ughaibu

Sometimes I back horses and sometimes I win, Marx presumably made some correct predictions, Einstein certainly did. I dont see how this thread, even if it's agreed that Daniel contains accurate predictions, proves anything about god.

Sven

No. The summary is not: "They were all liars", the summary is "You have not shown that what they wrote is true."
There are two important differences between these two summaries:
1) There are more ways to be wrong than to lie - this was explained to you already several times.
2) Not accepting something as true does not mean that one claims its false. It means that there is no evidence either way.

Jack the Bodiless

Historical errors in Daniel (brief summary):

1. King "Darius the Mede": no such person, Cyrus was the conqueror of Babylon. Probably confusion due to Daniel's reliance on the failed prophecies of Isaiah and Jeremiah (that Babylon would fall to the Medes).

2. The last Babylonian king was Nabondius, not Belshazzar. Belshazzar wasn't the son of Nebuchadnezzar, as claimed: he was the son of Nabondius. There were several other king between Nebuchadnezzar and Nabondius. A mess.

3. "Madness of Nebuchadnezzar": unknown to history. Nabondius (not Nebuchadnezzar) had an affliction (not madness: more like dermatitis).

4. Nebuchadnezzar's siege of Jerusalem: he wasn't yet king at the time specified.

5. The Persian Kings: it is prophesied that there will be four Persian kings between Cyrus and Alexander. There were nine: but only four of those were mentioned in the OT (Daniel's source).

3. Anachronisms: Greek musical instruments introduced into the region much later by Alexander's conquests.

4. "Chaldeans" as a priestly class in Babylon: not until later.

5. Mention of an afterlife with "Heaven and Hell" and judgement after death: alien to Judaism at that time.

6. Prophecy goes awry in chapter 11, with an attempted actual prediction that Antiochus would be victorious over the Ptolemies, ravage Egypt, and later die back in Palestine. He actually died in Persia, shortly thereafter.

7. The failure of the "Prophecy of 70 weeks", the countdown to the Messiah. Apologists have tried heroically to make the dates fit Jesus, but nothing quite works. A big topic in itself, depending on whichever desperate scheme the individual apologist attempts. It's actually a much better fit to the events of the Maccabean Rebellion.

Sven

Oh, yes, I remember the "bnfiiisms"

Barbarian

The way I read it, the defense starts from "we are undecided about the truth of the bible" and applies "in order to accept a claim, we need enough corroborating evidence to turn the claim into the simplest explanation we can come up with". The part about undecidedness is especially important, as you seem to think that one either accepts the bible as the ultimate truth or thinks it is a lie, but in reality there is a third alternative, undecidedness. We do not ask you to prove Daniel's prophetic aspect by assuming the bible is a lie, but you cannot assume it is true either, because that is exactly what you try to establish by parading Daniel, and you cannot assume it to be a fact before you conclude your proof.

Imagine us to be unkempt barbarians who are as of yet undecided about the truth of the bible, and prove to us that Daniel was given a vision about the future.

Jack the Bodiless

There are some I missed, like the late style of Aramaic used, but that's way too techical for me. And there's the usual smokescreen of apologetics, like "maybe Darius was just a general of Cyrus" and "maybe Belshazzar was a regent who was treated as a king because the Bible would be false otherwise..." and "...um, the missing Persian kings must have been really inconsequential or Daniel would have foresaw them...".

...But, of course, no reason to assume that these apologetic gymnastics have any validity.

spin

Briefly,

1. Nebuchadnezzar was not the father of Belshazzar. Belshazzar was the son of Nabonidas. People try to argue that Belshazzar's mother was the daughter of Nebuchadnezzar and so he was sort of a descendant of Nebuchadnezzar. Nabonidus had no claim to fame through his marriage.
2. Belshazzar was never king. He acted as regent while his father Nabonidus was away from the kingdom for over ten years. He was not called "king", but merely "king's son" in the official literature. The "third year of king Belshazzar" is simply erroneous.
3. Belshazzar died in battle at a place called Opis a few days before Babylon capitulated, Nabonidus was in Babylon when it fell, but Daniel is blissfully unaware of any of this for he has Belshazzar dying in Babylon and the city immediately falling to Darius the Mede.
4. Nebuchadnezzar's madness and abandonment of Babylon is a garbled version of events in the life of Nabonidus, the real father of Belshazzar. With the encroaching Persian problem blocking Babylonian trading routes, Nabonidus attempted to find other means of supplying Babylon, so he was absent from the city for over ten years. Babylonians were disaffected with the king's behaviour and he was portrayed very negatively, ie mad.
5. The Persian empire conquered the Medes. They didn't join hands and work together. The Medes were a conquered race. The Persians worked with the races they conquered, like they had a relatively good relationship with the Jews.
6. Darius son of Ahasuerus (= Xerxes) a Mede, is simply wrong. Darius was a Persian name. The writer has mixed different Persian king names, and so we have this misguided name. This Darius even has the ability to set up satraps in Dan 6:1, so the writer thinks he was a king, though there was never such a figure.
7. The person who governed Babylon after it fell to the Persians was called Gobryas. Because there was no Darius the Mede, our christian friends try to conflate Darius and Gobryas.
8. Daniel gives his first dream interpretation in the 2nd year of Nebuchadnezzar, ie in 604 BCE and assuming he was at least 16 at the time, he had to have been born by 620 BCE. Babylon fell into Cyrus's hands in 539 BCE. That makes Daniel about 81. Not an error, just incredible.

There may be other things to add to the list. But that's all the time I'm going to give to it.

ETA: Well, with Jack's list you can play mix and match.


spin

Johnny Skeptic

You are grossly misinformed. Please read an article by Bernard Katz on the book of Daniel at http://www.infidels.org/library/mode...tz/critic.html. Katz discusses some of Josh McDowell's writings about Daniel. Incredibly, Katz discredits McDowell's with McDowell's OWN sources. As the article shows, McDowell's OWN sources claim that Daniel was written by more than one author over a period of centuries.

If God really wants to prove to everyone that he can predict future, he could easily do it, right? What does God or anyone else gain from debates about prophecy? If you were able to predict the future, and you wanted to convince as many people as possible that you can predict the future, surely you would provide much better evidence than the Bible does.

John Kesler

To the list of errors provided, I will add the chronological discrepancy between Daniel 1 and 2. Farrell Till has a detailed article about the problem, including a response to Robert Turkel's attempted resolution. The New American Bible contains this frank footnote for Daniel 2:1:

John Kesler

Not only does Daniel 5 repeatedly refer to Nebuchadnezzar as Belshazzar's father, so does the apocryphal book of Baruch, lending support to the notion that by the time these books were written, the misconception of a father-son relationship was extant: