[Serious] The Story

[The Grand Nudger]

If you want to appeal to Bayesian statistics, please state your prior probabilities.

I don't believe the math behind Baye's rule is necessary to make better judgments. It is still a way of thinking about evidence and how to change your mind in relation to it, even if your prior probabilities are nothing more than guesses.

The most reasonable thing to do is start with what is known—the dates mentioned in the book. Not arbitrarily assuming there's deception and pulling a different date out of thin air. You take the initial known date and start updating your confidence in it given new information.

Ever occur to you that you're the one assuming deception, John?  Missed and rejected content....

Further, by wildly misrepresenting how a book comes to be dated for what is clearly no reason other than your particular (and particularly christian) religious sensibilities masquerading as a "traditional" or "conservative" interpretation...this appears to be about as genuine as any immediately abandoned claim to some sort of "bayesian" analysis.

I think it's ironic that a strong preference for a claim to historicity leads to a rejection of an understanding of the book of daniel that lends it historicity, as opposed to the work of pure thematic fiction it would be otherwise.