Page 189 - Demo

185I 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 hellfire. 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 wasthe destruction ofJerusalem 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 wasthreatening 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).