Contradictions in the Resurrection Account

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Contradictions ResurrectionHow many days did Jesus teach after his resurrection? Most Christians know that “He appeared to them over a period of forty days” (Acts 1:3). But the supposed author of that book wrote elsewhere that he ascended into heaven the same day as the resurrection (Luke 24:51).

When Jesus died, did an earthquake open the graves of many people, who walked around Jerusalem and were seen by many? Only Matthew reports this remarkable event. It’s hard to imagine any reliable version of the story omitting this zombie apocalypse.

The different accounts of the resurrection are full of contradictions like this. They can’t even agree on whether Jesus was crucified on the day before Passover (John) or the day after (the other gospels).

  • What were the last words of Jesus? Three gospels give three different versions.
  • Who buried Jesus? Matthew says that it was Joseph of Arimathea. No, apparently it was the Jews and their rulers, all strangers to Jesus (Acts).
  • How many women came to the tomb Easter morning? Was it one, as told in John? Two (Matthew)? Three (Mark)? Or more (Luke)?
  • Did an angel cause a great earthquake that rolled back the stone in front of the tomb? Yes, according to Matthew. The other gospels are silent on this extraordinary detail.
  • Who did the women see at the tomb? One person (Matthew and Mark) or two (Luke and John)?
  • Was the tomb already open when they got there? Matthew says no; the other three say yes.
  • Did the women tell the disciples? Matthew and Luke make clear that they did so immediately. But Mark says, “Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid.” And that’s where the book ends, which makes it a mystery how Mark thinks that the resurrection story ever got out.
  • Did Mary Magdalene cry at the tomb? That makes sense—the tomb was empty and Jesus’s body was gone. At least, that’s the story according to John. But wait a minute—in Matthew’s account, the women were “filled with joy.”
  • Did Mary Magdalene recognize Jesus? Of course! She’d known him for years. At least, Matthew says that she did. But John makes clear that she didn’t.
  • Could Jesus’s followers touch him? John says no; the other gospels say yes.
  • Where did Jesus tell the disciples to meet him? In Galilee (Matthew and Mark) or Jerusalem (Luke and Acts)?
  • Who saw Jesus resurrected? Paul says that a group of over 500 people saw him (1 Cor. 15:6). Sounds like crucial evidence, but why don’t any of the gospels record it?
  • Should the gospel be preached to everyone? In Matthew 28:19, Jesus says to “teach all nations.” But hold on—in the same book he says, “Do not go among the Gentiles or enter any town of the Samaritans” (Matt. 10:5). Which is it?

And there are lots more (thanks, Richard Russell).

Many Christians cite the resurrection as the most important historical claim that the Bible makes. If the resurrection is true, they argue, the gospel message must be taken seriously. I’ll agree with that. But how reliable is an account riddled with these contradictions?

Christian responses

I’ve seen Christians respond in three ways.

(1) They’ll nitpick the definition of “contradiction.” Contradictions, they’ll say, are two sentences of the form “A” and “not-A.” For example: “Jesus was born in Bethlehem” and “Jesus was not born in Bethlehem.” Being precise helps make sure we communicate clearly, but this can also be a caltrop argument, a way of dodging the issue. The issues listed above sure sound like contradictions to me, but if you’d prefer to imagine that we’re talking about “incongruities” or “inconsistencies,” feel free.

(2) They’ll respond to these “inconsistencies” by harmonizing the gospels. That is, instead of following the facts where they lead and considering that the gospels might be legend instead of history, they insist on their Christian presupposition, reject any alternatives, and bludgeon all the gospels together like a misshapen Swiss Army knife.

