As he was martyred on the cross, Jesus did not lose faith in his ascension into the Kingdom of Heavenly Father. The Gospels describe in detail all the events preceding the crucifixion of Christ and the crucifixion itself. About how the Ascension took place, nothing is reported in the canonical church texts.
Certificate of Gormisia
The absence of evidence of the Ascension of Christ officially recognized by the church does not mean that it did not exist. From the reports of the chroniclers of the 1st-2nd centuries AD, it is known that more than 200 people came to the burial place of Jesus taken down from the cross at night from Jerusalem. In the crowd of onlookers waiting for the miracle of the resurrection, there were people specially sent by the Roman procurator of Judea, Pontius Pilate - his personal biographer the Greek Hormisius and the Syrian doctor Yeishu. Knowing about the crowd of people near the garden of Joseph of Arimatha, where the body of Christ was transferred after the crucifixion, the ruler demanded that his messengers stay in the garden and personally make sure that the executed Jesus would not be able to rise again, and the body would be safely buried. But people deeply devoted to Pilate had to witness a completely unexpected, moreover, an out of the ordinary event. Here,which he wrote later in the work “History of Judea” by Hormisius, which was credited by the church as apocryphal.
“Approaching the coffin, being a few hundred paces away from it, we saw in the weak light of early dawn the guard at the coffin: two people were sitting, the rest were lying on the ground by the fire. It was very quiet. We walked slowly, we were overtaken by the guards, who were going to replace the one that was there yesterday.
Suddenly it became very light. We could not immediately understand where this light came from, but soon we saw that it emanated from a moving shining cloud (emphasis by the author): it sank over the coffin and there, above the ground, a man appeared, as if it were all made of light. Then there was a thunderclap, but not from heaven, but on earth. From this terrible thunder, the guard on the spot jumped up in horror, and then fell … At that moment, a woman was descending along the path to our right. She suddenly shouted: “Opened! Opened! Opened! At the same moment it became clear to us that a very large stone lying on the lid of the coffin seemed to rise by itself, opening the coffin. We were very scared. After a while, the light disappeared and everything became as it was. When we approached the coffin, it turned out that there was no longer the body of the person buried in it”.
What is depicted on the icons?
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A reasonable question arises: why did the Church recognize the testimony of Hormisius and similar texts about the Ascension as apocryphal? There are three possible explanations. First, at the end of the text, Jesus is called a man and not "the Son of God." Secondly, the canonical evangelists did not become eyewitnesses of the Ascension. Despite their subsequent spiritual exploits, on this wonderful night, apparently out of fear for their lives, they did not dare to appear at the burial place of Christ. Thirdly, the ascension in a cloud of radiant light did not fit into the biblical prophecy about the resurrection of the dead body of the Savior on the third day after death.
The apocryphal motives of the Resurrection and Ascension, however, are well reflected in church iconography. On many icons that make up the pride of Orthodox churches, the resurrected and ascending Jesus is depicted in a halo of two images of "tambourines" ("tambourine" is a slightly deformed rhombus to indicate suit in playing cards). These images are usually superimposed on each other with a rotation of 90 degrees and thus form a stylized eight-pointed star. Such eight-pointed stars and "tambourines" are almost always found also on icons dedicated to the Transfiguration.
Ukrainian scientists R. S. Furdui and Yu. M. Shvaidak in his book "The Beauty of Mystery" (1992) carried out a scrupulous study of these geometric symbols. It turned out that the "tambourine" is an image on the plane of a complex spatial formation - the Boyai-Lobachevsky pseudosphere. A feature of the pseudosphere studied in non-Euclidean geometry is its specific metric, which manifests itself in a complex twisting of surfaces. The consequence of this twisting is, as recently proved by theoretical physicists, the combination of past, present and future events on the surface of the body. That is, a single "tambourine" on the icons is a simplified image of a space transformer and a time machine at the same time!
Unfortunately, the researchers in their book did not say anything about the stylized eight-pointed stars depicted on many icons in the form of two intersecting "tambourines". Concerning these interesting figures in this context, the following assumption may be appropriate. If the "tambourine" is an image on the plane of the Boyai-Lobachevsky pseudosphere, then the superimposed "tambourines" are a display on a two-dimensional surface of the process of interaction of two multidimensional pseudospheres with their rotation by 90 degrees. The result of such interaction gives a new geometric body - a three-dimensional, completely enclosed egg or "cocoon". On a two-dimensional plane, such a body is perceived by us as an oval. Therefore, "ovals" or elongated "cocoons" are present on many church icons dedicated to the motives of the Resurrection, Ascension and Transfiguration. Rays can depart from them.
Based on the foregoing, it turns out that a mysterious tradition of pictorial description of complex topological transformations leading to the formation of a self-enclosed space in the form of an egg or "cocoon" around the body of the ascending or transforming Christ has long been present in church painting. Is it possible for the 15th - 18th century icon painting masters to know the theory of such complex geometric transformations, which was developed in the works of the outstanding German mathematician Berhard Riemann only in 1854? Our common sense clearly does not allow a positive answer to this question.
However, it is possible to rationally explain the geometric extravaganza of church painting if we turn to the interesting and original concept of the famous Russian philosopher and philologist K. A. Kedrov. Investigating the processes of artistic creation, the scientist came to the conclusion that human consciousness is part of the multidimensional space-time objectively existing in the Universe. Therefore, gifted people are able to “connect” to this continuum during creative intense work, read the diagram of its structures and processes, and then reproduce the latter in the form of an integral figurative system on paper, canvas, music staff.
It follows from this that many icons of the geniuses of church painting intuitively depict the process of the formation of a closed space-time capsule by Jesus Christ, on which he ascended to the Unknowable Heavenly Father, eternally abiding in his topologically complex space-time. The surviving testimony of Hormisia, cited by us, captures the physical effects and the final result accompanying the space-time transformation (Ascension), accomplished by the will and the spiritual consciousness of Christ - a flash of light, a sound shock and a luminous cloud-"cocoon".
In the occult literature it is stated that the Great Teachers, Initiates and seers of mankind do not have burials of a physical body. Is it not because they have transformed the flesh into a shining cloud and ascended into the Multidimensional Spiritual Heaven like Christ?
Vladimir Streletsky