Are there any prophecies in the Bible?

[notachance]

It seems to me that the go-to "proof" that the Bible is divinely inspired are prophecies.

So I was hoping that somebody would give me an example of a prophecy that might prove the supernatural nature of the Bible.

I will write below a few criteria that I think any alleged prophecy must meet in order to qualify as "evidence of supernatural nature of the Bible"

1) The prophecy must have been demonstrably written down before the event it predicts.
A prophecy is a statement about the future, not about the past.

For example, if I wrote today, in 2011, "I hereby make the prophecy that in 2008, Barack Obama will be elected President of the United States", that is NOT a prophecy, because I'm "predicting" an event that actually already happened.

Similarly, if a 350 AD manuscript (for example the Codex Sinaiticus) talked about some battle that took place in 600BC, that wouldn't be a prediction, it would be a description of something that happened almost 1000 years earlier.

2) A prophecy must have demonstrably actually been made
An example of scenario that would NOT count as a valid prophecy would one where I write down today "10 years before he died, John Lennon told an anonymous author that he would die by being shot in the head". There is no way of verifying that John Lennon ever said that, so it's not a valid prophecy.

3) A predicted event must be reliably documented.
For example, if I said "I predict that tonight I will dream about eating ice cream" and then the next day I say "The prophecy came true! I did dream about ice cream", that would not be an accurate prophecy because it was not reliably documented. Nobody other than me knows if it's actually true that I dreamed about ice-cream.

4) A prophecy must be specific enough that it cannot be adaptable to multiple scenarios that are somewhat likely to happen eventually.
For example if I wrote "There will be a war between Christians and Muslims in the next 100 years", then I'm not making a supernatural prophecy, just an educated guess given the nature of our international relations. In order for it to even be considered as a prophecy, it would have to be something like "On March 2nd 2076, the United States will begin a campaign of drone attacks in Iran, starting with a 3:30 am raid on a military base 20 miles north of Tehran".

Another example of what would not be a prophecy would be something like "the twin towers that collapsed on 9-11 will eventually be rebuilt"

5) In order for a prophecy to be considered proof of the supernatural nature of the Bible, there has to be no other reasonable way to explaining it than by supernatural means.
If you cannot prove that purely natural explanations (chance? self-fulfilling prophecy, forgery) truly cannot account for the prophecy, then your belief in the supernatural cause of the prophecy is no more than a faith statement, and if you are using that do justify your faith, you're engaging in circular logic ("I believe in this baseless claim, because it's supported by another baseless claim").

6) An accurate prophecy cannot be considered evidence of the supernatural if it is surrounded by inaccurate prophecies.
For example if I wrote today the following statements:
"Obama will be elected in 2012"
"Pawlenty will be elected in 2012"
"Romney will be elected in 2012"
"Palin will be elected in 2012"
"Gingrich will be elected in 2012"

And one of them turned out to be correct, that would prove nothing!

7) A prophecy can only be considered evidence of the supernatural if it predicts something that is extremely unlikely.
For example this chart shows that over the last 117 years, in Seattle it has rained on August 2nd 13 times. That means that there is 11.1% chance that it will rain in Seattle on August 2nd of any given year. So if I wrote the prophecy that "On Aug 2nd 2154 it will rain in Seattle", that would be an accurate prediction, but nonetheless not evidence of supernatural powers, simply evidence of the statistical fact that I had a 11.1% chance to be right.

8) The prophecy cannot be an expression of something that many people want to see happen, because the people's will is what drives the prophecy to be fulfilled in that case, and not a supernatural power.
For example, if Martin Luther King had said "I predict that one day a black man will be US President", that would not be the kind of prediction that would prove the supernatural, because in saying that, MLK would just be verbalizing a wish that was to some degree shared by millions of blacks and whites alike. It was simple social pressure from these millions that eventually caused the prophecy to be "fulfilled". If Hillary Clinton said "One day a woman will be President" she will, by saying it, inspire people to try to make that happen. It's called a self-fulfilling prophecy.


It's almost 3am and I am a little tired. I may have to add additional bullet points later. It may also be that there is some redundancy, and that the list could be condensed while retaining it's purpose. But I think this is a good start.

