Page 252 - Demo

248Man” 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 assayingsin the mouth of Jesus (pbuh) only make idiots ofthemselves.(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” andthat of Ezra -the Fourth Book of Esdras in the Vulgatespeak 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 Jerusalemand 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.