Christianity and the End Times

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It works beautifully.

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Funny how you always say that about stuff that doesn’t really work at all.

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Oh but we do.

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Funny how you abandoned the discussion then, with no real explanation of how there could be a continuous Roman Empire or any explanation of why later empires were excluded. Until you manage that you have no viable list. Your future empire must be a new one, and the Ottomans at least must be included. Probably the Sasanians, too and the British. Last time I looked eight is not four.

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You are right to focus on Antiochus Epiphanes' defeat by the Maccabees as a major part of the prophetic picture but you are wrong to ignore Daniel 9 which shows the bigger context of the coming of the Messiah and the fourth empire

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I am not ignoring it. I just reject your interpretation because you ignore too much of it and it’s relation to the other prophecies.

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Since you obviously can't show any timing from the seventy weeks of Daniel 9 to support your scenario you are missing the big picture by trying to squeeze it all into the prophecies concerning the Maccabean period. It doesn't fit. Because Daniel 7 and 9 contradict it.

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You can’t squeeze it in either. The only thing you have is the rough calculation of the date of Jesus’ death. The rest all fails. Daniel 7 does not contradict it and Daniel 9 agrees more than it disagrees. Not to mention Daniel 8 and Daniel 10-12

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The Maccabean period is spelled out in some detail but if you leave out the greater context of the fourth empire and the coming of the Messiah you miss that it's meant to be a foreshadowing of something far bigger, which we know by the description of the fourth empire as more terrible than all the others, and far off in the future, which we know because of that unfulfilled final week.

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The fact that the prophecy failed hardly proves that your interpretation is right.

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And this bigger picture depends entirely on understanding the meaning of the seventy weeks. Since you slight that one major prophecy you are missing the big picture and reducing the prophetic meaning of Daniel to a small local event in which Israel prevails over its enemy, which is in reality intended to foreshadow the end of the world and the triumph of God in Jesus Christ which will bring ALL history to an end.

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60 years is a much smaller error than 2000 years. Daniel 8 and Daniel 10-12 confirm that the end of the world was meant to occur in the Maccabean revolt, and Daniel 7 is consistent with that.

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All that is irrelevant to the question I'm asking you, so I continue to suppose you are just avoiding the fact that you have no answer. Which you can't have because there is no way the seventy weeks have anything to do with the Maccabean period.

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On the contrary. The question is whether you are prepared to be held to the same standard - or in fact a considerably more lenient one. The answer is that you are not.

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It is sufficient for my scenario that the sixty-nine weeks counts to the lifetime of Jesus no matter which starting point is used, and no matter which calendar is used, and there is no getting around that. There is nothing whatever in your scenario that fulfills any of the seventy week prophecy, not one part of it.

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And that is an outright lie. I not only have very good candidates for the messiahs, i also have the city being stormed, and the sacrifice being taken away and the abomination of desolation all in the years directly following a messiah’s death. You don’t.

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Well I'm very certain of my interpretation and if anybody is desperate I would suppose it must be you because you continue to avoid the glaring fact that your Maccabean scenario fits nothing whatever in the seventy weeks prophecy. All your accusations and carrying on serve only to put up a smokescreen as far as I can see.

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Funny how your accusations apply more to your own conduct. I at least have not stooped to lies, double standards, or inventing gaps in the narrative.

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But that is a huge straw man since I've said nothing about an extra 280 sevens.

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How else do you get to our future ? If you want to say the whole thing was fulfilled in the years immediately following the crucifixion go ahead. But otherwise you need to actually account for those extra years.

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...the only thing left out is the last week, seven years, which is understood to be yet future. Please stick to justifying your own scenario instead of making false accusations against mine.

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Well make your mind up. If the fulfilment is in our future you have at least 280 more sevens to account for.

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Oh the dates work out fine for anybody who isn't determined to make a mess of them

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The last seven years do not work for you.

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This is very confused. You are making Jeremiah's prophecy of seventy years for the duration of the Babylonian Captivity into your starting date for the seventy weeks?

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If you make things up your confusion is your own fault. And in fact the entire paragraph is too confused to be worth answering.

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Well there's your problem, you are assuming an intended end date based on your own misreading of the prophecies. It doesn't fit and you make that the fault of the prophecy?

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On the contrary, I am basing it on the very clear evidence from Daniel 8 and Daniel 10-12 as you ought to know by now, as well as the fact that much of Daniel 9 does fit.

