The Book of Daniel-Bogus

Many of the canonical New Testament books are bogus, in all likelihood. But in the Old Testament, we have the law-the Pentateuch, the Torah-and the prophets, and everyone from UFO contactees and ancient astronauts charioteers to secular Jews regards them as "the straight stuff".

The Book of Daniel, the bulwark for so much of the end-times prophesy howling in our day, falls short, too. Frank Zindler reports:



"But could they? Or was their "prophecy" actually prophetia ex eventu — prophecy written after the event? Space does not permit an analysis of all the prophets of the Bible. But one may learn a great deal about prophecy in general by examining carefully a specific example: the Book of Daniel. In particular, one will want to consider whether or not the book could possibly have been written at the time the prophet Daniel is supposed to have lived — the period of the Babylonian Captivity or Exile — or whether it was composed centuries later, after most of the events "predicted" in the book had already occurred.

Evidence Against Exilic Composition

There is very solid evidence 1 which indicates that the Book of Daniel was written much later than the Babylonian Captivity (597-538 B.C.). the "Exile" period to which Christian tradition has assigned the composition of the work. Scientific scholarship has shown that the Book of Daniel was actually written around 165 B.C. — long after the Exile — at a time when the Seleucid king of Syria, Antiochus Epiphanes, was trying to stamp out the Jewish religion. Daniel was not writing predictive prophecy, we now know, but rather history — and rather sloppy history at that!

Error In Verse One

The main line of evidence against composition around the time of the Babylonian Captivity involves the great number of factual errors in the book which concern the time of the Exile — errors which are in glaring contrast to the considerable precision with which the later Greek period is described (the period allegedly in the future, but actually the period in which the book was written).

The errors begin with Verse 1:

In the third year of the reign of Jehoiakim king of Judah. Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon came to Jerusalem and laid siege to it. The Lord delivered Jehoiakim king of Judah into his power, together with all that was left of the vessels of the house of God; and he carried them off to the land of Shinar... (Dan. 1:1-2).

Isaac Asimov sums up the Daniel-dating problem very well:

Where Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel make no anachronistic mistakes concerning the times supposed to be theirs, the Book of Daniel is replete with anachronisms as far as it deals with the period of the Exile. It treats, however, of the Greek period with easy correctness and while this might be explained by those dedicated to the literal acceptance of the Bible as a case of prophetic insight, it is odd that Daniel should be so correct in his view on what was to him the "future" and so hazy about his view of what was to him the "present." It is easier to believe that the writer was a man of Greek times, to whom the Exile was an event that had taken place four centuries earlier and concerning the fine details of which he was a bit uncertain.

Implications Of The Fraud

The Book of Daniel has, since ancient times, been considered to be an important Old Testament source of Messianic doctrines. The use of the expression "Son of Man," the prediction of "an anointed one" (priest or messiah) who will be "cut off (Dan 9:26), and other passages have been thought by many to presage the coming of Jesus. How embarrassing for true believers, therefore, is the fact that Jesus himself seems to have been unaware of the fraudulent nature of the book. On at least one occasion — when forecasting the end of his world -- he referred to the Book of Daniel:

So when you see "the abomination of desolation," of which the prophet Daniel spoke, standing in the holy place ... then those who are in Judea must take to the hills (Matt. 24: 15-16).

The fact that Jesus not only did not recognize the fraud, but was also unaware that the "abomination of desolation" had already appeared nearly two centuries earlier, does not reflect favorably either on Jesus's wisdom or his knowledge of history. If Jesus was mistaken in regard to the Book of Daniel, we may well ask, "What other mistakes did he make?"

http://www.atheists.org/christianity/daniel.html