Prophecies of Daniel.

[Justtristo]

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

Other people were so the Jews must have been too? Don't think so- the Jews were very different when it came to discerning between false prophets and mythology. the Jews had many guidelines for examining false prophets, and carefully excluded apocryphal writings. If Daniel was written in 167 BC as a mimic of a 600 BC tale- that would be a lot more obvious than most apocryphal books. You can say that it was a very credulous time, but it seems the Jews were not so; Baruch was too a prophetic book, but was rejected at the time of its introduction and never was received as genuine by the Jews. They did the same to 'Daniel 13', but not to the rest of Daniel.

Richard Carrier in a couple of paragraphs in the article quotes Josephus to describe how gullable even the Jews were back then.

Beyond the bible, the historian Josephus supplies some insights. Writing toward the end of the first century, himself an eye-witness of the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D, he tells us that the region was filled with "cheats and deceivers claiming divine inspiration" (Jewish War, 2.259-60; Jewish Antiquities, 20.167), entrancing the masses and leading them like sheep, usually to their doom. The most successful of these "tricksters" appears to be "the Egyptian" who led a flock of 30,000 believers around Palestine (Jewish War, 2.261-2; Paul is mistaken for him by a Roman officer in Acts 21:38). This fellow even claimed he could topple the walls of Jerusalem with a single word (Jewish Antiquities, 20.170), yet it took a massacre at the hands of Roman troops to finally instill doubt in his followers.

Twenty years later, a common weaver named Jonathan would attract a mob of the poor and needy, promising to show them many signs and portents (Jewish War, 7.437-8). Again, it took military intervention to disband the movement. Josephus also names a certain Theudas, another "trickster" who gathered an impressive following in Cyrene around 46 A.D., claiming he was a prophet and could part the river Jordan (Jewish Antiquities, 20.97). This could be the same Theudas mentioned in Acts 5:36. Stories like these also remind us of the faithful following that Simon was reported to have had in Acts 8:9-11, again showing how easy it was to make people believe you had "the power of god" at your disposal. Jesus was not unique in that respect.