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Your problem is that Daniel 9 doesn't have anything to do with the Maccabean period. You are imposing the other prophecies that ARE about that period onto this one which isn't about it. There isn't the slightest relation to the Maccabean period in Daniel 9. None of the seventy weeks has anything to do with the Maccabean period.

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That’s your opinion. However since,overall, my interpretation fits much better with the Book of Daniel I disagree with you.

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Well, thank you for spelling all that out after all so I can get a better idea of how wrong it is. No wonder I kept ignoring it, I couldn't make any sense of it.

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Your confusion comes from not reading it.

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That is false. I abandoned that discussion because there's only so far one can go with speculations about an unknown future.

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We don’t need to look at the future to know your interpretation doesn’t work. The fall of the Roman Empire and the following empires in the region are all history.And in fact you couldn’t even offer speculations that really addressed the problem that continuity is very thoroughly broken.

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But the idea of a continuation of the Roman Empire into the future has not been fulfilled so everything concerning it can only be speculative and tentative.

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The fact that the Roman Empire is so thoroughly gone that any revival would be a new Empire is not speculation.

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You are continuing a discussion that is purely speculative on your part as well as mine.

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The existence of all three empires and the fact that they have held the Holy Land at various points in history is not speculation. It is not a problem for my view, but it certainly is for yours.

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that is a problem from your point of view because of your way of looking at the prophecies

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That’s just reality. The Roman Empire IS gone. There is no continuity of government.

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...besides, your way of dealing with the prophecies is so off the charts wrong there's just no point.

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My reading fits the text far better than yours. That’s why it is my reading.

Empty assertion is no excuse for argument.

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Except for the fact that Antiochus is the type or symbol or model for the future Antichrist who is based on the little horn of the fourth empire of Daniel 7, there is no relation to the other prophecies.

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According to your assumptions. However the fact that the end is the time of the Maccabean revolt according to Daniel 8 and Daniel 10-12 is a fact that cannot be reasonably ignored.Also the fact that Antiochus does fit the description of the little horn in Daniel 7 further supports the idea that they are the same. That events in Daniel 9 are also seen in Daniel 11 is also relevant. And that’s just off the top of my head.

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Daniel 7 and 9 refer to the fourth empire and to Jesus Christ, and with the verses at the end of each of the chapters to a future time that hasn't yet come, and that is what you are ignoring.

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By which you I mean that I reject your interpretation of Daniel 7 and 9 because it contradicts Daniel 8 and Daniel 10-12.That’s the difference.

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Is there any point in continuing this discussion? It's very clear by now what our different interpretations are and there doesn't seem to be any way either of us is going to change.

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I understand that you must put doctrine ahead of the Bible and I am not demanding you change that.The only reason to continue this discussion is for you to deal with the serious problems in your assertions. If you can’t reasonably do that I have no reason to change my mind. I have the interpretation that best fits the text.

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No I don't, I just have to deal with the seventy weeks and all that is left after the crucifixion is the one seventieth week of the prophecy, which has no fulfillment in the time frame you are insisting on and therefore looks to the future.

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In other words you get to arbitrarily shove the end of the prophecy off into the future because it failed.Nope. The prophecy says 490 years. No mention of any gaps. Inventing one because it failed is twisting the text.But you’ve already proved my point that Christianity misrepresents the end time prophecies - proved it ad nauseum. So you can stop. I don’t need any further repetition.

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It's AN end it is not THE end. Daniel 7 and 9, plus the last verses of all these chapters, take us to THE end.

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That’s your assumption. It finds no support in the text of Daniel 8 and Daniel 10-12.

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They are similar, not identical, and this is how you miss the entire point, that not only does one come from the fourth beast and the other from the third, but they appear in widely separated times in history.

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That’s all interpretation. The fact that I disagree with your interpretation is not an argument in your favour.

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So yep, this discussion has reached senility and it's time to stop.

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Fine. Based on the actual text rather than Christian doctrine, you can’t provide any sensible reason for inserting a 2000 year gap into Daniel 9. You can’t provide any support for the alleged change of context in Daniel 10-12, and the text is against such an idea, too. You can’t justify the idea that Daniel 8 is about anything but the end envisaged in Daniel 2. You can’t even come up with a justifiable list of four empires.That’s certainly a good point for the discussion to end - for me.

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Just one last thing: you keep saying I'm basing my views on doctrine, I am not, absolutely everything I've said here comes straight out of my reading of the scripture. It's all there and anybody who is interested in getting into the book of Daniel should see that.

