Christians often claim that the person who wrote the Old Testament Book of Daniel accurately predicted the time Jesus would be on earth and his death. They say he even gave the year! Not surprisingly, those who teach that he did cannot agree among themselves about how to calculate this or what event in Jesus’ life it points to. This tells the tale that they are forcing their interpretation on Daniel. Some say it is the start of the ministry or the baptism. Others say that it is the entry into Jerusalem. Others say it is the cross.
Here it is: “Seventy weeks are decreed for your people and your holy city to finish with breaking the law, to finish with sin, to atone for wickedness, to bring in righteousness and holiness without end, to seal up and finish vision and prophecy, and to anoint the most holy. Know this, understand this: from the time that the decree to restore and rebuild Jerusalem is issued, there will be seven weeks and then sixty-two weeks until the Anointed One, the ruler, comes. Jerusalem will be rebuilt with streets and a trench, but in times of distress. After the sixty-two weeks, the Anointed One will be cut off and will have nothing at all. And the people of a ruler who is yet to come will destroy the city and the sanctuary” (Daniel 9:24–26).
This is the famous prophecy of the Seventy Weeks.
What we want to know is: Can the numbers in the prophecy give us the same year as the year Jesus supposedly died?
Short answer: Daniel 9:24–27 is riddled with poorly chosen and poorly constructed Hebrew, which leaves it terribly unclear. That is why it is best not to impose an interpretation that forecasts Jesus claiming to be Messiah here. Let us pretend, though, that the text above has been rendered satisfactorily.
THE 70 COMES FROM JEREMIAH
Daniel 9:2 says that Daniel read in Jeremiah the number of years. It forecast a 70-year exile for Israel. The exile, unfortunately for this opportunist, was actually 48 years. And Jeremiah said the end of that time would see the end of Gentile oppression. This never happened either. Now the Daniel book wants us to think that God sends the angel Gabriel to Daniel to explain Jeremiah's error. It is rationalised as a symbol, not an error. Daniel now has it that Jeremiah meant 70 weeks, using week as a symbol for year. But Jeremiah is not telling us that. An angel is saying it out of thin air.
It accuses Jeremiah of being a dodgy prophet who uses symbolism as a cover for inability to really see the future. And Gabriel makes himself as bad! Now the angel says he meant 70 units of seven years! That is comedic in its absurdity. Gabriel must have been more than reliable, though, when God told him to tell Mary she was going to have the Messiah!!
That the days are years and that weeks are seven years is just an assumption.
What use is all this symbolism to Daniel? What if Gabriel comes today and changes the meaning again? We cannot use such nonsense to work out the time of Jesus' ministry.
And after lying about what Jeremiah meant, Daniel goes about trying to construct an amazingly accurate prophecy from it.
[www.mindspring.com/~bab5/BIB/lessons.htm
— Daniel 9:17–27 Seventy Weeks of Years is a webpage that argues regarding Daniel’s 70 weeks prophecy that since the author of Daniel knew Jeremiah pretty well and how Jeremiah’s prophecy that Israel would be exiled for 70 years proved false (for it was 48 years), he probably assumed that the 70 years were not literal and so he might not have meant his 70 weeks to give a specific time span. It also points out how the conservatives often add “the” before the word anointed in verse 25 to make it seem that Jesus is being referred to, and even go as far as to pretend that the seven weeks and the sixty-two weeks add up to sixty-nine weeks when they could be running concurrently—and indeed must be, for the writer could have written 69 weeks instead of 7 and 62 weeks. It shows that the Jewish year was not 360 days long, for they had reason to add on a month every three years, which means that Jesus would have died about 38 AD, which Christians cannot accept, for Pilate was axed in 37 AD.]
WHAT ARE THE WEEKS?
Daniel seems to say that Jerusalem has got 70 weeks in which a day stands for a year from the time of the decree to rebuild it. So 70 weeks is 70 × 7, which is 490. Seven weeks pass and then sixty-two weeks, making sixty-nine weeks, which stands for 483 years, after which the anointed—anointed or anointed one is the same word as Christ or Messiah—will be cut off or killed. Seven years are left, and Jerusalem will be destroyed.
Christians say that when the 69 weeks from the decree to rebuild Jerusalem are up, the Christ will be at large. The prophecy says that the anointed one will be cut off after 69 weeks—that is, 483 years.
The Christians work this out by saying that a year represents a year shorter than our year of 365 days. According to them, Daniel is using a year of 360 days (The Case for Jesus the Messiah, page 127). They say the 360-day calculation was employed at the time of Noah in Genesis. They think Genesis has 12 months of 30 days each (ibid., 127). But where is the evidence that they did not add on the days they were short unto the last month? And what has Genesis and its time to do with Daniel, who lived centuries later? The next thing they do is argue that since the Book of Revelation used the 360 years to refer to the same period Daniel once prophesied about, Daniel must have used the same method of reckoning. Revelation 12:6 seems to say that the three and a half years indicated in Daniel 7:25 is 1,260 days, meaning the year was 360 days. But it seems to be only in their imagination, for if you read Revelation, the 1,260 days are spent nourishing the symbolic woman with the stars round her head. She could have been doing something different if Daniel was on about her for the rest of the three and a half years, reckoning the days by our 365-a-year system. The prophecy is being rigged to make it refer to the year Jesus was nailed to the cross. Evidence That Demands a Verdict, Vol. 1 (page 172), does that too.
