Did Jesus ascend on the day he rose, or forty days later?

Luke’s Gospel and Acts are two volumes by the same author, and Acts opens by pointing back to the first (“The former treatise have I made”, Acts 1:1); in the same breath Luke says that Jesus showed himself to the apostles, “being seen of them forty days” (Acts 1:3). The man who wrote that did not think his Gospel had put the ascension on Easter Day.

Read closely, Luke 24 does not say it does. The day’s events are carefully timed up to the meal at Emmaus and the return to Jerusalem (24:13, 29, 33). After the appearance that evening, the last paragraphs begin simply ‘And he said unto them’ and ‘And he led them out’ (24:44, 50), with no note of time. Luke has drawn together, to end his first volume, the risen Lord’s teaching and the final parting, and kept the story of the forty days for the start of his second. Nor would one evening have left room for it all: the Emmaus pair reached their village “toward evening” and then walked some seven miles back before Jesus appeared to the group. The longer ending of Mark (16:9–20), which the two oldest complete Greek manuscripts lack, likewise gives the ascension (16:19) no date, and John tells of appearances eight days later and in Galilee (John 20:26; 21:1). Nothing in any of the accounts conflicts with a single ascension at the end of the forty days.