Here are my two questions:

1) Do you agree that the requirements above are reasonable, if not explain why not

2) Can you think of any Bible prophecy that meets the requirements above?

(please don't link or quote 100 different prophecies, and don't then leave it to me to look them all up and debunk them all. Start by quoting the SINGLE MOST CONCLUSIVE example of a prophecy, and we can talk about that. Once we've debated it, we can move on to additional examples)

[Mithrae]

Daniel 2:37-39. I understand your need to try this approach; you responded to River with mockery, said that the prophecy is "vague meaningless gibberish" and denied that the head of gold is associated with Babylonians. Presumably you'll feel somewhat justified by the fact that "Daniel's" words only explicitly identify the head with the greatest king of the Babylonians, which clearly isn't an association with the Babylonians!

Unless you can name even one single scholar with academic credentials who says that the head of gold refers to something other than the Neo-Babylonian empire, it may be best to withdraw your dismissive "some christian "scholars" seem to believe that." You've already included a huge assumption about the unreliability of textual transmission in your opening criteria; are you now going to pit your careful ignorance against the whole field of hermeneutics? If you didn't check out the Wiki link I posted before, perhaps you'd instead be interested in reading a little about the common Greek understanding of the four successive world empires from which 'Daniel' drew and modified?

Mithrae, I retract this entire section of my argument. I didn't realize that in Daniel 8 it does associate the head of gold with Babylon. My bad.

Fair enough. It's Daniel 2 by the way

Not quite what I asked, but fair enough. Essentially, you'll reject accurate transmission of the text on principle, if no better non-prophetic explanation presents itself. Again, I have no particular problem with that presupposition, if it's recognised as such.

No. Your summation of my position is garbled and inaccurate. I will reject the farfetched hypothetical assumption that a 300 AD text is identical to a 600BC text that doesn't exist anymore, if that assumption is contradicted by the laws of physics.

It's that simple. If I have two possible assumptions I can make, and one of them requires that I believe the basic laws of physics were suspended, and the other one doesn't, I'll operate under the assumption that doesn't require such a big leap into the unlikely.

I'm not a scientist, but my understanding is that in a deterministic system all things should ultimately be predictable in theory. So maybe you could help me; which of the laws of physics does prophecy violate?

Perhaps more importantly, do the 'laws of physics' exist and actually govern the behaviour of the universe? Again, my understanding was that they are simply the most fundamental elements in our extensive observations on how the universe tends to work. They are descriptions of how things do happen, not forces which ensure what doesn't.

If you show that the laws of physics actually exist and constrain the behaviour of the universe, and if you show that inhumanly accurate prediction of the future violates these laws, I'll certainly agree that your stance on the transmission of alleged prophetic texts is more than an assumption.

That's all I'm doing with Daniel.
I hear a story that a 350 AD book contains some allegedly accurate description of events that happened 500 years earlier. There are two explanations for this:
1) The person who wrote that 350 AD book, just wrote about events that had already happened
2) The person who wrote that 350 AD book wrote about events that had already happened, but his words happened to be identical to an earlier book that nobody's ever seen, and the author of that book had magical powers.

Why go for explanation number 2? Assumption 1 is reasonable and fits all the facts at our disposal.We have a guy in 350 AD writing about events from centuries earlier. Period. That's ALL we have. What justification is there for building a web of baseless and unwarranted assumptions that lead to the notion that some unknown guy centuries earlier had magical powers?

#1 doesn't fit all the facts at our disposal. I think this is why you like to throw so many analogies into your posts, because it allows you to ignore the historical contexts of the discussion. Contents of a 350CE work just 'happen' to be the same as earlier works, because it's not like there were people around with any interest in accurately preserving the text and of course there was nobody before 350CE who had seen them! A more accurate depiction would be:

1) The person who was tasked with accurately copying an older work in 350CE simply inserted passages about events which had already happened, without any of his peers noticing the change in the text
2) The various copies and versions of the text which were around, the scribes and teachers who worked with them, and the contents of the text which we'd expect a modifier would have changed but weren't, suggest a fairly high level of accuracy in transmission at and before 350CE despite incomplete manuscript remains

As an extension of your yet-to-be-validated stance on the 'laws of physics' vs. the 'supernatural,' no doubt you still favour option #1. But let's not pretend there was no historical context in which the transmission of manuscripts occurred. Where changes to a text are alleged, if they are to be taken as anything more than assumption (or an extension of philosophical views) we require evidence for the claim.