  • How many women were at the tomb? Obviously, five or more, our apologist will say. When John only says that Mary Magdalene came to the tomb, he’s not saying that others didn’t come, right? Checkmate, atheists!
  • Why didn’t all the gospels note that a group of 500 people saw Jesus (instead of only Paul)? Why didn’t they all record the earthquakes and the zombie apocalypse (instead of only Matthew)? Our apologist will argue that each author is entitled to make editorial adjustments as he sees fit.
  • Was the tomb already open or not? Did Mary Magdalene recognize Jesus or not? Did Jesus remain for 40 days or not? Should the gospel be preached to everyone or not? Did the women tell the disciples or not? Was Jesus crucified the day after Passover or not? Who knows what he’ll come up with, but our apologist will have some sort of harmonization for these, too.

Yep, the ol’ kindergarten try.

(3) They’ll try to turn this weakness into a strength by arguing that four independent stories (the gospels aren’t, but never mind) shouldn’t agree on every detail. If they did, one would imagine collusion rather than accurate biography written using eyewitness testimony. Yes, biography and collusion are two possibilities, but a third is that this could be legend.

Let’s drop any preconceptions and find the best explanation.

Wandering in a vast forest at night, 
I have only a faint light to guide me. 
A stranger appears and says to me: 
“My friend, you should blow out your candle 
in order to find your way more clearly.”
This stranger is a theologian.
—Denis Diderot

(This is a modified version of a post originally published 10/17/11.)

Photo credit: ThinkGeek

Jesus: Just One More Dying and Rising Savior

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It’s Easter season. As with Christmas, I’ll be rerunning some posts relevant to the season for the next week or so. I hope you enjoy them.

EasterHistory records many dying-and-rising saviors. Examples from the Ancient Near East that preceded the Jesus story include Tammuz, Osiris, Dionysus, Adonis, Attis, and Baal. Here is a brief introduction.

Tammuz was the Sumerian god of food and vegetation and dates from c. 2000 BCE. His death was celebrated every spring. One version of the story has him living in the underworld for six months each year, alternating with his sister.

Osiris was killed by his brother Set and cut into many pieces and scattered. His wife Isis gathered the pieces together, and he was reincarnated as the Egyptian god of the underworld and judge of the dead. He was worshipped well before 2000 BCE.

Dionysus (known as Bacchus in Roman mythology) was the Greek god of wine and dates to the 1200s BCE. The son of Zeus and a mortal woman, Dionysus was killed and then brought back to life.

Adonis (from 600 BCE) is a Greek god who was killed and then returned to life by Zeus.

Attis (from 1200 BCE) is a vegetation god from central Asia Minor, brought back to life by his lover Cybele.

In the Canaanite religion, Baal (or Baʿal) was part of a cycle of life and death. Baal and Mot are sons of the supreme god El (yes, one of the names of the Jewish god). When El favored the death god Mot over Baal, the heat of the summer took over and Baal died. He was resurrected when his sister-wife killed Mot.

All these gods:

  • came from regions that were close enough to the crossroads of Israel (Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Asia Minor) for the ideas to have plausibly traveled there,
  • were worshipped well before the time of Jesus, and
  • died and rose again.

This is strong evidence either that the gospel writers knew of and could have been influenced by resurrecting god stories from other cultures or that these stories influenced the Jesus story when it was told from person to person. Remember that a newly converted gentile might have been a Dionysus worshipper. If the Jesus story at that point didn’t have him rising from the dead, memories that his prior god did would’ve put pressure on the Jesus story to improve in that direction.

Is it possible that Judea at this time was a backwater, and the people were unaware of the ideas from the wider world? That seems unlikely. The book of 2 Maccabees, written in c. 124 BCE, laments at how Hellenized the country was becoming. It says that the high priest installed by Seleucid king Antiochus Epiphanes “at once shifted his countrymen over to the Greek way of life.” The book complains about “an extreme of Hellenization and increase in the adoption of foreign ways” and the youth “putting the highest value upon Greek forms of prestige.”

In fact, the gospels themselves report that the idea of dying and rising again was a familiar concept. Jesus in the early days of his ministry was thought to be a risen prophet.