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That isn’t true and you have no excuse for not knowing it after your failure to produce textual support for the claims I listed.All the points I raised were clearly based on doctrine not text. Putting off the seventieth week of Daniel 9 is - in your own words- based on the fact that the events didn’t happen on schedule. It is only doctrine that says that a prophecy can’t fail.There’s nothing in the text of Daniel 8 to say that the end it refers to is anything other than the end shown in Daniel 2.It’s even worse with Daniel 10-12. There is no indication of a change of context in the text.There is no textual support for the idea that the fourth empire goes away and somehow comes back (despite being destroyed as an empire or a kingdom or even a pathetic group of exiles holding onto a pretence of rule) nor that there will be other empires which get ignored despite occupying the same region the text is concerned with.

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It is you who deviate from scripture by ignoring the fact that there are two separate little horns IN SCRIPTURE, NOT DOCTRINE, one in Daniel 7 that comes out of the4 fourth kingdom and one in Daniel 8 from the third kingdom, this is SCRIPTURE, not assumption or interpretation as you try to claim

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Then quote the text that says that they are different. Quote the text that says that the little horn of Daniel 8 comes from the third empire. Quote the text that says that they are different people. You can’t because it isn’t there. It is all interpretation.

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There is no contradiction between Daniel 7 and 9 and Daniel 8 and 10-12 because they CLEARLY DEAL WITH DIFFERENT PROPHECIES, one about gtreece qand the other about the fourth kingdom or the Roman Empire and the coming of the Messiah or Jesus Christ

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If we straightforwardly read Daniel 8 and Daniel 10-12 in the light of Daniel 2 there will be no empires after the Maccabean revolt. The end is the end of the Empires (Daniel 2:44). You contradict this by interpreting Daniel 7 and Daniel 9 as referring to a later empire.

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THIS IS ALL IN THE SCRIPTURE, you are indulging in devious spin when you try to make it out to be my interpretation as imposed on it. You misread scripture, it's all there as I've described it.

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Telling the truth is not devious spin. No matter how much you hate it.

I will note that a commentary is where you go for interpretation. If you want the text, you go to an actual Bible.

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Well I could have guessed you were following a liberal interpretation, juust found the evidence. Perfect example of how liberals mangle the scripture in order ot impose their prejudices on it. this is how you arrive at Greece and not Rome eh? Kind of makes a mess of the pretty symbolism of the statue which has the two-nation Medo-Persian empire represented by the chest and two arms, which echoes the symbolism of Medo-Persia in the bear of Daniel 7 which has one side higher than the other which symbolizes that one part of the empire is stronger than the other, and likewise the symbolism of the ram in Daniel 8 which has one horn that is higher than the other. The liberal interpretation destroys this beautiful symbolism.

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Actually I haven’t settled on an interpretation of the four Empires of Daniel 2. However the idea that the Persian Empire was lesser than the Babylonian (Daniel 2:39) is highly questionable and the divided nature of the legs (2:43J fits well with the Diadochi kingdoms as described in Daniel 11-12And the idea that the chest and arms somehow matches the symbolism of Daniel 7 and 8 seems odd indeed.But all this is interpretation.

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And of course make all the symbolism of the fourth kingdom apply to Greece, which is ridiculous since none of it describes any kingdom that has yet appeared on the earth, and then it must also iturn the Great and terrible beast of Daniel 7 into Greece as well, and try to make the little horn there the equivalent of the little horn in Daniel 8 though the one arises out of ten kings, subduing three of them, and the other arises out of one of four kingdoms.

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The last sentence is especially daft in light of the fact that both descriptions fit Antiochus. But just because you object to the interpretation doesn’t make it wrong, and still you argue about interpretations.

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This certainly reflects your own mangling of the scripture. How can one possibly debate someone who does this to the text and then accuses me of imposing MY interpretation on it?

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Well you could show that there was actual mangling of the text on my part rather than simply disagreeing with your preferred interpretation. And you could try showing that things you claim to be in the text actually are. Which is what you were meant to be doing.

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It's even got you accepting two messiahs that come nowhere near the sixty-nine years to Messiah the Prince of the text. Oh it goes on and on.

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And there you go, attacking me for simply disagreeing with your interpretation. There’s nothing in the actual text that contradicts me, despite your assertion.So deal with the text. Instead of confusing the text with your preferred interpretation.

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Interesting with all this complaint about how I don't quote scripture how you hardly ever do. And you don't even bother to paraphrase it, which I at least do.

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The complaint is that you say things are in the actual text and are not interpretation - without offering any support for it. Not even citing verses. Indeed quoting would be better than citing for that purpose but you haven’t even cited verses.