My best mate back in university was a Buddhist; I'd known him over six years, an honest bloke, familiar with the tricks the mind can play on us and smarter than me in many respects (he studied law while I did arts). He mentioned that once when he'd been visiting his homeland he went to a temple with a list of religious questions, but when he met the monk he answered each of them in order, without ever being asked. What I gather from your views is that I should rationally assume that the monk had a clever mirror system in place to see my mate's list of questions, or that an acolyte had pick-pocketed the paper to read them and return them.

Yes, or a million other explanations, including that your friend exaggerated the feats performed by this monk, or that you are exaggerating them in relaying them to me.

Another friend I knew for four, maybe five years; an MD and forensic investigator. She mentioned a quite remarkable experience in a seance she'd led, though she found it hard to reconcile it with the methodological naturalism of her profession.

Are you SERIOUSLY expecting me to take your anecdotes about a friend who couldn't explain something as evidence of the supernatural? Why in the world do you belong to the "atheist" usergroup? You clearly are not an atheist!

I wouldn't expect you to take my word for anything. I'm merely pointing out that there've been several people who I've known well enough to put considerable trust in both their integrity and their judgement, who have had experiences best described as 'supernatural.' Perhaps no-one you've ever known has had any 'supernatural' experience, or perhaps you simply question the integrity or the judgement of those who might relate such experiences. Your own acquaintances and experiences have had whatever effect they've had on your views, just as mine have on me.

Could I ask when 'atheist' became defined as rejection of the supernatural?

On the other hand the contents of ch9 (and indeed even 11:36ff) are very hard to explain under that theory, and even more problematic is how a 2nd century Jew would know about Babylon's 'king' Belshazzar (heir and co-ruler with the last king, Nabonidus). The Jewish stewards of the text faithfully copied the difficult chapter 9, the historical errors in the Aramaic section (ch2-7) and even little nuances in the spelling of Nebuchadnezzar's name. So I conclude that Hebrew Daniel was probably written in the 6th century and probably transmitted accurately across the centuries; and thus probably contains real prophecy.

Wait, why do you conclude that?

You think that it's more likely that a 600 BC author knew about 200BC events, than that 200 BC author knew about 600 BC events?

You're saying that it's more weird to assume that a 200 BC author knew about the PAST than it is to a assume that a 600 BC author knew about the FUTURE?

You're saying that the prophecy must be real, and the guy must have magical powers, because the alternative explanation - that a historian would write about the past - is just too weird and farfetched?

The most parsimonious explanation is one which explains the facts while introducing the fewest new elements into the discussion. We have a text which purports to have been written in the 6th century, by a fellow called Daniel who had visions of angels explaining the future. This explanation, while 'farfetched,' seems to fit all the available data quite well without introducing any new elements.

As we've been discussing, you are certainly welcome to introduce the concept - as a philosophical stance or even as a bare assumption - that knowledge of the future is 'supernatural' (beyond the realm of 'nature') and should be considered an inferior explanation on principle. We can then certainly introduce all the new elements to the discussion which would account for a 2nd century author living under the persecution of Antiochus IV Epiphanes telling his countrymen that it'd be more than a century before all the good stuff in ch9 comes to pass, and so on. Since they help avoid the problem we've introduced regarding the 'supernatural,' these new elements we've introduced might still make for a better explanation than one presented by the text.

However I question how valid that concept of the 'supernatural' is, and the presumption that it's explanatory inferiority is so great as to justify an indefinite number of alternative assumptions in a theory.

[notachance]

The most parsimonious explanation is one which explains the facts while introducing the fewest new elements into the discussion.

Agreed.

We have a text which purports to have been written in the 6th century, by a fellow called Daniel who had visions of angels explaining the future.

No we don't. We have a text written in 350 AD that talks about things that happened centuries earlier.

