What up?

[GBTWC]

why did Jesus ascend up into the clouds is heaven up this never made sense to me Ive always percieved heaven to be other dimensional perhaps but not really up ?

 

[Kristos]

Maybe so those who witnessed it would understand what was happening?

I don't know for sure, but I don't think they had any concepts of other dimensions. Heaven was up in the sky, hell was below the earth...

 

[rusmeister]

Some things in the Bible aren't necessarily to be taken literally. The Bible was written by fallible men inspired by the Holy Spirit, so they described things in ways that they understood - thus, Jesus' Ascension was "up" (and maybe it really, really was - symbolically, it fits...), Joshua told the sun to stop and it did ( - the sun stopped?? Wouldn't it really be the earth that stopped? Etc.) So the actual explanation for the phenomenon might be explained in different terms today - but those terms could prove just as inadequate to describe what they really saw. Geordi of Star Trek:TNG would use the best multi-hyper-spatial language available - and it still might not be completely accurate. Who could describe the Transfiguration?

I think it would take a heavenly language in perfected bodies/minds to really fully understand "what happened". The languages we read the Bible in are decidedly not quite there.

 

[rdhosken]

It's called "phenomenological language" when we describe something as it appears to us, like saying the sun rises and sets. Nowadays we know it's Earth that's turning on its axis, but we still use words like sunrise and sunset.

 

[Chesterton]

One possibility is that they actually saw Jesus physically, literally ascend into the clouds.

But "up" in human linguistics has always been good. "Down" is bad. They may have been speaking figuratively, or they may have actually seen that and were speaking literally. Either way is fine with me. The message is the same.

 

[MariaRegina]

It's called "phenomenological language" when we describe something as it appears to us, like saying the sun rises and sets. Nowadays we know it's Earth that's turning on its axis, but we still use words like sunrise and sunset.

The idea of the sun rising and setting is centered on the belief that earth is the center of the universe and that the sun revolves around us, rising and setting.