The Moral Problem. 

        It is the New Testament endorsement of Daniel that is really fatal to the modern view. Unfortunately the achieving of good ends by wrong means has never been rare in religious circles; but the end never does justify the means. If Daniel is a second-century work, whatever the motives of the author, it is a sham and a forgery, and we are seriously asked to believe that our Lord had not sufficient spiritual insight to recognize it as such. The period 150 B.C. — A.D. 100 did produce a large crop of pseudepigraphic works (These were mostly apocalyptic and eschatological works attributed to various worthies of the past), of which Enoch and II Esdras (the latter in the Apocrypha) are perhaps the best known. There is no evidence known to us that the ascriptions of authorship in these books were taken very seriously by any of the Jewish religious leaders, and yet our Lord Jesus Himself (to say nothing of all the others) was completely deceived by Daniel!

        To make matters worse, according to this view He took a book which had only been intended by its author to refer to the time of Ajntiochus Epiphanes, and so misunderstood it, that He made it apply to things yet future!

        To sum up: Over a century of controversy and study has proved inconclusive. The honest verdict on the intellectual arguments of both conservative and liberal must be, the book is true! Here, as so often in the Bible, the final answer must be one of faith. Pusey’s words are as valid to-day as when they were first written in 1864, “The book of Daniel is … either divine or an imposture” (Pusey: Daniel the Prophet, p. 1.) It is in our Lord’s attitude, rather than in linguistic studies and archaeological research, however valuable and commendable they may be, that we shall find the answer to the problem.