Right? That's what we have. Think about it. That is what EXISTS. The Codex Vaticanus. It's in the Vatican. It was written around 350 AD. In it is some text about stuff that happened centuries earlier.

Whether it's identical, similar, fundamentally different from any other document that may or may not have existed at some stage in the past is SPECULATION, not FACT. What we have is a text written in 350 AD, That's it.

These are the facts:

FACT 1: A book written in 350 AD exists

FACT 2: This book contains narrative about 500 to 100 BC.

The most parsimonious explanation for these two facts is this:

A person wrote down things he knew about because they happened in the past.

[The prophecy] explanation, while 'farfetched,' seems to fit all the available data quite well without introducing any new elements.

Patently false. Your explanation adds all sorts of new elements. Check this out:

FACT 1: A book written in 350 AD exists

FACT 2: This book contains narrative about 500 to 100 BC.

New Element 1: A book was written at some stage between 600 and 200 BC

New Element 2: This hypothetical book written at some undetermined time in a 4 century time span by an unknown author happens to be identical to the book written in 350 AD

New Element 3: The fact that this hypothetical book that nobody has ever seen is identical to the 350 Ad book, is evidence of the fact that the unknown person had the power to predict the future, by writing in advance the very same words that the 350 AD book would contain about the past.


Let me put it this way, which one of these two explanations is more parsimonious:

Fact 1: I wrote in 2011 that Obama would not close Guantanamo Bay within the first 3 years of his presidency

Fact 2: My 2011 statement is true.

Ok, here go my two explanations, try to figure out which one is more parsimonious, ok?

Explanation 1: I read the news and wrote my statement based on that.

Explanation 2: This statement I made in 2011 is actually identical to a statement some other unknown person also made at some stage between the year 1400 and the year 2007, but nobody has ever seen this statement. Since this mysterious other statement that nobody's ever seen was made before Obama became president, the only explanation is that the person that nobody's ever seen had the power to predict the future, otherwise he wouldn't have been able to write this mysterious statement that nobody's ever seen, but which we believe is identical to the one I wrote in 2011.


Please dude. Just give up.

[notachance]

1) The person who was tasked with accurately copying an older work in 350CE simply inserted passages about events which had already happened, without any of his peers noticing the change in the text

You are aware that there are LOTS of forgeries in the Bible, right? We know that the entire Mark 16 was a forgery, for example. You know this, right?

So it's not like with Daniel, some lone scribe went rogue and did something hoping that none of the other people would notice.

Modifying, editing, subtracting from, and adding to the Bible was a systemic methodology of the church for centuries. You know this, right?

Why is it so hard to believe that it may have happened for Daniel, when we know for a fact that it happened for many other books?

Why do you think early Christians would treat this one book differently from all the others?

[Braveheart]

Where did you go, River? Have you abandoned your satanic faith in Jesus the son of Lucifer yet, and come to accept the true word of Our Holy Father Allah?

If not, it's because you don't have enough faith in God. You should pray harder, until you mange to see through Satan's trick of making you worship his son Jesus.

Actually, I believe the muslims view Christ as some kind of prophet, not in the negative sense...

[Mithrae]

1) The person who was tasked with accurately copying an older work in 350CE simply inserted passages about events which had already happened, without any of his peers noticing the change in the text

You are aware that there are LOTS of forgeries in the Bible, right? We know that the entire Mark 16 was a forgery, for example. You know this, right?

So it's not like with Daniel, some lone scribe went rogue and did something hoping that none of the other people would notice.

Modifying, editing, subtracting from, and adding to the Bible was a systemic methodology of the church for centuries. You know this, right?

No I don't know that "Modifying, editing, subtracting from, and adding to the Bible was a systemic methodology of the church for centuries." You already failed to back up a similar claim against the book of Wisdom, and now you're making even more sweeping generalisations?

Off the top of my head, the only major alterations in the transmission of the New Testament are Mark 16 (only verse 9 forwards btw, not the entire chapter), John 8:1-11 and 1 John 5:7. Some two dozen verses in the whole New Testament, none of which drastically alters the message of the texts. One might include John 21 also, but since it was appended shortly after the author's death and is fairly obvious in its nature, I wouldn't consider it an alteration in transmission. If I've missed any other major changes, please feel free to provide them.

