The passage in Numbers 9:1-14 presents new legislation on the Passover sacrifice. For one who contracted impurity immediately prior to the Passover or was too far away to participate in it, the amendment prescribes an alternate date, one month later:

The presents its chief protagonist in two discrepant ways: Job the patient and Job the rebel. Ancient Jewish interpretations of Job praise Job the patient and condemn, or at least do not praise, Job the rebel. Modern Jewish interpretations, by contrast, praise Job the rebel and scant the patient, pious Job of the frame story. Job the rebel becomes a model of sincerity or authenticity, a chief value of modernity. Job the patient and pious sufferer so celebrated by antiquity is at best an ambivalent figure.

In 1963, when the “linguistic turn” had evidently taken hold of New Testament studies, Albert Vanhoye, a linguistically trained Catholic priest, published a monograph entitled La structure littéraire de l'épître aux Hébreux.1 The manifold reactions to his refined literary-rhetorical approach and conclusions in favor of a concentric structure oscillated between euphoric approval and offensive disapproval. Along with its translation into German (1979/1980) and a decade later into English (1989), Vanhoye's study influenced and stimulated Hebrews scholarship like none other in the twentieth century.

In this essay I examine a rather quirky and possibly novel teaching of Faustus Socinus (1539—1604): what George H. Williams calls a “pre-Ascension ascension” (hereafter PAA) of Christ into heaven. Faustus claimed that this bodily ascent into heaven took place before Christ's final visible ascension to heaven some time between his baptism and the commencement of his earthly teaching ministry. The theory states in brief that Christ, “after he was born a human, and before he began to discharge the office entrusted to him by God, his own Father, … was in heaven, and abode there for some time.” Christ took this heavenly sojourn “that he might hear from God himself and … see in his very presence what he was soon to proclaim and reveal to the world in God's own name.”1 In another place Socinus states that Jesus, “after his birth from the virgin, and before he announced the gospel, was raptured into heaven (in caelum raptus fuerit). There he learned from God himself what he was to reveal to the human race.”2

Fortunately, the two travelers arrived before sunset. Earlier in the day, on 5 May 1674, John Eliot and Daniel Gookin had set out from Boston for Wamesit, the northernmost of the fourteen Indian “praying towns” within the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and the one most subjected to retaliatory attacks from raiding bands of Mohawks in the previous few years. Upon safe arrival, the Englishmen greeted their Pennacook friends and gathered as many as they could at the wigwam of Wannalancet, the head sachem of Wamesit, where Eliot, the aging missionary to the Indians, proceeded to talk about the meaning of the parable of the marriage of the king's son in Matthew 22:1—4. Wannalancet, according to Gookin, was a “sober and grave person, and of years, between fifty and sixty”; he had from the beginning been “loving and friendly to the English,” and in return they had tried to encourage him to embrace Christianity. Although the English missionaries would have desired him to readily accept the gospel message they preached, Wannalancet voluntarily incorporated Christian practices slowly, over time, without necessarily repudiating his native culture and traditional religious practices.1 For four years Wannalancet “had been willing to hear the word of God preached”; when Eliot or other missionaries made their periodic visits to Wamesit, Wannalancet made sure he was there. Over time, Wannalancet adopted the English practices of keeping the Sabbath, learning to go to any available meeting or instruction, fellowshipping, and refraining from various activities proscribed by the town's praying leaders. Despite all that, however, the English missionaries still complained that he “hath stood off” since he had “not yielded up himself personally.”2