Page 180 - Demo

176oppressions, robberies, and insatiable greed for conquest and money than all the rest of humankind put together.(5) John the Baptist (pbuh) could not be the precursor of Jesus Christ (pbuh) in the sense in which the Churches interpret his mission. He is presented to us by the Gospels as a “voice crying aloud in the wilderness,” as the fulfilment of a passage in Isaiah (xl. 3), and as a herald of Jesus Christ (pbuh) on the authority of the Prophet Malakhi (Mal. iii. 1). To assert that the mission or duty of the Baptist was to prepare the way for Jesus (pbuh) -the former in the capacity of a precursor and the latter in that of a triumphant Conqueror coming “suddenly to his temple,” and there to establish his religion of “Shalom” and make Jerusalem with its temple more glorious than before (Hag. ii. 8) - is to confess the absolute failure of the whole enterprise.Nevertheless, one thing is as true as two and two make four - that the whole project, according to the extravagant view of the Christians, proves a total failure. For, from whatever point of view we examine the interpretations of the Churches, the failure appears to be obvious. Instead of receiving his prince in Jerusalem at the Gate of the Temple clad in diadem and purple, amidst the frantic acclamations of the Jews, the precursor receives him, naked like himself, in the middle of the River Jordan; and then to introduce him, after immersing or plunging his master into the water, to the crowds as “behold, this is the Messiah!” or “this is the Son of God!” or elsewhere “behold the Lamb of God!” would either be tantamount to simply insulting the people of Israel or to blaspheming; or to purely mocking Jesus (pbuh) as well as making himself ridiculous.