King Herod heard of [the ministry of Jesus], for His name had become well known; and people were saying, “John the Baptist has risen from the dead, and that is why these miraculous powers are at work in Him.” But others were saying, “He is Elijah.” And others were saying, “He is a prophet, like one of the prophets of old.” But when Herod heard of it, he kept saying, “John, whom I beheaded, has risen!” (Mark 6:14–16)

Christian objections

One Christian website does a thorough job attacking poorly evidenced parallels between Jesus and these prior gods. For example, was Dionysus really born to a virgin on December 25? Did Mithras really have 12 disciples? Was Krishna’s birth heralded by a star in the east? The author offers $1000 to anyone who can prove that any of these gods’ lists of parallels are actually true.

I’ll agree that there are strained parallels. One early work that has been criticized for too many claims and too little evidence is The World’s Sixteen Crucified Saviors by Kersey Graves (1875). The recent “Origins of Christianity and the Quest for the Historical Jesus Christ” by Acharya S also may be reaching.

I don’t have the expertise to weigh in on these many issues, so let’s grant the complaints and dismiss the many unsupportable specific parallels. What’s left is what really matters: that the Jesus story arose in a culture suffused with the idea of dying and rising saviors.

Apologists raise other objections.

Many of these gods actually came after Jesus. That’s why the list above only includes dying-and-rising gods who are well known to have preceded Jesus. There are many more such gods—Mithras, Horus, Krishna, Persephone, and others—that don’t seem to fit as well. In fact, Wikipedia lists life-death-rebirth deities from twenty religions worldwide, but I’ve tried to list above the six most relevant examples.

But Jesus really existed! He’s a figure from history, unlike those other gods. Strip away any supernatural claims from the story of Alexander the Great, and you’ve still got cities throughout Asia named Alexandria and coins with Alexander’s likeness. Strip away any supernatural claims from the Caesar Augustus story, and you’re still left with the Caesar Augustus from history (and a month in our calendar named after him). But strip away the supernatural claims from the Jesus story, and you’re left with a fairly ordinary rabbi. The Jesus story is nothing but the supernatural elements.

Most of those gods were used to explain the cycles of the seasons. Jesus isn’t like them. Yes, Christianity is different from all the other religions, but so is every other religion. If Christianity weren’t different from one of the earlier religions, it would just be that religion.

In another post I explore the Dionysus myth more fully to show the parallels with the Jesus story. That post also notes how Justin Martyr (100–165 CE) not only admitted to the similarities but argued that the devil put them in history to fool us.

Okay, they’re all myths, but the Jesus story is true myth. This was the approach of C.S. Lewis, who said, “The story of Christ is simply a true myth; a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference, that it really happened, and one must be content to accept it in the same way, remembering that it is God’s Myth where the others are men’s myths.”

So you admit that the Jesus story indeed has many characteristics of mythology but demand that I just trust you that it’s true? Sorry, I need more evidence than that.

And the throw-in-the-towel argument:

Just because Christianity developed in a culture that knew of other resurrecting gods doesn’t mean that Jesus wasn’t the real thing. And just because the Amazing Randi could do Uri Geller’s spoon-bending stunt through trickery doesn’t mean that Geller wasn’t doing it for real (but that’s the way to bet).

“You haven’t proven the gospel story false” isn’t much of an argument. Those who seek the truth go where the evidence points.

And here’s where the evidence doesn’t point: that humans worldwide invent dying-and-rising saviors … except in the Jesus case, ’cause that one was real!

I found that God never began to hear
my prayer for liberty until I began to run.
Then you ought to have seen
the dust rise behind me
in answer to prayer.
— Frederick Douglass

(This is a modified version of a post originally published 4/15/12.)

Photo credit: Wikipedia

Ray Comfort Says What Needs to Be Said

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Ray Comfort Armageddon ApocalypseAre we all here? If so, perhaps some of the excitement about last night’s blood moon was overblown. John Hagee said that God was literally screaming at the world. Maybe he can get God to scream a little louder.

Let’s return to Prophet Ray Comfort’s Top Ten list of clues that “the end of the age is happening now,” as he puts it. We’ve explored the first half here. Let’s finish up to see if Armageddon really is around the corner.

