A Call for Honesty in Christian Scholarship

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faith statement

At first glance, faith statements seem reasonable. There’s plenty to criticize, but let’s first see them from the standpoint of the Christian organizations that use them.

What’s a faith statement?

Faith statements are declarations like these.

  • “The mission of Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture is to advance the understanding that human beings and nature are the result of intelligent design rather than a blind and undirected process.”
  • A fragment from the faith statement of Houston Baptist University: “[Those connected with HBU must believe] that man was directly created by God, the virgin birth of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior, as the Son of God, [and] that He died for the sins of all men and thereafter arose from the grave.”
  • A fragment from Answers in Genesis: “By definition, no apparent, perceived or claimed evidence in any field, including history and chronology, can be valid if it contradicts the scriptural record.”

There are lots of interpretations of Christianity. If you want to donate to a Christian organization, you need to see if their beliefs line up with yours. The faith statement helps make that evaluation.

Academic freedom and conflicts of interest

Faith statements are good for donors, but they’re bad for the institutions that have them. A faith statement is a commitment to a conclusion. By accepting the conclusion beforehand, institutions governed by them forfeit their ability to defend or even comment on the points in those statements.

When a scholar from HBU concludes that the virgin birth is history rather than mythology, why believe it? That’s just the faith statement talking. The same is true when the Discovery Institute reports that intelligent design beats evolution or Answers in Genesis argues for a 6000-year-old earth.

Might the scholar simply have come to an unbiased conclusion? That’s possible, but how would we know? Mike Licona is a Christian scholar who found out the hard way that faith statements have teeth. In 2011, he lost two jobs because, in a 700-page book, he questioned the inerrancy of a single Bible verse (more here).

There is a stick raised above these Christian scholars that demands that they toe the line or else. With some conclusions predetermined to be correct and others incorrect, how do we know that their work is an honest search for the truth? We don’t, and indeed the work of every Christian scholar constrained by a faith statement is suspect.

By committing to the faith statement, they are ruling out certain conclusions before they’ve done any research. For example, the HBU statement says Jesus was born of a virgin. By signing that statement, a professor is publicly stating (among other things), “I promise to never conclude that the virgin birth was just a myth.”

Accepting and rejecting claims because of dogma rather than science got the Church into an embarrassing situation when it rejected Galileo’s heliocentric solar system. They only publicly retracted their error in 1992.

There are close to a thousand religiously affiliated U.S. colleges and universities plus many more ministries that make intellectual claims. The cloud of scholarly untrustworthiness hangs over a lot of Christians.

How things work in the real world: disclosure

Faith statements are a restriction on academic freedom according to The American Association of University Professors. But that’s not enough. In other areas of intellectual discourse, this constraint would be disclosed. Many medical journals have policies that demand that authors disclose conflicts of interest. The same is true for science journals (source). The American Historical Association’s “Statement on Standards of Professional Conduct” calls for historians to disclose any research assistance that could bias their conclusions.

Journalists are careful to avoid not only conflicts of interest but even the appearance of such conflicts. You’ve probably seen articles with an aside such as, “Full disclosure: I have a close relative who works for the company that is the subject of this article.”

The equivalent in judicial, legal, or governmental fields is called recusal—abstaining from participation in an issue that would cause a conflict of interest.

Does it matter when research about climate change is funded by a fossil fuel company rather than Greenpeace? Does it matter when research about smoking is funded by the Tobacco Institute rather than the National Institutes of Health? Does it matter when research about gun violence is funded by the National Rifle Association rather than the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence?

Just because research is funded by an organization with an interest in the result doesn’t mean that the research is flawed. The point is simply that that all potential biases should be made public.

Carry this thinking into Christian scholarship. Every blog post, journal article, book, or lecture from a Christian scholar constrained by a faith statement should have that faith statement disclosed.

The parallel world of Christian scholarship

Christian scholars seem to admire the respect given to fields like journalism, medicine, science, and so on. But rather than earning that respect the old-fashioned way, Christian scholarship creates a parallel world with training wheels.

Creationists can’t get published in Nature or Scientific American? No problem—Ken Ham’s Answers in Genesis has created its own “peer-reviewed journal,” Answers Research Journal. The problem is that this is a journal constrained by yet another faith statement. The author submission guidelines make clear that any paper will be rejected if it “conflicts with the best interests of [Answers in Genesis] as judged by its biblical stand and goals outlined in its statement of faith.”