If not, your claim is off to a fairly shaky start. With this supposed wholesale forgery mill which you allege the early church to have operated, you really think it didn't occur to them that maybe they should have only one angel at Jesus' tomb in Luke and John? They were really so inept that they didn't notice that Judas hangs himself in Matthew but stumbles to his death in Acts? Sounds like a great "systemic methodology" they had there!

Why is it so hard to believe that it may have happened for Daniel, when we know for a fact that it happened for many other books?

Why do you think early Christians would treat this one book differently from all the others?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it almost sounds as though you have an axe to grind against Christians here. If I might remind you that Daniel was written long before the birth of Christ, it makes far more sense to propose that any alleged alterations were done by Jews earlier on, before the work became widely known. The better-known a work becomes, the more manuscripts and versions in circulation, the much, much less likely it becomes that changes could pass unnoticed. Suggesting major changes by Christians - when from memory Braveheart has already pointed out that contemporary Jews would raise hell over it - is quite frankly absurd.

Of course in choosing not to accept that Daniel even existed before 350CE, you've kind of backed yourself into a corner there, haven't you? Your baseline position is irrational, but it necessarily restricts you to absurd counter-arguments also.



Edit: By the way, I've been meaning to throw this into a post at some point, but the opportunity never seems to have come up. Going back to the essentially meaningless nature of criteria which would also prohibit reasonable belief in the existence of Aristotle, Josephus and so on: You claimed in response that criterion #1 existed only to safeguard the validity of any "supernatural prophecy."

Yet in another thread you made these remarkable claims:

• Nobody who ever met anybody who ever met anybody who met Jesus EVER mentioned miracles.
  
  People started writing about miracles ELEVEN generations after Jesus was dead.

Since the point has been raised by your decision to blame alleged changes to Daniel on Christians rather than earlier Jews, I think this little jewel illustrates it perfectly for our readers: Once you let unsound reasoning enter into your thought process, it's hard to stop it from blossoming out of control. People started writing about miracles eleven generations after Jesus you say? With views like that, no wonder you don't think there's sufficient evidence of biblical prophecy!


Heck, it's not though I particularly care whether there's prophecy or not. It just seems to me as though you think you're on some kind of crusade to conclusively debunk Christianity or theism in general. You raise some reasonable questions I'll admit, and you've thrown in a few genuine facts, quite a bit of speculation and perhaps some valid premises tying them together. But if we then took away the unsubstantiated sweeping generalisations, the hyperbole, over-simplification and faulty analogies, and the repeated pleas for your opponents to "give up" or "stop it," and what else is left?

Maybe it's best to mellow out a little?

[notachance]

Mithrae, what can I do but continue repeating the same argument over and over again, trying to make it as simple as possible, until you finally manage to understand it?

A book exists. It's called the Codex Vaticanus.

It was written around 350 AD.

It contains a chapter called Daniel 2, which contains words about events from centuries earlier.


That is not a prophecy.


Please don't go off on a tangent, just answer yes or no: Do you agree with what I've said so far?

[notachance]

Of course in choosing not to accept that Daniel even existed before 350CE, you've kind of backed yourself into a corner there, haven't you? Your baseline position is irrational, but it necessarily restricts you to absurd counter-arguments also.

What? Of course I accept that Daniel existed before 350 AD. Are you kidding me? There are 8 Dead Sea Scroll fragments that prove that! Wow! Where did THAT come from!??!

All I am saying is that the oldest extant copy of the "prophecy" in Daniel 2:31-45 is in the 350 AD Codex Vaticanus.

Here is another yes or no question:

Is there REASONABLE DOUBT that this 350 AD text is IDENTICAL to some unknown earlier book written at some unknown time between 200 and 600 BC by some unknown person?

Please understand. I am not saying that definitely those words were changed over those centuries. All I am saying is that there is REASONABLE DOUBT that they were not.

Which of these two attitudes makes more sense:

1) All we have is words written in 350 AD, but I believe there is NO REASONABLE DOUBT that they are identical to words written by an anonymous author at an unspecified time between 200 and 600 BC, even though nobody has ever seen those ancient words.

