Page 186 - New English Book L

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I will not detain you on the vagaries of the
commentators, for they are reveries, which neither John
nor his hearers had ever dreamed of. Could John ever
teach those haughty Pharisees, and those rationalistic
Saduqees [1] who denied the corporeal resurrection, that
on the day of the last judgment Jesus (pbuh) of Nazareth
would pour down upon them his wrath and burn them
like the fruitless trees and like the chaff in the fire of
hell? There is not a single word in all the literature of the
Scriptures about the resurrection of bodies or about hell-
fire. These Talmudistic writings are full of eschatological
material very similar to those of the Zardushtees, but have
no distinct origin in the canonical books.

The Prophet of repentance and of good tidings does
not speak about the remote and indefinite wrath, which
certainly awaits the unbelievers and the impious, but of
the near and proximate catastrophe of the Jewish nation.
He threatened the wrath of Allah awaiting that people
if they persisted in their sins and the rejection of his
mission and that of his colleague, Jesus Christ (pbuh) . The
coming calamity was the destruction of Jerusalem and the
final dispersion of Israel, which took place some thirty
years afterwards during the lifetime of many among his
hearers. Both he and Jesus (pbuh) announced the coming
of the Great Apostle of Allah whom the Patriarch Jacob
had announced under the title of Shiloha, and that at his
advent all prophetic and royal privileges and authority
would be taken away from the Jews; and, indeed, such
was the case some six centuries later, when their last
strongholds in the Hijaz were razed to the ground and
their principalities destroyed by Muhammad (pbuh) . The
increasingly dominating power of Rome in Syria and
Palestine was threatening the quasiautonomy of the Jews,
and the emigration current among the Jews had already

[1] This Hebrew name is wrongly written as “Saducees.” (The author).