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Well of COURSE it's interpretation.

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Thanks for admitting it.

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Daft? To point out that the circumstances of their appearance are completely different?

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The symbolism is different but both can reasonably be interpreted as referring to Antiochus.

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Next you say I should show how you are mangling the text without identifying the context of my remark so I can't show it.

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I included a sufficient quote, and you can easily go back to your own post to see more. Of course the reason you can’t show it is that I’m not doing it.

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But I've given many ways already, including the fact that you try to make the two different little horns mentioned above into one.

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In other words it is just disagreeing with your interpretation, not mangling the text at all.

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How can you make such a statement in the teeth of the fact that your messiahs DO NOT FIT THE SIXTY-NINE WEEKS PROPHECY THE TEXT SAYS POINTS TO THE MESSIAH? THIS IS FACT, THIS IS TEXT, THIS IS NOT INTERPRETATOIN. 69 is 69, it is not 49 or 7 or whatever other wrong number applies.

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But I don’t mangle the text there, either. The 49 years are there, as even you admit. About the only valid point you have is that the 434 years doesn’t fit. But I don’t mangle the text even there. I simply argue that it is the author’s mistake WITH SUPPORT FROM THE TEXT and the context.Holding that the text has an error is not mangling it.You, on the other hand claim that there is a gap between the first 483 years and the last seven, and you claim that the text actually says that - you deny that it is interpretation. It should be easy for you to find that text. Daniel 9 is not that long and you only need to read the last four verses. That is the entirety of the seventy weeks prophecy and there is no additional explanation of it.But you haven’t done that. Why spend time reading commentaries when you only need to read four verses to find the text that you say is there.

The primary goal of Bible scholars is to understand the Bible in context. Most of them are Christian of some flavour. They just don’t unthinkingly accept fundamentalist views of the Bible (at leat not completely - even those that are evangelicals often disagree with common beliefs)There are others who treat the Bible as a collection of historical documents rather than scripture, which is the line I try to follow.Opposing fundamentalism for it’s own sake is not and cannot be the primary agenda of anyone worth listening to. It’s not even my agenda, appalled as I am by their behaviour.

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I don't see the point of trying to make a case for the shift in focus in the text that alerts us that we have left the original context and are now being presented with something that is yet future, as long as PaulK insists that the two little horns of Daniel 7 and 8 are the same person.

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Let us note that you have refused to support that claim from the point you made it. Let us also note that the challenge before you is expressly not about interpretation - so complaining that I dare to disagree with your interpretation on another matter is hardly a valid excuse.

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The text says that the one comes from among ten kings and the other comes out of one of four kingdoms

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And both descriptions fit Antiochus.

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We agree that the second is Antiochus Epiphanes who was defeated by the Maccabees around 200 BC. He says the first is the same person.; I say the text says he's a different person. The TEXT, not me, not my interpretation, the TEXT which says he comes from an empire with ten kings while we know that Antiochus came from the kingdom of the Seleucids which was one of four of the divided Greek empire.

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And I have already presented my explanation of how that text fits Antiochus. Ten Seleucid kings preceded him - at least technically - and three of them were deposed to give him the position. Which fits the description. Which even supports the idea that the fourth beast of Daniel 7 represents the Seleucids.Abe: Message 77

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There are other things that make the men different, and other things that make his reading of the text wrong in other ways, but just that one is enough to stop any kind of reasonable discussion in its tracks. It's a blatant denial of what the Bible says.

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Funny how you make that claim even though you ought to know that I already explained how that text fits Antiochus.

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If he can't get that simple fact straight about what the Bible actually says there's no point in trying to make a case for the subtle switch in focus that takes some of the prophecy into the future.

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Since I did get it right I expect an apology. No, only kidding. You see nothing wrong with making blatantly false accusations - if we’re to believe you Jesus did it all the time.Note to Phat. Are you still unsure who the bad guys are ? Faith has pretty much proved that she is one of them. Again.Edited by PaulK, : No reason given.

list of Seleucid rulersAntiochus is preceded by1 Seleucus I
2 Antiochus I
3 Antiochus II
4 Seleucus II
5 Seleucus III
6 Antiochus III
7 Seleucus IV (elder brother of Antiochus IV)The three who were uprooted areHeliodorus - murderer and usurper of Seleucus IV. Defeated by Antiochus IVDemetrius - son and rightful heir of Seleucus IV (who managed to gain the throne later, but outside the relevant time period)Antiochus - infant son of Seleucus IV, co-regent with Antiochus IV until his murder.