Note 139 — Chapter IV · DEATH AND RESURRECTION OF JESUS.

Lastly, on the presupposition that Jesus by his resurrection returned to a purely natural existence, what conception must be formed of his end? In consistency he must be supposed, whether at the end of a longer139 or a shorter time after his resuscitation, to have died a natural death; and accordingly Paulus intimates that the too intensely affected body of Jesus, notwithstanding it had recovered from the death-like rigidity produced by crucifixion, was yet completely worn out by natural maladies and consuming fever.140 That this is at least not the view of the Evangelists concerning the end of Jesus is evident, since two of them represent him as taking leave of his disciples like an immortal, the others as being visibly carried up to heaven. Thus before the ascension, at the latest, if until then Jesus had retained a natural human body, it must have undergone a change which qualified him to dwell in the heavenly regions; the sediment of gross corporeality must have fallen to the earth, and only its finest essence have ascended. But of any natural remains of the ascended Jesus the Evangelists say nothing; and as the disciples who were spectators of his ascension must have observed them had there been such, nothing is left for the upholders of this opinion but the expedient of certain theologians of the Tübingen school, who regard as the residuum of the corporeality of Jesus, the cloud which enveloped him in his ascension, and in which what was material in him is supposed to have been dissolved and as it were evaporated.141 As thus the Evangelists neither represent to themselves the end of the earthly life of Jesus after the resurrection as a natural death, nor mention any change undergone by his body at the ascension, and moreover narrate of Jesus in the interval between the resurrection and ascension things which are inconceivable of a natural body: they cannot have represented to themselves his life after the resurrection as natural, but only as supernatural, nor his body as material and organic, but only as transfigured.