Christian colleges can teach whatever they want and call it “science.” Their religious shibboleth for science make it noteworthy when they teach evolution—that is, when they teach actual science.

They give themselves the right to domesticate science to avoid anything that steps on their theological toes and have their own science-y books, conferences, and home schooling curriculum.

But their parallel world is just a play table with clay and crayons. They only dream that they’re sitting at the adult table. Christian scholarship has sold its soul.

Here’s the cause and effect relationship. Donations power the Christian machine, and they don’t happen without a faith statement; a faith statement means that any “scholarship” is suspect; poor scholarship means that Christian scholars can’t play with the big boys; and that leads to their parallel Christian world with a low bar that they can cross.

Correcting the problem

With this article, I’m calling on Christian scholars to, as a first step toward legitimacy, disclose faith statements they’re bound by. Not admitting to a faith statement that prevents honest research is to break the ninth commandment against lying. Unfortunately, any who read this will ignore it because to do otherwise would risk breaking the spell. It would call attention to a weakness.

What’s surprising is that they will ignore it without embarrassment. They don’t need to whisper about damage control among themselves. They can publicly use the word “recant” when demanding that an errant scholar return to the fold, unconcerned about how that makes them very unlike the scientists, historians, and the other conventional scholars they admire. That was the word used with Mike Licona, the Christian scholar called to account (above). They used “recant” four centuries ago for Galileo; why not for Licona now?

But times are changing. In the time of Galileo, the church wasn’t questioned in the West. They held the intellectual high ground. That’s no longer true, and I expect that the need for credibility will increasingly conflict with the need for donations. Ignoring conflicts of interest and doing “scholarship” with Christian training wheels will become less acceptable.

This crime called blasphemy was invented by priests
for the purpose of defending doctrines
not able to take care of themselves.
— Robert Green Ingersoll

Image credit: Denise Krebs, flickr, CC

Daniel’s End Times Prediction: Take Two

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Sunset

Wait a minute—another interpretation of Daniel 9? We recently explored one Christian interpretation here. If several interpretations are possible, this is clearly a malleable text, which doesn’t give much confidence in any clear and unambiguous prophecy in the Bible.

In fact, it’s worse than that. This has been fertile ground for imaginative Christians for two millennia, and many conflicting ideas have arisen. For a long list of scholars and amateurs who weighed in with their interpretation of the evidence, go here and search for “List of Historicist Biblical Expositors.”

(For the first post in this series, go here.)

Christian interpretation #2

This is the Dispensationalist interpretation (which gets into the rapture, premillennialism, Revelation as prophecy, and so on). I summarized Daniel 9:24–7 in a previous post, so go there if you need a refresher on the steps in that prophecy.

With this interpretation, start the clock with the Decree of Artaxerxes to rebuild the Temple given to Nehemiah in 444 BCE (Nehemiah 2:1–8). If we count ahead as before using 7 weeks + 62 weeks (–444 + 483 + 1 = 40 CE), the final week would be 40–47 CE. This is obviously too late to align with any popular dates associated with the death of Jesus.

The clever (or desperate) solution is to declare a “prophetic year” to be twelve 30-day months, creating a 360-day year. Supporters defend this by pointing to several verses where round numbers are used (42 months are equated with 1260 days, for example).

If this is correct, our years have been too long. They need to be scaled by 360 (days in a “prophetic year”) divided by 365.25 (days in a Julian year). Our 483-year jump is now only 476 years, and the final week begins in 33 CE. If we say that Jesus died in this year, we have the Anointed One dying at the right time (again assuming that we can add 7 weeks to the 62 weeks).

But what about that final week? Proponents of this hypothesis imagine an unspecified amount of time before this Tribulation Period starts, though the prophecy says nothing about this. If we allow this, however, the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE can explain the reference to destruction. But that has its own problems: the “ruler who will come” who destroyed the Temple is the one in the final week, so the Tribulation must’ve already happened in the first century, which means no rapture or tribulation in our own future.

Some proponents go so far as to imagine that this prophecy accurately predicts the crucifixion to the day. To those prophecy enthusiasts, I ask if anyone decoded the puzzle before the event. If it’s clear to you, some of the smart Jews of that time must’ve figured it out. They had almost five centuries, after all.

And what about Jews today? Daniel is their holy book, too. Are they convinced by this claim that Jesus is prophesied within Daniel? If not, I wonder what possible use this undecipherable prophecy could’ve had.

