Page 249 - New English Book L

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Man” was expected to accomplish! To declare to the Jews
under the grip of Pilate that he was “the Son of Man,” and
then to pay tribute to Caesar; and to confess that “the Son
of Man had nowhere to lay his head;” and then to postpone
the deliverance of the people from the Roman yoke to an
indefinite future, was practically to trifle with his nation;
and those who put all these incoherencies as sayings in the
mouth of Jesus (pbuh) only make idiots of themselves.

(b) Jesus (pbuh) knew better than everybody else did in
Israel who “the Son of Man” was and what his mission
was. He was to dethrone the profligate kings and to cast
them into the hell-fire. The “Revelation of Baruch” and
that of Ezra -the Fourth Book of Esdras in the Vulgate-
speak of the appearance of “the Son of Man” who will
establish the powerful Kingdom of Peace upon the ruins
of the Roman Empire. All these Apocryphal Revelations
show the state of the Jewish mind about the coming of
the last great Deliverer whom they surname “the Son
of Man” and “the Messiah.” Jesus (pbuh) could not be
unaware of and unfamiliar with this literature and this
ardent expectation of his people. He could not assume
either of those two titles to himself in the sense which
the Sanhedrin - that Supreme Tribunal of Jerusalem-
and Judaism attached to them; for he was not “the Son
of Man” and “the Messiah,” because he had no political
programme and no social scheme, and because he
was himself the precursor of “the Son of Man’, and of
“the Messiah” -the Adon, the Conquering Prophet, the
Anointed and crowned Sultan of the Prophets.

(c) Critical examination of the surname “Son of
Man” put three and eighty times in the mouth of the
master will and must result in the only conclusion that he
never appropriated it to himself; and in fact, he often uses
that title in the third person. A few examples will suffice
to convince us that Jesus (pbuh) applied that surname to
someone else who was to appear in the future.