Scripture
Daniel 9:24-27
Daniel speaks of atonement, everlasting righteousness, the Messiah, and the destruction that follows.
Seventy weeks are decreed for your people and your holy city to stop their transgression, to put an end to sin, to make atonement for iniquity, to bring in everlasting righteousness, to seal up vision and prophecy, and to anoint the Most Holy Place. Know and understand this: From the issuance of the decree to restore and rebuild Jerusalem until the Messiah, the Prince, there will be seven weeks and sixty-two weeks. It will be rebuilt with streets and a trench, but in times of distress. Then after the sixty-two weeks the Messiah will be cut off and will have nothing. Then the people of the prince who is to come will destroy the city and the sanctuary. The end will come like a flood, and until the end there will be war; desolations have been decreed. And he will confirm a covenant with many for one week, but in the middle of the week he will put an end to sacrifice and offering. And on the wing of the temple will come the abomination that causes desolation, until the decreed destruction is poured out upon him.”
Messiah and atonement
Daniel joins atonement, everlasting righteousness, an anointed one, and Jerusalem’s later destruction in a passage central to Christian messianic argument. The focused question is whether the anointed one cut off before the city and sanctuary are destroyed is best explained by Jesus’ death before the Second Temple fell in AD 70.
Where this passage comes up
- The Messiah cannot die before reigningThe Tanakh and the rabbis both speak of an anointed one who suffers or is killed. The Christian claim joins suffering and reign in one person, and rests on the resurrection.
- Daniel 9 and the Messiah before the Temple's destructionDaniel 9 is difficult and its arithmetic is disputed, but its sequence is clear. An anointed one is cut off, and then the city and sanctuary are destroyed.
- The resurrection as messianic vindicationA crucified Messiah looked like a contradiction to Jesus' own followers. They read his resurrection as God overturning that verdict, and argued it from the Psalms and Isaiah.
- Jesus and messianic prophecyIsolated proof texts do not settle the question. A pattern of suffering and reign runs through Isaiah, Zechariah, Daniel, Micah, and the Psalms.
- The new covenant promised in the prophetsJeremiah, not the church, coined the phrase "new covenant." He promised it to Israel and Judah, with the Torah written on the heart and sin remembered no more.