(For a detailed slap-down of this claim of to-the-day accuracy, I refer you to Sandoval.)

But this interpretation don’t work so good either

The first Christian interpretation of Daniel didn’t work, and this one is also full of problems.

Problem 1: We still have the initial verse saying that the atonement is at the end of 70 weeks. Christian theology says that the death of Jesus is the atonement, but this interpretation of Daniel demands that the final week is still in our future.

Problem 2: The “prophetic year” is nonsense. The Jewish calendar alternates between 29- and 30-day months, giving a 354-day year, and it has a complicated mechanism that adds months to keep it in sync with the solar year. Yes, there are Bible verses that give time spans of days that, if precise, would point to a 30-day month. No, there is no reason to think that a special, grossly wrong calendar was ever used. Do those who argue for the prophetic year use it to calculate the millennium as only 985 years? Do they scale time periods used in other prophecies? Consistency, please.

Problem 3: A floating final week isn’t what the prophecy says. There was no gap after the 7 weeks; why imagine one after the 62 weeks (I mean, besides that you’re trying to shoehorn the facts into your presuppositions)?

And most of the problems from the previous attempt apply as well. It makes no sense of the 7 week/62 week distinction, there is no justification for picking this start date out of the alternatives, and it ignores the evidence in Daniel that the final week was roughly 171–164 BCE.

Looking back to Daniel chapters 11–12, the prophecy discussed earlier, we saw the same idea of half of a 7-year period. Clearly, chapter 9 is yet one more interpretation of the same time period, and we need to bring in Antiochus Epiphanes, the Seleucid mustache-twisting villain of the Maccabean Revolt.

Reinterpreting the end as being during this time makes a lot more sense of the text. We’ll explore that interpretation in the final post in this series.

 To surrender to ignorance and call it God
has always been premature,
and it remains premature today.
— Isaac Asimov

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 3/27/14.)

Image credit: DominÖ, flickr, CC

God Is Love—Does that Make any Sense? (2 of 2)

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sunset lovers

Let’s wrap up our look at the popular Christian platitude “God is love.” In part 1, Christian apologist Peter Kreeft handwaved a clever yet ridiculous argument about how God being love made the Trinity mandatory.

Let’s continue with more of Kreeft’s groundless speculation of what God’s love is all about.

God is like a father

Imagine the progression in wisdom from a fool, to an ordinary human, to a sage, to God. Along this progression, positive qualities are amplified—patience, consideration, kindness, thoughtfulness—and negative qualities reduced—impatience, anger, jealousy, ego. “My way or the highway” is replaced by a yielding, selfless, whatever’s-best-for-you approach.

Peter Kreeft gave his insights about what the God end of the spectrum looks like as he spoke about God’s love (“God’s Existence” @1:05:45). He gave the example of a child who didn’t want to show his bad report card to his father. Why not, since the father loves him? Because he’s afraid that the father will get mad at how the child fell short of his potential.

Now dial up that relationship from father/child to God/us. When we adults show our report card to God, does he respond in a patient and considerate way, trying to work with our limitations to find what’s best for us? Apparently not. Kreeft says that God’s perception of our failings is far more acute than the father’s and God gets into a justifiable rage when we make a mistake. So, you see, God’s throwing us into hell forever for the smallest sin is not petty vindictiveness but Deep Love. (And the inmates of hell get to feel the warmth of God’s love for a long, long time.)

Kreeft is our Virgil as he guides us through the afterlife. You might think that injuring or offending God would be as likely as injuring Superman. You might think that God is far more sage-like than any human sage.

Nope. Kreeft tells us that “Love makes God more formidable, not less,” and “Infinite love is utterly intolerant in any imperfection in the beloved.” Gee—who’d’ve guessed? Heaven sounds like George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four where War is Peace and Love is Hate.

(Christians: when you puzzle over what atheists could possibly find troubling about your philosophy, this kind of groundless handwaving is part of the problem.)

See also: Why is God Hidden?

Does the Bible show us that God is loving?

“Love” is not the punch line of the Job story. Job was the pawn in a wager between Yahweh and Satan, and Job’s life was destroyed (but in the end God gave him another set of children to replace the ones that were killed, so it’s all good). Job complained about his undeserved bad fortune, and God made clear to Job that he (God) could do whatever the heck he wanted, and Job could just shut the hell up.

