Christians: After Jesus allegedly died on the cross why did he deny that he was "ascended to the father"?

No one knew if Jesus had really been crucified or not in early Christianity. Many of the Gnostics seemed to deny it, and came to view Orthodoxy's teaching on the atonement as so abhorrent, that the author of the Apocalypse of Peter said that the Jesus the Orthodox Church believes in is a false Jesus who died on the cross.