Ray’s Bible verse #6:

For [although] they hold a form of piety (true religion), they deny and reject and are strangers to the power of it [their conduct belies the genuineness of their profession]. (2 Timothy 3:5, Amplified Version)

Fortunately, we have Ray to tell us that this means that religious hypocrisy will be prevalent. He illustrates this by interviewing people on the street who claim to be Christians but who attend R-rated movies and have premarital sex. This is hardly a statistically sound study showing that hypocrisy within Christians worldwide is markedly greater now than it was in the past. (I’m beginning to sense that scientific rigor isn’t one of his goals.)

In the last days scoffers will come …. But they deliberately forget that long ago by God’s word the heavens came into being and the earth was formed out of water and by water. By these waters also the world of that time was deluged and destroyed. (2 Peter 3:3, 5–6)

So in the last days, people will deny that God created everything and flooded the world.

Ever the evolution denier, Ray scratches his head trying to figure out the logic behind panspermia. He interviews people who also don’t understand it to make his point. (No, I don’t see how this is relevant, either.)

Ray asks, “Do you think 70% of the earth being covered with water is a good clue that there was a worldwide flood?” Nope. The water likely came from comets, the earth may have been seeded with the components needed for abiogenesis from planets with different initial conditions than earth, and there is no evidence of a worldwide flood.

Next, Ray defends the plausibility of the Noah story. He says that the ark was enormous and that only representatives of biological families were taken on board, not species. (I’ve written about the many problems with taking the Noah story seriously here.)

Ray is right that people reject the ridiculous Flood story, and they’ve been doing so ever since science provided an alternative. I wonder, though, if gullible acceptance of Bible stories is more prevalent in recent decades with the success of fundamentalist Christianity. Ray’s concern on this point may be unfounded.

People will faint from terror, apprehensive of what is coming on the world, for the heavenly bodies will be shaken. (Luke 21:26)

In this long description of how the end will unfold, Jesus says six verses later, “This generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened.”

Didn’t happen. Apologists have tried to reinterpret this to avoid the embarrassing fact that the Son of Man was wrong, but their attempts are themselves embarrassing. The real test is to imagine Jesus actually saying this and then asking how his followers would have interpreted it—obviously, that the end would come within a few decades.

Awkward.

… in the last days scoffers will come, scoffing and following their own evil desires. They will say, “Where is this ‘coming’ he promised? Ever since our ancestors died, everything goes on as it has since the beginning of creation.” (2 Peter 3:3–4)

Good question! Where is this imminent “coming” he promised 2000 years ago? Of course there are scoffers. Given the Bible’s poor track record, what else would you expect?

The rest of this chapter clumsily tries to rationalize away the problem. You see, God has a different sense of time than we do. And isn’t it handy that the end has been delayed since it allows more people to be saved? Still, you must be ready! It could come at any minute!

As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. For in the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark; and they knew nothing about what would happen until the flood came and took them all away. That is how it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. (Matthew 24:37–39)

Ray takes this as license to give his famous Ten Commandments test. He asks people if they’ve ever stolen something (even once), ever lied (even once), and so on. He concludes by declaring that, by their own admission, each person is a lying, thieving, blasphemous adulterer at heart. The next logical step, apparently, is to assume God’s existence and ask these sinners how God should treat them on Judgment Day.

Sorry, Ray. The Ten Commandments test assumes what you’re trying (not very successfully) to prove. Your Top Ten list of Signs of the End is no better.

Religion is regarded
by the common people as true,
by the wise as false,
and by the rulers as useful.
— Seneca the Younger

Photo credit: Petri Damstén

Tonight: the Beginning of the End?

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Blood Moons Ray ComfortRemember John Hagee’s hysterical fulminations about the upcoming “blood moons”? I wrote about that here. In brief, four Jewish holidays in a row (two Passovers and two Sukkots) will have lunar eclipses. Eclipses during any one of these is common, but four in a row are rare, and Hagee makes an enthusiastic but weak argument that important things happen to Israel during each of these periods of four blood moons.