“God is love” isn’t the takeaway from the Old Testament. It isn’t interested in showcasing God’s love but rather his majesty and power in cases like drowning the Egyptian army or burning Sodom and Gomorrah. The lesson from the story of Abraham sacrificing Isaac was not love but obedience. “ ‘Should you not fear me?’ declares the Lord. ‘Should you not tremble in my presence?’ ” (Jeremiah 5:22).

Christian children can be introduced to Old Testament stories with toys, but they omit the full story. The Noah’s Ark playset contains a handful of toy animals and people that survived, not the millions who drowned. The David action figure doesn’t come with a bag of 200 Philistine foreskins, Samson doesn’t come with the jawbone of an ass (with which he killed a thousand men), and Joshua doesn’t come with the corpses of any of the millions killed in the conquest of Palestine.

The New Testament isn’t much better, and it invented hell for most of us. Jesus makes this clear: “Wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it” (Matthew 7:13–14).

Love isn’t the obvious theme in individual human lives around the world today, but as love-poor as the earth is, the empty space that composes almost all the universe contains none.

Former pastor Rob Bell wrote Love Wins, in which he argued for a kinder, gentler afterlife than the traditional Christian view. That was a little too much love for one traditionalist who spoke for many when he said, “Adjusting the gospel to placate human rebellion against God transforms the good news into a compromise with worldliness, something we should earnestly avoid.”

Let me close with a fragment from a modern hymn.

Scorned by the ones He came to save.
Till on that cross as Jesus died,
The wrath of God was satisfied.

This portrait of God was so unpleasant that the hymn was finally removed from a hymnal.

There’s not a lot of love happening here. When listing God’s attributes, love isn’t on the short list.

Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
— Benjamin Franklin

Image credit: Bcow, flickr, CC

Daniel’s End Times Prediction

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Scholars are largely agreed that Daniel’s “prophecies” are actually prophecies after the event. These false prophecies were so common in antiquity that they have their own scholarly name: vaticinia ex eventu.

The book of Daniel was written in about 165 BCE (as discussed in Part 1 of this topic), not during the sixth-century-BCE captivity of the hero of the book. Though there may be debate on the issue, this late dating is based on scholarship, not atheists’ attempt at avoiding compelling evidence for a miraculous prophecy.

Dating of Daniel

More than just the “prophecies” failing after 165 BCE point to this date. Daniel wasn’t included in the Hebrew Bible’s canon, which was closed around 200 BCE; it wasn’t referenced in the Wisdom of Sirach (c. 180 BCE), which referenced almost every other book of the Old Testament; and it makes errors in the oldest historical claims (for example, it claims that Darius the Mede conquered Babylon, though this king is unknown to history).

Daniel looks very much like other apocalyptic writings of the period such as Baruch, Esdras, and the books of Enoch. These works are not anonymous but are pseudonymous—that is, falsely attributed to a respected figure of antiquity. A “rediscovered” old book from an ancient authority would carry much weight. Many of these books used Daniel’s trick of listing “predictions” from known history so that whatever had yet to occur would seem credible. Finally, these apocalyptic books all predict that the current painful age would soon end.

Daniel’s 70 weeks prophecy

Daniel 9:24–7 gives the famous prophecy that many think predicts the crucifixion of Jesus. I’ll summarize the claims it makes, sometimes with a paraphrase, but feel free to check this against the actual text.

I. “Seventy weeks [“week” is used here to mean seven years, not seven days] are decreed for your people and your holy city to finish transgression, to put an end to sin, to atone for wickedness, to bring in everlasting righteousness, to seal up vision and prophecy and to anoint the Most Holy Place.”

Equating a week with 7 years, like we call 10 years a “decade,” is seen in Greek literature, so this is a reasonable interpretation. The use of 70 comes from Jeremiah’s prophecy that the Judean captives taken to Babylon would return after 70 years.

This passage tells us we’ve got a long and sinful period of time (seventy weeks of years is 70×7 = 490 years), but things will be great at the end.

II. “From the time the word goes out to restore and rebuild Jerusalem until the Anointed One, the ruler, comes, there will be seven weeks and sixty-two weeks.”

When does the clock start? From the command to rebuild Jerusalem. When does it end? When the Anointed One comes. This isn’t a messianic reference, however, because “anointed one” can be applied to many people, including the high priest.