2) All we have is words written in 350 AD, and I believe there is REASONABLE DOUBT that they are identical to words written by an anonymous author at an unspecified time between 200 and 600 BC, because nobody has ever seen those ancient words and we have no way of verifying it.

Please reply with the number 1 or with the number 2.

[riverslivnwtr]

The only way to see it is, by the directions given in the bible.

No, the only way to see it it, is by the directions given in the Koran.

Now tell me what positive evidence you have that my statement is false and yours is true.

first you show me evidence from the Quran that says you can see the kingdom of heaven while you are still in this world..

It says so on page 46

Jesus says those who believe in him shall have rivers of living water flow within them.

John 7_37-39

I am a living witness of this reality..

now does the koran have any witnesses at all that have anything like that ???

Yes, millions of Muslims are witnesses of something like that.

I'v e only heared of one such ...and you know how these people use that ganga

no it is not in their testimony..it's all religious rules and stuff like that..

hey it's a lot of Christians like that....maybe that's why muslims came to be in the first place...Christians in the 7th century unable to deliver..perhaps because so many had been killed by the Roman empire God just gave them blood to drink...as he promised in the book of Revelation..

You are blinded by your sin and by the influence of the devil. If you approached the Koran with an open mind and an open heart, you'd find that it is the true word of God. You can't see it because you're full of hate and tribulation, and because Satan has corrupted you with all his false talk about his son Jesus.

(Moderators. Is it ok that I continue this line of argument? I'm assuming that you understand where I'm going with this. If it's not cool, let me know)

well as the bible says, who is blind as my servant? of deaf, as my messenger that i sent? who is blind as he that is perfect, and blind as the lords servant?
seeing many things and seeing not and hearing many things and hearing not..
The lord is well pleased for his righteousness sake he will magnify the law and make it honourable..

[notachance]

The only way to see it is, by the directions given in the bible.

No, the only way to see it it, is by the directions given in the Koran.

Now tell me what positive evidence you have that my statement is false and yours is true.

first you show me evidence from the Quran that says you can see the kingdom of heaven while you are still in this world..

It says so on page 46

Jesus says those who believe in him shall have rivers of living water flow within them.

John 7_37-39

I am a living witness of this reality..

now does the koran have any witnesses at all that have anything like that ???

Yes, millions of Muslims are witnesses of something like that.

I'v e only heared of one such ...and you know how these people use that ganga

no it is not in their testimony..it's all religious rules and stuff like that..

hey it's a lot of Christians like that....maybe that's why muslims came to be in the first place...Christians in the 7th century unable to deliver..perhaps because so many had been killed by the Roman empire God just gave them blood to drink...as he promised in the book of Revelation..

You are blinded by your sin and by the influence of the devil. If you approached the Koran with an open mind and an open heart, you'd find that it is the true word of God. You can't see it because you're full of hate and tribulation, and because Satan has corrupted you with all his false talk about his son Jesus.

(Moderators. Is it ok that I continue this line of argument? I'm assuming that you understand where I'm going with this. If it's not cool, let me know)

well as the bible says, who is blind as my servant? of deaf, as my messenger that i sent? who is blind as he that is perfect, and blind as the lords servant?
seeing many things and seeing not and hearing many things and hearing not..
The lord is well pleased for his righteousness sake he will magnify the law and make it honourable..

Yada yada yada. Here is the only thing that is definitely 100% true and nobody can deny. You worship the devil. That's why you fail to see that Allah is the One True God and Mohammed is His Prophet.

You hate God, and that's why you worship Satan.

Also, you worship Satan because by doing that you can continue sinning without being answerable to anybody. And probably you had some bad experience with Islam when you were a child, and that's why you can't find it in you to love the One True God, Allah the Merciful.

That's it. This truth appeared to me in a personal revelation that was very very powerful, therefore it cannot be disputed. It's true. You worship Satan.

Praise Allah.

[Mithrae]

Of course in choosing not to accept that Daniel even existed before 350CE, you've kind of backed yourself into a corner there, haven't you? Your baseline position is irrational, but it necessarily restricts you to absurd counter-arguments also.