The first of these lunar eclipses is tonight. Barring poor weather, it will be visible in North America (the eclipse will be total 12:08–1:23 am in Seattle). But no, Israel won’t be able to see this or the remaining blood moons. You’d think that would be required since Israel’s wellbeing is the focus of Hagee’s prophecy. I guess John Hagee works in mysterious ways.

He says about these celestial fireworks, “God is literally screaming at the world, ‘I’m coming soon.’” Let’s see if tonight’s eclipse is God’s calling card.

Time to bring in another expert

End times prediction is strangely attractive to some apologists (I’ve written more here). It’s a shiny thing to a baby. Ray Comfort couldn’t help using his annoyance at the recent Noah movie as a grandstanding opportunity to make his own movie about our own imminent end, and it has that je ne sais quoi that only Ray Comfort can provide. Or maybe it’s WTF.

Ray gives ten New Testament passages that make clear that we’re in the end times. “The end of the age is happening now,” he says. Let’s take a look to see if we can see it as clearly as Ray can.

He begins with 2 Peter 2:1–3:

But there were also false prophets among the people, just as there will be false teachers among you. They will secretly introduce destructive heresies, even denying the sovereign Lord who bought them—bringing swift destruction on themselves. Many will follow their depraved conduct and will bring the way of truth into disrepute. In their greed these teachers will exploit you with fabricated stories. Their condemnation has long been hanging over them, and their destruction has not been sleeping.

Yes, there are lots of false prophets in our time—Hal Lindsey vaguely predicted the end in 2000, Harold Camping in 2011, Ronald Weinland in 2013, and there were others. But don’t imagine that naively idiotic prophecies are a recent thing. There’s the Great Disappointment of 1844. And the many failed predictions by the Jehovah’s Witnesses. This is no sign of the end. These Christian doomsday prophets have always been with us.

And now Ray Comfort is yet another prophet. Give us a specific date, Ray, so we know when to add you to the false prophets list. But be careful: this passage says that God will judge these liars like he judged the wicked people he drowned in the Flood.

On to Ray’s next verse of what to look for in the end times:

Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be famines, pestilences, and earthquakes in various places. (Matt. 24:7)

Yes, there are wars, but no more now than in the past. The incidence of famine and pestilence is far less today (no thanks to Christianity), and science is helping predict earthquakes and make cities more resilient. This argues against Ray’s claim.

The sun will be turned to darkness and the moon to blood before the coming of the great and glorious day of the Lord. (Acts 2:20)

Consider the context of this verse. The disciples were gathered for the feast of Pentecost, shortly after Jesus had returned to heaven, and the Holy Spirit descended on them. They all spoke in tongues, and passersby marveled that they could hear God praised in their own language. Peter explained that this was a fulfillment of a prophecy from Joel (the verse above is Peter quoting Joel).

Now consider the entire quotation (2:17–21). Joel was listing what will happen in the last days, and Peter said that this visitation of the Holy Spirit indicated that Joel’s symptoms of the end were happening at that moment. Yes, the sun will turn to darkness and the moon to blood, but it will happen in the time of Peter and the apostles.

Another fail, Ray. You’ve really got to read these things more carefully.

There will be terrible times in the last days. For men will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, blasphemers … (2 Timothy 3:1–2)

Ray’s focus here is naughty words used in movies. I’ll grant that there are more R-rated movies now than centuries ago, but this seems a tiny point to put in a Top Ten list.

It was the same in the days of Lot. … But the day Lot left Sodom, fire and sulfur rained down from heaven and destroyed them all. It will be just like this on the day the Son of Man is revealed. (Luke 17:28–30)

Ray interprets this as an increase in the acceptance of (shudder!) homosexuality.