Pulling out the 7 weeks is confusing. Is it concurrent with the 62 weeks? If so, why even mention it (except to find a way to get to 70)? Or does the 62 weeks follow the 7-week period? If so, why not just add them together (except as an excuse to use the number 7, the number of completion)? No commentator has a great answer.

III. After 62 weeks, the Anointed One will be put to death.

IV. “The ruler who will come” will destroy (or corrupt) the city and the sanctuary.

V. War will be continuous, and then the end will be swift.

VI. This ruler will make a covenant with many for one final week.

VII. In the middle of this 7-year period, the ruler will prevent Temple offerings. “And at the temple he will set up an abomination that causes desolation, until the end that is decreed is poured out on him.”

 Christian interpretation #1

Start the clock with the Decree of Artaxerxes to rebuild the temple, given to Ezra in 458 BCE (Ezra 7:11–26). From this date, count ahead 7 weeks and then 62 weeks (69×7 = 483 years). Remembering that there was no year 0, the math is: –458 + 483 + 1 = 26 CE. This is the beginning of the final week, starting when Jesus was baptized.

Halfway through this final week, Jesus (the Anointed One) is put to death, which finishes the “transgression” and brings in “everlasting righteousness.”

The final week ends in 33 CE, with the conversion of Paul and Cornelius and inaugurating the mission to the Gentiles.

Problem 1: There are loads of problems. First, the weeks are off. Even if you infer that the Anointed One will be killed after the 62 weeks which begins after the 7 weeks (which isn’t really what it says), that makes his death in 26 CE, too early. And the first point makes clear that the atonement happens at the end of the 70 weeks, not halfway through the final week. The Anointed One’s death can’t be the atonement, since they’re separated by that final week.

Problem 2: It doesn’t identify the destroying “ruler who will come” or the “abomination that causes desolation.”

Problem 3: It makes no sense of the 7 week/62 week distinction. Why not just say 69 weeks?

Problem 4: The decree from Ezra 7 is just one of at least four plausible starting dates given in various places in the Old Testament. Why pick this one? (These four dates are given in an appendix to this post.)

Problem 5: It ignores the overwhelming evidence that the final week was roughly 171–164 BCE (see previous post).

Problem 6: If Daniel was written in the sixth-century BCE, why didn’t anyone during all that time understand and anticipate this prophecy? And the gospels don’t record anyone saying, “Hey, guys? Has anyone made the connection between Daniel’s prophecy and Jesus? It’s spooky—it’s pretty much talking about . . . wow—it’s talking about now.”

Problem 7: Remember the last time we saw the phrase “abomination that causes desolation”? It was the sacrifice of pigs to Zeus in the Jewish Temple, as ordered by Antiochus Epiphanes. Bringing Antiochus in would address more than this—“the ruler who will come” to destroy, continuous war (the beginning of the Maccabean Revolt), the covenant (Antiochus made agreements with Hellenistic Jewish leaders, splitting them away from the traditionalists), and so on. The only problem is that this destroys this Jesus-centric prophecy.

Continued with a different Christian interpretation of this prophecy that claims consequences in our own day here.

Faith isn’t a virtue; 
it is the glorification of voluntary ignorance. 
— Anonymous

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 3/21/14.)

Photo credit: Wikipedia

God Is Love—Does That Make Any Sense?

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rain lovers

Christians delight in telling us that “God is love” (1 John 4:16), but what does this even mean? We can compare this to other New Testament declarations that God is truthful, faithful, and just, but these are adjectives. This doesn’t help us understand God’s relationship to love, which is a noun. We can find “God is light” (equating God to a noun), but this sounds like a metaphor.

Is this phrase saying that “God” and “love” are synonyms? That makes no sense. Love didn’t destroy Sodom and Gomorrah or drown everyone in a global flood.

Or maybe the goal was to assign love as one of God’s properties. Why not then say, “God is loving”? And is love to God what love is to humans? If so, how can these relationships be equivalent when we wouldn’t say “Love is one of Mary’s properties”? No, we’d simply say, “Mary is loving” or “Mary is a loving person” or something similar.

Never mind. The original epistle was written in Greek, which gives Christians some ambiguity to play with as they create their own interpretation. Endless articles have been written about how fabulously loving God is, and I don’t much care how Christians spin “God is love.” What’s more interesting is the tangled tales apologists weave as they improvise their fantasy world.

Love and the Trinity

Peter Kreeft uses love to defend the bizarre idea of the Trinity. He argues that the Trinity is actually an asset to grounding this love question.