What? Of course I accept that Daniel existed before 350 AD. Are you kidding me? There are 8 Dead Sea Scroll fragments that prove that! Wow! Where did THAT come from!??!

From here:

• notachance wrote: Whether it's identical, similar, fundamentally different from any other document that may or may not have existed at some stage in the past is SPECULATION, not FACT. What we have is a text written in 350 AD, That's it.
  
  These are the facts:
  FACT 1: A book written in 350 AD exists
  FACT 2: This book contains narrative about 500 to 100 BC.
  The most parsimonious explanation for these two facts is this:
  A person wrote down things he knew about because they happened in the past. . . .
  
  
  Patently false. Your explanation adds all sorts of new elements. Check this out:
  FACT 1: A book written in 350 AD exists
  FACT 2: This book contains narrative about 500 to 100 BC.
  New Element 1: A book was written at some stage between 600 and 200 BC

As I've said, you do have a tendency for hyperbole and over-simplification. I appreciate your honesty in now acknowledging that it was definitely written long before 350CE.

All I am saying is that the oldest extant copy of the "prophecy" in Daniel 2:31-45 is in the 350 AD Codex Vaticanus.

The oldest extant copy is actually from the Dead Sea Scrolls; manuscript 4Q112 is dated to the mid-1st century BCE, and contains the vast majority of the book (Daniel 1:16-11:16). Among the other scrolls, all of Daniel is preserved except the beginning and end (1:1-9 and 11:39 forwards), and another DSS manuscript quotes the twelfth chapter and references it to "Daniel the prophet." Two portions are dated in the second century BCE.

I came across a rather fascinating article while researching this, though you may not like it since it relates back to my comments about the probabilities of unnoticed change given a work's circulation. The community at Qumran was founded c150CE, a mere 15 years after the anti-supernaturalist date for Daniel's composition.

There are now eight mss. of Daniel from Qumran (1QDan/a, 1QDan/b, 4QDan/a, 4QDan/b, 4QDan/c, 4QDan/d, 4QDan/e, pap6QDan). This represents every chapter of Daniel, as Flint observes [HI:EMDSS:43]:

• "Every chapter of Daniel is represented in these manuscripts, except for Daniel 12. However, this does not mean that the book lacked the final chapter at Qumran, since Dan 12:10 is quoted in the Florilegium (4Q174), which explicitly tells us that it is written in 'the book of Daniel, the Prophet.'"

This group of documents represents the largest representation of ANY biblical book at Qumran, exceeding even the number of Jeremiah scrolls.

What's particularly interesting about this is that the Qumran scrolls apparently indicate a different text tradition than what's preserved in the official Masoretic Text. To explain, suppose one scroll of a work is copied two times, and each of those copies are taken off to different areas. Those two scrolls may be virtually identical copies, but over the generations small scribal errors will begin to appear in the successive copies made of each scroll. By comparing the differences in these errors, scholars are able to recognise different text families or text traditions - you may be familiar with the Alexandrian and Byzantine text-types in New Testament studies. The key point here is that it takes time for different text traditions to diverge:

What this entails (since 60% of the DSS are proto-Massoretic) is that Daniel had already circulated widely enough and been copied enough--prior to 150 BC-- to have created (at least) two textual "families". Minor textual variants, of course, might mean very little for dating purposes, but textual 'traditions' presuppose a "point of divergence" somewhere in the past. [This is a bit oversimplified, since "cross-fertilization" of traditions is known to have occurred.] To create a 'tradition' the document has to create multiple "generations" of copying (not just lots of copying of the original), and to believe this occurred within some 15 years of the date of authorship (i.e., written in 165, and having been copied many, many times--along separate linear paths-- by 150) is quite a stretch.

To understand why this growth of two textual families within 15 years is highly doubtful, one need only consider the "useful life" of a scroll. Since most literature at the time was used for oral performance/reading, one didn't need a lot of copies. Accordingly, copies were made on an as-needed basis (and for personal library reasons). Since scrolls might exist and be used for a century or more (we have mss at Qumran that are dated 3rd century--a century before the Qumran community came into existence), the need to make 'generational' copies simply wouldn't exist--the exemplar itself would have been available (and in good shape). [Older scholarship believed in strong definitions of textual 'families', in which geographical isolation factors would insure that the generational copying processes would not interact with other, but this has been largely discounted.] What the existence of two textual traditions before Qumran/150 means, is that the origination date of the "original original" would most likely be much earlier than a miniscule 15 years.

