Where Did Christ Jesus Go after the Resurrection
There is one mystery in the story about Christ Jesus in the Gospels: Where did Christ Jesus go after resurrection?
It seems to be a fact that Christ Jesus resurrected after the execution on the cross by Roman soldiers. It seems to have given His followers courage to further live as followers to Him, sticking to faith in Christ Jesus. So, the Gospel authors wrote how Christ Jesus appeared to His followers after He had disappeared from the tomb. Those descriptions cannot be a fiction. But the Gospels read that Christ Jesus ascended to the heaven 40 days after the resurrection, while His followers were watching Him. This part must be a kind of metaphor, since it is clearly against a natural law. But, there must have been something that made His followers believe that Christ Jesus ascended to the heaven. Then, what was it?
The fact was that Christ Jesus disappeared from His followers; He never repeated His mission in the way He had done before the execution on the cross and the resurrection; and He never appeared to them after a certain time point except His spirit talked to Paul months or years later. From the modern sense, it is thought that he went to some place, not probably the heaven, to hide. And probably, Christ Jesus lived there in the rest of His life. But how could people around Him fail to recognize Him? Or did people around Him in His hiding place cooperate with Him to hide Him, knowing that the person was Christ Jesus? And why did Christ Jesus hide in the special place? Could not He secretly hide Himself among His followers, although the Jewish authority was eager and active to suppress the movement He had launched?
From a religious point of view, it can be thought that God hid Christ Jesus 40 days after His resurrection. And the way God hid Christ Jesus must have looked like Christ Jesus was ascending to the heaven to the eyes of His followers. In this case, as we cannot understand the mind of God fully, we only have to accept the act by God as it is. And, indeed, without Christ Jesus further repeating His mission, Christianity prevailed and widely accepted by Roman citizens.
Nonetheless, we may wonder what became of Him when He disappeared from His followers after the resurrection.
And we may estimate that Christ Jesus went back to the place from which He had come. It was not Nazareth, a village where He was born and raised. From the beginning, He had appeared on a bank of the River Jordan, where John the Baptist was administering baptism, from nowhere. The Gospels do not describe how and why Christ Jesus left Nazareth to come to the River Jordan. And it cannot be thought that Christ Jesus had learnt Judaism in Nazareth.
So, it is natural to think that Christ Jesus had come from a special place where Judaism could be studied like the Temple in Jerusalem, although it is unthinkable that Christ Jesus learnt Judaism from Jewish priests in the Temple of Jerusalem. But, there is one place suitable for study of Judaism independently from the Temple in Jerusalem. It is Qumran. Then if so, Christ Jesus came to the River Jordan from Qumran, and He must have returned to Qumran after the resurrection.
And Paul after encountering with the spirit of Christ Jesus on his way to Damascus must have traveled to Qumran, too, to learn the teaching of Christ Jesus.
Qumran is the base and facilities of a school or a faction of Judaists called the Essenes. The notable Jewish author in the first century Flavius Josephus described in his book about the Jewish people that there were three major factions among Jewish people at the time: Sadducees, Pharisees, and Essenes. The Gospels mention Sadducees and Pharisees, but strangely or interestingly there are no references to the Essenes. The authors of the Gospels must have avoided mentioning Essenes, since they wanted to keep secret the tie between Christ Jesus and Qumran (or Paul and Qumran). It must be because Qumran was the place where Christ Jesus went after the resurrection.
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Joh 1:4 In him was life; and the life was the light of men.
Joh 1:5 And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.