If God is not a Trinity, God is not love. For love requires three things: a lover, a beloved, and a relationship between them. If God were only one person, he could be a lover, but not love itself. The Father loves the Son and the Son loves the Father, and the Spirit is the love proceeding from both, from all eternity. If that were not so, then God would need us, would be incomplete without us, without someone to love. Then his creating us would not be wholly unselfish, but selfish, from his own need.

So Kreeft imagines the three members of the Trinity loving each other for the eternity before the universe was created. The only thing in existence was the Trinity, but how would that work? There was no development, progress, or even change of any kind, so what would love mean in this static environment? The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit might as well have been marble statues. Where’s the love?

See also: William Lane Craig Misrepresents Christianity and Insults Islam

Keep these statues in mind as we think about how love works with humans. We’ll sacrifice for our beloved. We’ll forgive our beloved’s errors and trust in the same courtesy in return. We value a loving relationship because it is temporary and uncertain. We contrast loving relationships and feelings of loving bliss with the far greater number of ordinary relationships and periods of time.

None of this is possible for the omniscient, invulnerable, unchanging Trinity. So tell me again how “love” could describe the relationship between the persons of the Trinity. (More here.)

William Lane Craig piles on

WLC has a similar take. Here he’s favorably comparing Christianity’s Trinitarian concept against Islam’s strict monotheism:

If I am right that love is of the very essence and nature of God then when there was nothing (when there were no human beings to love) then whom did God love? There isn’t anybody else to love other than God. . . . And this is, I think, a very good argument for a plurality of persons within God over against Unitarianism which says that God is just one person. . . . A Unitarian God cannot do that; cannot be essentially loving. This gives, I think, a very persuasive reason for thinking that there is a plurality of persons within God himself so that within the godhead there are eternal love relationships that have existed forever and now are manifested toward human beings with the creation of the world.

Uh huh. Show me that you got that from the Bible instead of your imagination.

“Good” emotions like love and compassion and “bad” emotions like jealousy and anger each have their role. We categorize them as good and bad simply because we typically see too little of the good ones and too much of the bad ones.

The palette of human emotions that we have exists simply because it provided survival benefit during our evolutionary path. I’m sure Kreeft and Craig want to imagine that they’re grounded in something less arbitrary than evolution. They have no good reason to say that or to elevate love to the pinnacle of emotions. The naturalistic explanation is sufficient.

Why imagine that love is that big a deal from a cosmic perspective? We think it is, but that’s our evolutionary programming talking. Our emotions and morals make sense to us because of evolution, but they’re in no sense objectively the best. If we were Romulans or Vulcans or Klingons or maybe even Spartans, we’d think differently. Maybe honor would be at the top if we were Klingons, or maybe respect for wisdom if Vulcans.

We can’t even agree among ourselves what the best moral actions are. Why would our morals be universally correct?

It’s like the fable of the blind men and the elephant. Humans are like the guy who grabs a leg and says, “An elephant is like a tree.” Okay, from that perspective, it is. And for humans, love might be the pinnacle of human emotional expression. But let’s not take it any farther than that. In a universe that might have millions of independently evolved intelligent species, what is obvious to us is just a relative interpretation.

Concluded in part 2 with more nutty, groundless speculation on love by Peter Kreeft.

We have just enough religion to make us hate,
but not enough to make us love one another.
— Jonathan Swift

 Image credit: t.germeau, flickr, CC

Liars for Jesus: Does Daniel Predict the Future?

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This is post #1000!

This blog has had over 2.5 million views and a quarter of a million comments, and it recently had its sixth anniversary. Thanks for your readership!

 

daniel

 

The book of Daniel is the story of a Judean nobleman taken into captivity in Babylon in the sixth century BCE. If it was actually written in the sixth century, as it claims, it does a remarkable job of predicting the future.

Nebuchadnezzar’s frightening dream

Daniel is an advisor to Babylon’s King Nebuchadnezzar and is called in to interpret a disturbing dream. The king is admirably skeptical: he demands that his wise men tell him the meaning of the dream without telling them what the dream was. If they have the wisdom to interpret the dream, they must surely have the wisdom to know what it was.

Good for you, O king—we could do with more of that skepticism today.

Of the king’s advisors, only Daniel is up to the challenge. In chapter 2, we learn that the king had dreamed of an enormous statue with gold head, silver chest, bronze loins, iron legs, and feet of iron plus clay. The statue is then destroyed by a huge rock.

