Prophecies of Daniel.

[Justtristo]

Okay, let's split up these criticisms and address them separately. I'll address the significance of the date firstly.

One of the mss found at Qumran is reliably dated to late 2nd century BC (ie ~125 BC). The DSS themselves were the library (or part of the library) of works owned by a Jewish sect called the Essenes. Virtually all DSS date within 2nd century BC to first century AD; meaning we can reasonably infer that the majority of the scrolls themselves were penned by the Essenes. Some, however, would have been owned by the sectarians previously and added to the collection, thus we have the earliest dated fragment to the very late 3rd century BC.

You cannot discount the possibility that that manuscript of Daniel elsewhere and by somebody who was not a member of the Qumran. Only later on in the 1st century CE the document ended up with the Qumran community. Much the same has happened to the old books I have on my shelf, which were produced many years ago and were owned by one or more persons, before I got it.

Where was the book of Daniel written? Was it written at Qumran? It is near universally accepted that it was not written at Qumran, it was likely penned at Babylon. Thus we can conclude that the 125 BC mss that was discovered at Qumran is not the autograph. So it had to be written sometime prior to this - and gained enough circulation that a Jewish sect would be interested in having a number of copies of it. All this suggests that it was indeed canonized well before the 2dn century BC - the Essenes wouldn't have been interested in the book if it was a contemporary work.

The date which the scrolls at Qumran were deposited was likely the late 1st to early 2nd century CE, which was something like two centuries after the Macabbean revolt which was in the earlier half of the 2nd century BCE. That is quite a long time and certainly by the first century CE Daniel was considered scripture and Daniel was considered a Prophet by the Jews (including Josephus).

Also people back then were much more credulous than us modern people, so it could not taken very long for people to believe that a book like Daniel was actually written by a guy who lived back during the Persian period. This article gives you an idea how credulous the people of the Greco-Roman world were during the first centuries of the 1st millennium CE, I cannot see how the Jews of the period we are covering in this discussion were any less so.

http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/r...kooks.html

Now we move on to internal biblical evidence. Daniel appears three times in Ezekiel. He is mentioned by Jesus himself as a prophet (Matthew 24:15; Mark 13:14), Jesus also uses the title "Son of Man" for himself numerous times - this is taken directly from Daniel 7:13.

In Ezekiel Daniel is portrayed as some ancient figure like Noah and Job, not as a contemporary of Ezekiel. The same sort of Daniel appears in Urgatic texts (14th century BCE), it is clear from my point of view that Daniel is an old mythical character in Levantine Semitic culture (which the Old Testament emerged out of), who somebody decided to use as the main character of the book of Daniel we find in the bible.

Finally, among all the evidence, there isn't any that proves that the book is a forgery, or that it was written in stages. Thus the evidence is very strong that the book was not written in the 2nd century BC, and had to be written well before this time.

I am not claiming that how ever wrote Daniel in the first place was creating a forgery on purpose. Given this was a very credulous age, it is not surprising that people fairly quickly would believe that the book of Daniel was actually written by person who was a court official in Babylon around the time of the exile. Also this same person was a prophet of god, who is essentially is somebody who is an mouthpiece of god.