@peacefulpete
Your reconstruction of the book of Daniel—as a patch-work of disappointed nationalistic pamphlets repeatedly recycled to keep pace with fresh political humiliations—is ingenious but finally unpersuasive once one moves beyond the narrow field of form-critical speculation and listens to the wider choir of evidence that has impressed both Jewish and Christian tradition for two millennia. A Catholic reading does not claim that the book dropped from heaven in its final shape without any redactional history; the Church has always admitted that the sacred authors employ sources, languages and even later hands who collate or gloss. What she denies is that such literary history empties the work of genuine prophecy—real foreknowledge given by God—or that it reduces Daniel to a cynical exercise in post-eventu guesswork.
The bilingual structure is not proof of a century-and-a-half compositional gulf. Ezra, written in the Persian period, shifts between Hebrew and Aramaic within a single paragraph—hardly evidence of a later author forging continuity. In Mesopotamia the court language was Aramaic while sacred reflection remained at home in Hebrew; a sixth-century Jew trained for government service would naturally write court memoirs in Aramaic and private visions in Hebrew. Dead Sea Scroll copies of Daniel, dated a mere generation after Antiochus, already treat the work as Scripture; there is no sign of a freshly minted Maccabean tract awkwardly seeking canonical status. Qumran’s esteem disposes of the theory that the Hebrew chapters were late Hasmonean propaganda waiting for Pompey to become “relevant.”
The identification of the fourth kingdom with Rome is not a Christian novelty foisted on an unsuspecting Daniel. The Greek translation of Theodotion—pre-Christian and used by both synagogue and Church—already renders the metals in a way that fits Alexander’s break-up and Rome’s iron grip. The “eagle” midrash in 4 Ezra, far from confessing novelty, simply clothes the common Jewish reading of Daniel in the imperial iconography of its day. Nor must one ignore Josephus, who tells us that Daniel’s vision of the fourth empire was interpreted as Rome when Pompey was scarcely cold in his grave. To dismiss this as opportunistic is to ignore the stubborn fact that Rome is the only historical super‐power that fulfills Daniel’s explicit criteria: it crushes all predecessors, lasts deep into messianic time, and is still standing when the divine stone strikes.
Your proposal that chapter 7 originally aimed at Ptolemy I Soter dissolves when weighed against the text. The little horn subdues three of the ten; Ptolemy displaced none of Alexander’s core successors. He never “changed the times and the law,” a phrase far more naturally suited to Antiochus’ abolition of Sabbath and sacrifice. Nor did Ptolemy meet his demise “without human hand” in a sudden, non-military fashion. The Antiochene crisis, on the other hand, fits every detail. The more economical reading is precisely the one the Church Fathers inherited from pre-Christian Judaism: chapter 7 sketches the entire series of empires from Babylon to Rome, then focuses the camera on the archetypal persecutor who foreshadows later antichrists.
That brings us to a specifically Catholic nuance often missed in reductionist schemes. Prophecy is not exhausted by its first historical horizon. The Church Fathers call this the “sensus plenior”—a fuller sense intended by the Holy Spirit that unfolds across history. Antiochus is a near fulfillment, a dress rehearsal; the final fulfillment surges forward into the Roman period and beyond, lying open until the stone “cut without hands” pulverizes the image at Christ’s return. This layered depth explains why a single vision can speak coherently to Maccabean martyrs, to first-century Christians groaning under Nero, and to believers still awaiting the last act of history. Far from being embarrassed by successive applications, Catholic theology expects them.
Even modern critical scholarship has begun to retreat from the sweeping skepticism of the nineteenth century. The linguistic profile of Daniel’s Aramaic is older than Qumran, and the Persian loan-words reflect an Achaemenid rather than a Seleucid administrative milieu. Greek words are conspicuously absent where we should expect them if a Jerusalem scribe were writing under Antiochus. The book’s knowledge of sixth-century Babylonian titles and architecture proved embarrassingly accurate once cuneiform was deciphered. These are awkward facts for the ex-eventu hypothesis but congenial to a date near the lifetime of the historical Daniel.
Catholic faith therefore continues to read Daniel as the Church always has: an inspired mosaic, certainly edited and transmitted, but substantially the work of a sixth-century seer whose visions God enlarged to embrace later crises and, finally, the definitive victory of Christ’s kingdom. Skeptical reconstructions will no doubt continue to circulate, yet the burden of proof remains on those who would overturn the remarkable unity of tradition, internal coherence, and mounting archaeological confirmation that surround this prophetic book.