22. Fürst, p. 56. See also Reuss, Gesch. d. Heil. Schr. A. T. (p. 550), who gives its date as
132.
23. Fürst, who holds the Maccabean origin of the Book of Daniel, is so frequently
inconsistent with himself in the course of his remarks on the subject, that it is sometimes
difficult to understand him. Occasionally, when argument is wanting, he asserts that a
thing is self-evident (es versteht sich von selbst). Such a 'self evident' assertion, for
which, however, no historical evidence is offered - which, indeed, runs in the opposite
direction - is summarized on page 100. But the word 'self-evident' has no place in
historical discussions, where only that is evident which rests on historical grounds.
24. This is admitted even by Mr. Drummond ('Jewish Messiah,' pp. 246, 245 -257, 260).
Mr. Drummond's book is quoted as representing the advocacy by a distinguished English
scholar of the Maccabean theory of the authorship of Daniel.
25. Drummond, u. s. p. 261.
The question hitherto treated has been exclusively of the date of the composition of the
Book of Daniel, without reference to who may have been its author, whether its present is
exactly the same as its original form, and finally, whether it ever belonged to tho se books
whose right to canonicity, though nor their age, was in controversy, that is, whether it
belonged, so to speak, to the Old Testament αντιλεγοµενα . As this is not the place for a
detailed discussion of the canonicity of the Book of Daniel - or, indeed, of any other in
the Old Testament canon - we shall only add, to prevent misunderstanding, that no
opinion is here expressed as to possible, greater or less, interpolations on the Book of
Daniel, or in any other part of the Old Testament. We must here bear in mind that the
moral view taken of such interpolations, as we would call them, was entirely different in
those times from ours; and it may perhaps be an historically and critically no unwarranted
proposition, that such interpolations were, to speak moderately, not all unusual in ancient
documents. In each case the question must be separately critically examined in the light
of internal and (if possible) external evidence. But it would be a very different thing to
suggest that there may be an interpolation, or, it may be, a re-arrangement in a document
(although at present we make no assertions on the subject, one way or the other), and to
pronounce a whole document a fabrication dating from a much later period. The one
would, at any rate, be quite in the spirit of those times; the other implies, beside
insuperable critical difficulties, a deliberate religious fraud, to which no unprejudiced
student could seriously regard the so-called Pseudepigrapha as forming any real
analogon.
But as regards the Book of Daniel, it is an important fact that the right of the Book of
Daniel to canonicity was never called in question in the ancient Synagogue. The fact that
it was distinguish as 'visions' (Chezyonoth) from the other 'prophecies' has, of course, no
bearing on the question, any more than the circumstance that later Rabbinism, which,
naturally enough, could not find its way through the Messianic prophecies of the book,
declare that even Daniel was mistaken in, and could not make anything of the predictions
concerning the 'latter days' (Ber. R. 98).26 On the other hand, Daniel was elevated to
almost the same pinnacle as Moses, while it was said that, as compared with heathen
sages, if they were all placed in one scale, and Daniel in the other, he would outweigh