Daniel tells him that the statue shows the future succession of kingdoms. Gold represents Babylon, and the subsequent kingdoms become baser (gold to silver to bronze to iron) and more powerful. Finally, they will be swept away by the rock of God’s kingdom.

The four beasts

Daniel then has his own vision, a dream of four beasts (chapter 7). We see the beasts in succession, and, like the succession of metals, they represent the future kingdoms. The first is a lion with eagle wings (though we might call it a griffin, that also describes a cherub), then a bear, then a leopard. The final beast has iron teeth and is the most terrifying and destructive. It initially had ten horns, which represent ten kings, but then three were replaced by a new little horn that spoke boastfully. Again, all is swept away in the end.

It’s not too hard to map these symbols onto the history of the Middle East. (My primary skeptical source for this analysis was “The Failure of Daniel’s Prophecies” by Chris Sandoval—thorough and highly recommended.)

In Babylon—remember, that’s the context of the story—the cardinal directions are represented by animals. The lion is the south (Babylon), the bear north (Media), and the leopard east (Persia). That leaves the west for the dragon (Greece).

Mapping this onto Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, Babylon is gold, silver Media comes next, bronze Persia is next, and the iron Greek Empire under Alexander the Great is last. The feet of iron and clay represent the four weaker successor states to Alexander’s empire. The most important of these to Daniel’s story are the Seleucid Empire in Syria and the Ptolemaic Empire in Egypt.

The ten horns appear to be ten kings of the Seleucid Empire, starting with Alexander (356–323 BCE) and ending with Antiochus IV Epiphanies (215–164 BCE). Antiochus is the boastful little horn that replaced three other horns, which are three relatives killed to allow Antiochus to take the Seleucid throne.

And now it gets interesting …

Daniel has a final vision (chapter 11), describing the various wars between the kings of the north and south—that is, the Seleucid (Syrian) and Ptolemaic (Egyptian) kings, respectively. The account becomes more detailed as Antiochus Epiphanes—a “contemptible person” (Dan. 11:21)—takes power in 175 BCE. The ebb and flow of the power struggle is accurately described, including a battle where a Roman fleet prevented his victory over Egypt.

Judah was part of the Seleucid Empire at this time, and a Jewish force took advantage of the king’s absence in Egypt to capture Jerusalem. Antiochus retaliated by killing 40,000 Jews, enslaving an equal number, outlawing Jewish worship, and establishing an altar to Zeus in the Jewish temple on which pigs were sacrificed. This “abomination of desolation” (Dan. 11:31) happened in 167 BCE.

Prophecy looking forward or history looking back?

Could this accurate history have been written from the vantage point of the sixth century BCE? If so, Daniel lost his mojo at this point, because the “prophecy” then falls apart. Daniel says that Antiochus would once more attack Egypt, winning this time, and return to camp in central Palestine. And then, like the stone that destroyed the statue in Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, Michael the Archangel would open a bigly can of whoop-ass on the world that would make Noah’s Flood look like rain on a picnic. The good and wicked from all of history would go to their appropriate afterlives, and the world would end.

From the abomination until the end of the world in mid-164 BCE would be three and a half years.

But it didn’t work out that way. Antiochus didn’t fight Egypt again but took part of his army to address troubles in the east, leaving another force in Palestine to stamp out the Maccabean Revolt. Incredibly, this Jewish uprising against the mighty Seleucid empire was eventually successful, and the Hasmonean dynasty ruled a semi-autonomous and then fully independent Judea for about a century. Antiochus died of a sudden illness in 164.

Conclusions

Daniel “predicted” Alexander the Great, the four successor states, and the pitiless response by Antiochus in 167 BCE, but then he imagined a nonexistent victory over Egypt, missed Judah’s successful revolt, and raised a false alarm about the end of the world.

What seems likelier—that the book was written in the sixth century BCE and correctly predicted the major events in that part of the world up to just after 167 BCE but then lost its touch when it predicted the end of the world a few years later? Or that it was falsely attributed to a respected sixth-century BCE patriarch and was instead written shortly after 167 to give encouragement to a beleaguered Jewish population? In fact, this kind of after-the-fact prophecy was common enough during that time to have a scholarly name: prophecy post eventum.

Continue with more on Daniel.

Other posts on prophecy:

The scientific theory is the modern equivalence of the prophecy.
— comment by MNb

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 3/19/14.)

Photo credit: Wikipedia