Christians say that the time to start counting is from the decree of Artaxerxes in 444 BC, and counting with the fact in mind that a year for a Jew then was 360 days, we come up with the year Jesus died, 33 AD. So that is 483 years.
The trouble is, there is no evidence of such a decree. Nehemiah 2 is distorted by some as saying there is. Nehemiah asks permission to go rebuild Jerusalem’s walls and gates, which “have been destroyed by fire.” Artaxerxes gives him letters (essentially travel and supply orders), not a formal “royal decree” establishing national or religious restoration. The authorization is personal and practical, not a public law addressed to the nation of Judah. If that is a decree then everything is.
Daniel speaks of a decree that stood out to his readers. The decree is actually in the book Daniel refers to—Jeremiah. It does not give any year that fits Jesus.
Why did Daniel say 70 weeks instead of 490 years? Even though the word he used for week means a week of seven years, it must mean something different. He is not using the word literally. Daniel complained that he did not understand what years stood for in Jeremiah (9:2). The angel Gabriel gives him the 70 weeks vision but does not say what the weeks mean, or if we can take a strict reckoning of time from them—they might be only poetic and highly symbolic. Verse 23 indicates that what Daniel sees in the vision gives him understanding of what years and weeks symbolize. The angel didn’t make it plain to him. Consequently, Daniel’s vision does not justify Christian attempts to prove that he knew the year in which Jesus would die. The Jews had a word for weeks in which days represented years. Shabua was that word, and Daniel used it. Had he taken the word literally, he would not have been confused or have needed to be informed by an angel. Nor would he have written 70 weeks instead of 490 years.
AN ARGUMENT THAT DANIEL DOES NOT HAVE 490 YEARS IN MIND
There is evidence that Daniel did not mean sets of seven years by a week at all. In Daniel 12, during and after chatter about a year and a half-year and two years and days, Daniel is told that nobody will understand what all this is about until the end time, and then only the wise will understand. The meaning is that there is a code that nobody can break, for the book is sealed by God until the end of time. The key to understanding the prophecy would be working out what is meant by weeks and days and years in the chapter to see who is meant. But this is what is being kept secret (v.4). When these times are secret, it is the vital clue that the seventy weeks are not 490 years at all. What would be the point of writing seventy weeks when you could write 490 years, and others could figure out that it is 490 years? It only makes sense if you want to throw people off the scent.
BOOKS CONSULTED
Alleged Discrepancies of the Bible, John W Haley, Whitaker House, Pennsylvania, undated
Are There Hidden Codes in the Bible? Ralph O Muncaster, Harvest House Publishers, Eugene, Oregon, 2000
Attack on the Bible, John R Rice, Sword of the Lord, Murfreesboro, Tennessee, 1965
Bible Dictionary and Concordance, New American Bible, Catholic Edition, CD Stampley Enterprises, Charlotte Enterprises, Inc, North Carolina, 1971
Encyclopaedia of Bible Difficulties, Gleason W Archer, Zondervan, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1982
Evidence that Demands a Verdict, Vol 1, Alpha, Scripture Press Foundation, Bucks, 1995
God’s Word, Final, Infallible and Forever, Floydd C McElveen, Gospel Truth Ministries, Grand Rapids, 1985
In Search of Certainty, John Guest, Regal Books, Ventura, California, 1983
Jesus Hypotheses, V Messori, St Paul Publications, Slough, 1977
Science and the Bible, Henry Morris, Moody Press, Bucks, 1988
Science Speaks, Peter W Stoner, Robert C Newman, Moody Press, Chicago, 1976
The Bible Code, Michael Drosnin, Orion, London, 2000
The Case for Jesus the Messiah, John Ankerberg Harvest House, Eugene, Oregon, 1989
The Hard Sayings of Jesus, FF Bruce, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1983
The Late Great Planet Earth, Hal Lindsay, Lakeland, London, 1974
The Signature of God, Grant R Jeffrey, Marshall Pickering, London, 1998
The Truth Behind the Bible Code, Dr Jeffrey Satinover, Sidgwick & Jackson, London, 1997
The Truth of Christianity, WH Turton, Wells Gardner, Darton & Co Ltd, London, 1905
The Unauthorised Version, Robin Lane Fox, Penguin, Middlesex, 1992
The Virginal Conception and Bodily Resurrection of Jesus, Raymond E Brown, Paulist Press, New York, 1973
Theodore Parker’s Discourses, Theodore Parker, Longmans, Green, Rader and Dyer, London, 1876
Whatever Happened to Heaven, Dave Hunt, Harvest House, Eugene, Oregon, 1988
The WWW
www.infidels.org/library/modern/steven_carr/non-messianic.html, Steven Carr, Critique of Josh McDowells Non-Messianic Prophecies This Site cannot be overly recommended. It is superb.