You know you live in strange times when the atheist has to explain to the Christian what Bible passages mean. No, Ray, that’s not what we’re talking about here. The point is suddenness. The wicked people during Noah’s time were going about life as usual and were caught unawares by the Flood. The people in Sodom were surprised by the hail of destruction. The section continues with admonitions against going back to your house for your stuff when the end comes—just run for safety.

Yes, we’re more accepting of homosexuality. No, that’s not what this passage is about.

Let’s finish up Ray Comfort’s Kant-Fail® Signs of the End tomorrow. If John Hagee is to be believed, however, it’s not clear that there will be a tomorrow …

Part 2.

I used to be Christian,
but then I thought about it.
— Anon.

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What Did the Original Books of the Bible Say? (Part 2)

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Part 1 of our journey from today’s New Testament back in time to Jesus looked at the problems of translations, canonicity, and finding the best copies. The next problem to crossing this gulf is textual variants. There are 400,000 differences between the thousands of New Testament copies—more differences than there are words in the New Testament. Almost all are insignificant, but thousands of meaningful differences remain.

Historians use several tools to resolve these differences:

  • Criterion of Embarrassment. Of two passages, which one is more embarrassing? We can easily imagine scribes toning down a passage, but it doesn’t make sense for them to make it more embarrassing. The passage that is more embarrassing is likelier to be more authentic. For example, different copies of Mark 1:40–41 has Jesus either “moved with compassion” or “moved with anger” (for more, see the NET Bible comment on this phrase). A copyist changing compassion to anger is hard to imagine, but the opposite is quite plausible. The Criterion of Embarrassment would conclude that “moved with anger” is the likelier original reading.
  • Criterion of Multiple Attestation. A claim made by multiple independent sources is preferred over one in a single source.

In addition, a contested passage in an older manuscript is preferred, the one contained in more manuscripts is preferred, and so on.

The weak link

Notice that these tools need multiple manuscripts to work. They ask: given two manuscripts with different versions of a particular passage, which is the more authentic one?

Consider the long ending of Mark, for example. Given a manuscript of Mark ending with verse 16:20 (version A) and a manuscript ending with 16:8 (version B), the historians’ tools can be applied to determine which is the likely older and more authentic version. But what if you don’t have multiple versions? Suppose we only had Mark version A, with no copies of B and no references to it. Scholars wouldn’t even know to ask the question!

Consider the three most famous of these embarrassing scribal additions: the long ending of Mark, the Comma Johanneum (the only explicit reference to the Trinity in the Bible), and the story of the woman taken in adultery. Apologists will argue that these are neither embarrassing nor problems because they’ve been resolved. We know that they weren’t original. But this is true only because historians happen to be lucky enough to have competing manuscripts without these additions. What about added biblical passages where do we not have correct manuscripts to make us aware of the problem? Are there dozens of instances of these untraceable additions? Thousands? We don’t know.

There are consequences. Pentecostal snake handlers trust in the long ending tacked onto Mark (“In my name they will drive out demons; they will speak in new languages; they will pick up snakes with their hands, and whatever poison they drink will not harm them”). What additional nutty demands in our New Testament do we not know are inauthentic?

Of several manuscript categories, our oldest complete copies are Alexandrian manuscripts, including the Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus mentioned in the last post. That’s not because they’re necessarily better copies but because they were preserved better. The dry conditions of Alexandria, Egypt preserved manuscripts better than many other places where New Testament documents were kept—Asia Minor, Greece, or Italy, for example. We accept these manuscripts simply because anything that might refute them has crumbled to dust, which is not a particularly reliable foundation on which to build a portrait of the truth.

Read the first post in the series here: What Did the Original Books of the Bible Say? or continue on to “The Bible’s Dark Ages”

Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe,
but in proportion to their readiness to doubt.
— H.L. Mencken

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 4/19/12.)

Photo credit: Wikipedia

Daniel’s End Times Prediction: a Skeptical Approach

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Daniel Prophecy 70 Weeks skepticalI’ll wrap up this series on Daniel with one final interpretation of the 70-weeks prophecy, a secular one. If this interpretation is accurate, the 7 years of tribulation, the Rapture™, and all the rest are built on nothing.