Similarly, it takes time for a work to become well-regarded and for many copies of it to be circulated. The above article notes that in the case of Ecclesiastes, Chronicles and many Psalms, finds at Qumran have led scholars to the obvious conclusion that they must have been written at least century or more earlier to allow for this diffusion period. Quoting Bruce Waltke:

"The discovery of manuscripts of Daniel at Qumran dating from the Maccabean period renders it highly improbable that the book was composed during the time of the Maccabees.

"In Apercus preliminaires Dupont-Sommer reports that The owners of seventeen different fragments of Daniel are known, but there are certainly several others. This evidence demonstrates the popularity of Daniel with the Qumran Covenanteers. One Dead Sea scroll cannot be dated later than 120 B.C. on the basis of its paleography.

"Equivalent manuscript finds at Qumran of other books where the issue of predictive prophecy is not in question have led scholars to repudiate a Maccabean date for their compositions. For example, Brownlee, professor of religion at the Claremont Graduate School, writes:

• 'Frank Cross has indicated that one of the Psalms manuscripts from Cave Four attests so-called Maccabean psalms at a period which is roughly contemporary with their supposed composition. If this is true, it would seem that we should abandon the idea of any of the canonical psalms being of Maccabean date, for each song had to win its way in the esteem of the people before it could be included in the sacred compilation of the Psalter. Immediate entre for any of them is highly improbable.'

"Burrows follows the same line of reasoning with respect to the date of Ecclesiastes:

• 'The script [of two scrolls of Ecclesiastes found in Cave Four] indicates a date near the middle of the second century B.C. This is not much later than the time at which many scholars have thought the book was originally written. We cannot tell, of course, how old the book was when this particular copy was made, but the probability of its composition in the third century, if not earlier, is somewhat enhanced by finding the manuscript probably not written much after 150 B.C.

"Likewise, Myers, professor of Old Testament at the Lutheran Theological Seminary, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, wrote, The discovery of a fragment of Chronicles at Qumran renders a Maccabean date virtually impossible for any part of Chronicles.

"But critical scholars have refused to draw the same conclusion in the case of Daniel even though the evidence is identical. For example, in the work cited above by Brownlee, he avers the 165 B.C. date in spite of the evidence. His refusal to allow the evidence to lead him to the more probable conclusion that Daniel was composed before the Maccabean era is the more astonishing because along with others he thinks that the late pious forger of Daniel made a mistake in one of his predictions. He reasoned, The predicted end of Antiochus in 11:40"45 differs from the stories of his death in I and II Maccabees and hence it presumably represents real prediction on the part of the author of Daniel which was never fulfilled. But if this be so, it seems incredible that the alleged contemporaries would have held his work in such high regard referring to him as Daniel the prophet, a title bestowed on him in a florilegium found in 4Q."

As I've said from the beginning, and as your ongoing questions about 'reasonable doubt' show, you seem to be interested only in the question "Do we have 100% certainty about this?" And with this, as with every other issue in history, the answer is obviously no. However despite your apparent unwillingness to weigh evidence in the hopes of reaching a probable conclusion, I think this article does make a rather convincing case - even more so than what I'd already learned on the subject. So many thanks for the thought-provoking discussion

These folk at Qumran called Daniel a 'prophet'. They--eyewitnesses of these events--considered his words prophetic of the times/events. They 'were there' and they did not consider Daniel's words to have been merely a 'description' of the past; He was describing THEIR future. And this is NOT a group removed in time from the Revolt, remember. The numbers simply don't add up. You just cannot get from questionable authorship and dubious milieu to full acceptance (of the WHOLE BOOK) as a codified piece of Scripture(!) by a contemporary, rigorist, separatist group in 10-15 years [this, of course, is what the non-conservative scholars are conceding in the above quotes]. It MUST have been considered scriptural LONG before the break, and anything long enough to create this authority puts the window earlier than the events in question--and we are back to 'real, predictive prophecy'.