St. Paul: The Apostle We Love to Hate (Icons)

by Karen Armstrong

Jesus’s physical ascension was not without precedent: Adam, Enoch, Moses, and Elijah were all said to have been carried bodily into Heaven; mystics saw them there sitting on golden thrones. After the prophet Ezekiel had been deported to Babylon in 597, he had a vision of Yahweh that made an indelible impression on the Jewish imagination. He had seen the God of Israel, leaving the Holy Land and traveling to join the exiles in a war chariot drawn by four strange beasts. High above their heads, Ezekiel saw something that defied normal categorization. It “looked like a sapphire, it was shaped like a throne and high up on this throne was a being that looked like a man.” This humanlike figure was surrounded by a nimbus of fire and light that “looked like the glory [kavod] of Yahweh.”49 One could never see God himself—that lay beyond human capacity—but it was possible to glimpse God’s “glory,” a kind of afterglow of the divine presence adapted to the limitations of human perception.