(For the first Christian interpretation of Daniel 9 go here, and for the first post in this series, go here.)

Remember the timeframe of the composition of the book. It’s the beginning of the Maccabean Revolt, when things were looking pretty bleak. Jeremiah had said that 70 years in Babylon would erase the sins of the Jews, and God would bring them home and prosper them. But now it’s the 160s BCE, and Antiochus Epiphanes has massacred tens of thousands and polluted the Temple. What’s the deal? Wasn’t the suffering supposed to end?

That’s why Gabriel visits Daniel (in chapter 9) to say that it wasn’t 70 years, as Jeremiah thought, but 70 weeks of years. And—whaddya know?—from the standpoint of the audience, that long period was just about to end.

Below is the interpretation of Chris Sandoval (“The Failure of Daniel’s Prophecies”), which was taken largely from André LaCocque. I’ll step through Daniel 9:25–7 and give that skeptical interpretation.

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

The 7 weeks and 62 weeks aren’t back to back. Let’s return to the 7 weeks and focus just on the 62 weeks. It starts when Jeremiah’s 70 years starts, in 605 BCE. That prophecy is the “word” that explains the exile and promises the rebuilding of Jerusalem. It ends 62 weeks later in 171 BCE (605 – 62×7 = 171) with the death of the Anointed One, high priest Onias III.

Jerusalem shall be built again with squares and moat, but in a troubled time.

The 7 weeks extend from 587 BCE when Jerusalem and the Temple were destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar until 538 when Babylon itself was conquered and exiles returned to Judah (587 – 7×7 = 538). This isn’t part of the big timeline, nor does it need to be. Since we’ve gone from Jeremiah’s 70 years to Daniel’s 70 sevens of years, the number 7 (the number of completion) is obviously important. Chopping out a block of 7 sevens serves several purposes. It leaves a remaining timespan of 62 weeks that plausibly fits between important dates, that 49-year time period was roughly the time during which Jerusalem lay in ruins, and it’s numerically pleasing (with all those sevens).

After the sixty-two weeks, the Anointed One will be put to death and will have nothing.

The 62 weeks is pulled out as a separate unit and makes sense as our primary block of time. Onias, the Anointed One, was put to death in 171.

The people of the ruler who will come will destroy the city and the sanctuary. The end will come like a flood: War will continue until the end, and desolations have been decreed.

Antiochus Epiphanes is “the ruler.” He was the Seleucid king who corrupted (the word for “destroy” can also mean “corrupt” or “pervert”) the city and Temple. He had tens of thousands of Jews massacred. This was the beginning of the Maccabean Revolt.

He will confirm a covenant with many for one week.

This was also a period of civil war between traditional and Hellenized Jews. Antiochus killed high priest Onias, well-loved by the traditionalists, and made alliances with the Hellenized Jews. From the standpoint of the traditional Jews, the ones behind the rebellion and the writing of Daniel, those Hellenized Jews were collaborators or even traitors.

This begins the final week, 171–164 BCE.

In the middle of the week he will put an end to sacrifice and offering. And at the temple he will set up an abomination that causes desolation, until the end that is decreed is poured out on him.

Halfway through this “week,” Antiochus prevented Jewish sacrifices and created the “abomination that causes desolation,” the sacrifice of pigs to Zeus in the Jewish temple. (That’s discussed in detail in the first post in this series.)

Of course, this whole thing would’ve been a lot easier if the author had dropped the pretense and given names to things, but where would the fun be in that?

Like it or not, this interpretation is both more plausible and is far more honest to the text than the Christian interpretations.

Since the Bible and the church
are obviously mistaken in telling us where we came from,
how can we trust them to tell us where we are going?
— Anonymous

Appendix: Here’s the timeline that shows the important dates (all BCE) and the blocks of time.

Daniel Prophecy 70 Weeks skeptical

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