into the movements’ development. Stringent readings of Luke’s account of the Ascension in Acts suggesting that Christ will not return until his second coming fail to consider the theological rhetoric with which Luke conveys the resurrection traditions he relied on in composing his account. Analysis of Luke’s narrative displays that his presentation of these traditions is shaped in a way to stress the primacy of the apostolic Easter experiences in establishing the apostles as authoritative “witnesses” in the early church over and against possible competing authoritative claims stemming from purported experiences with the risen Lord.

The thesis of this work loosely mirrors an observation made by Francois Bovon in his commentary on the Gospel of Luke: “The idea that there was an ultimate limit to the appearances of the Risen One does not come from the earliest stage of Christianity.”1 Indeed, it is difficult to find in the earliest Christian literature any definitive conclusion to these “more extravagant manifestations of religious experience.”2 Such observations suggest that earliest Christians anticipated continued interaction with the risen Lord relatively late into the movement’s development. Furthermore, early Christians do not seem to have considered Christ’s [Page 130]resurrection appearances recorded at the end of each gospel as final in any temporal or experiential sense. As Larry Hurtado has rightly noted, rather than the Easter appearances signaling a conclusion to the resurrected Jesus’s earthly ministry, early Christians appear to have had a “powerful sense of revelation” associated with the figure of the risen Lord after resurrection morning, which was “perceived by recipients to have a new quality and frequency in their lives.”3

The narrative structure of the endings of the gospels of Mark, Matthew, and John all readily attest to this expectation of continued interaction with the resurrected Jesus. While Luke’s depiction of “the Ascension”4 in Luke-Acts may appear more definitive in its closure, a careful survey of Luke’s collective narrative reveals an expectation of continu...