Commenting
on a minority of texts that, at first blush, may appear to suggest “the
immediate ascent of the righteous into the presence of God” (i.e., heaven
itself), Eliezer Gonzalez, in a study on the fate of the dead in North African
Christianity in the third century wrote:
These include Luke 23:43; Eph 2:6 (cv. Col
2); Heb 12:18-23; Rev 6:9-11. Those who wish to understand these passages as
referring to an immediate post-mortem ascent to heaven must also necessarily
classify them as exceptions to the
explicit majority teachings of Jesus and Paul. Rather, it is far preferable to
attempt to understand these references, as with 2 Cor 5:1-8, within the
traditional, Pharisaic and Jewish terms of an eschatological resurrection
within the context of an essentially monistic anthropology. As an example, Luke
23:43 represents a particularly interesting statement by Jesus to the thief on
the cross. However, it should not be decontextualized, in its exegesis, in a
way that sets it against Jesus’ explicit teachings on the afterlife, and the
balance of the explicit teachings of the New Testament. (Eliezer Gonzalez, The Fate of the Dead in Early Third Century
North African Christianity [Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2-14], 51 n. 85, emphasis in original)
