1. Daniel is a part of the Hebrew canon and the hebrew cannon was closed before the 4th century BCE. The priests did not allow any new books to be added to the canon and evidence of this is that the apocryphal books and the Macabees were never included in the canon. This adds weight to this because it shows that the priesthood stood as guardians of the scriptures and did not allow them to be added to willy nilly. No new books have been added since the 5th century according to Jewish tradition.
That might be big news to the Hebrews! They closed their canon in the 1st century CE and by your logic would have left out all of the prophets, psalms etc. In fact there were 3 different sets of books that the Hebrews had "closed" canons at DIFFERENT times and they are:
Torah - 400BC - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy
Prophets - 200BC - (Notice the lack of Daniel) Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, etc
Writings - 100CE - (Notice the presence of Daniel) Psalms, Proverbs, Job, .... Daniel, Ezra, Chronicles
Your other arguments have some subtlty as to why they are wrong but this one is just plain and simply wrong. Daniel is a late addition to the Hebrew scripture, moreover it actually supports the late dating because it was not included when the Prophets were canonized even though Daniel most certainly SHOULD have been considered on par with Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. Christians move Daniel out of writings and near the other exilic prophets which is telling on a number of levels. It is more than worth noting that this was done at 200BC just before the argument for the late dating suggests that Daniel was written ~167BC.
I will admit that this is only suggestive of the dating of Daniel. It is TECHNICALLY possible that Daniel was written at any point between 600BC and 100CE. The canons only show us when Daniel was regarded. The Hebrew's had 2 chances to include an early Daniel into their canon. Once at 400BC which they didn't but they also didn't include the other exilic writings. But it IS curious why they did not include him in 200BC when they explicitly DID include the other exilic writings.
The Hebrew canon being closed at 400BC is just plaininly a non-starter Peg. It is factually incorrect that it was closed at 400BC and even if it was, it would have been missing MOST of the books we know today.
2. Jesus Christ himself accepted Daniels prophecy ....
Except for theologically, it is perfectly acceptable for either Jesus or Matthew or both to have been wrong.
3. Parts of the book of Daniel was also found in the Dead Sea Scrolls and the parchments of Daniel were dated to be 2nd century BCE. For this reason and the fact that the book was already in circulation by early in the 1st century, it has been concluded that:
The Zondervan Pictorial Encyclopedia of the Bible: *A Maccabean dating for Daniel has now to be abandoned, if only because there could not possibly be a sufficient interval between the composition of Daniel and its appearance in the form of copies in the library of a Maccabean religious sect.*
This is a decently lousy argument because we have absolutly no idea how long it would take a text to be regarded in Qumran. For all we know, the author of Daniel could have been a member/leader of said Maccabean sect in which case it would have been regarded immediatly. There are exactly ZERO copies of Daniel that date older that 167BC and all the DSS copies date to the late 2nd century BC. There may have been as much as a half a century for Daniel to be circulated. Plenty of time especially considering that it was an apocolypse regarding the troubles the Hebrews were having at the time. Daniel also is not that large of a book and was broken into sections some of which differ from the canonical texts (another problem for biblical inerrancy).
There are just SO MANY unknowns and you cannot possibly make this claim. We don't know who the 2nd century author was, we don't know the level of interest in this type of writing or this author. We do have a relativly large window of opportunity and we do know that Daniel was being copied to the point of being differentiated by the late 2nd century when the DSS scrolls are dated.
4. the Jewish historian Josephus states that the prophecies of Daniel were shown to Alexander the Great when he entered Jerusalem. This was about 332 BCE. Jewish Antiquities, XI, 337 [viii, 5]
And Josephus lived when???
I'll skip the rhetorical question. Excuse me if I don't regard the writings of a 1st century CE jewish apologist as evidence that anything like the sort happend when Alexander came into Jerusalemin 337 BC. There is no evidence contemporary to Alexander that any such event happened.
5. Parts of Daniel are written in both Hebrew & Aramaic. About the Aramaic portion of Daniel, The International Standard Bible
Encyclopedia says:
*When the Aramaic vocabulary of Daniel is examined, nine-tenths of it can be attested immediately from West Semitic inscriptions, or papyri from the 5th cent. B.C. or earlier. The remaining words have been found in sources such as Nabatean or Palmyrene Aramaic, which are later than the 5th cent. B.C." (Vol. 1, p. 860) The style of writing and the terms used are a strong evidence of very early authorship.
This is IMO the best of the evidence for an early dating. I don't have the personal expertise to criticize it nor can I find any layman's criticism of it. I'll note just like the canon argument, it does not date Daniel. It dates the language. We can certainly hypothesize that the late author of Daniel certainly was at least trying to make it seem like the writing was contemporary with the exile. Perhaps he also wanted the language to sound like it was contemporary too. I can certainly imagine that if I wanted to write a book of the Bible and make it sound like it fit the King James language that I would be able to do that right now if I was careful.
But I conceed this point, I just don't have the chops to defeat it. It is one chip on the scale of the early dating against what I can see as much more on the side of the late dating.
6. The 6th Century prophet Ezekiel was a contemporary of Daniel who served as a prophet during the Babylonian exile. Ezekiel mentions Daniel by name a number of times in his own writings. So if Daniel really was forged, then so was the book of Ezekiel.
Ezekiel does not mention the exilic Daniel and certainly does not do it a "number of times". He mentions a person named Dan'el and only does so twice in the exact same context less than 10 verses apart. Dan'el was a non-Hebrew hero just like Noah and Job that Ezekiel mentions in the same breath. In fact, he mentions Dan'el in between the two, "Noah, Dan'el, and Job". What is similar about them? They were all non-Hebrew, considered righteous (in context of Ezekiel 14), and long gone. In the context of Ezekiel 14, it is not possible that he could have been refering to the Daniel of the exile. Note Ezekiel verse 20 (...they could save neither son nor daughter...) and that Daniel of the exile had no kids. The Babylonians made sure of that.
7. The fact is that Daniel gave the timing of the Messiahs arrival. his prophecy regarding the 69 weeks of years is a messianic prophecy about when the Messiah would appear. Daniel 9:25-26
Even IF this was a prophecy of Jesus which it is not, it just means that Daniel was pretty good about being a prophet 200 years before Jesus rather than 600 years before. It doesn't prove that it was written in the exile at all.
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be. --Thomas Jefferson
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