The Daniel Dilemma

Islam calls Jesus the Messiah.

It also denies that He was crucified.

Centuries before Muhammad, however, the book of Daniel described an anointed figure who would be “cut off”, followed by the destruction of Jerusalem and its sanctuary.

That creates a serious question.

If Jesus is the Messiah, and if Daniel’s prophecy speaks of the Messiah being cut off before the Second Temple was destroyed, how can the Qur’an preserve His title while denying His death?

The argument must be made carefully. Daniel is not named in the Qur’an. No surviving Dead Sea Scroll contains Daniel 9:26. The Hebrew word translated “Messiah” can describe more than one kind of anointed person, and responsible Jewish interpreters have proposed alternatives to Jesus.

Those qualifications matter. They prevent an apologetic argument from claiming evidence it does not possess.

But they do not remove the problem.

Daniel 9 existed within Judaism before Christianity. Its prophecy places the cutting off of an anointed figure before the destruction of the city and sanctuary. Jesus appeared during the Second Temple period, was recognised as the Messiah, was crucified, and was followed within one generation by the Roman destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple.

Islam retains the title.

It denies the event.

Daniel demands that we ask whether those two decisions can be held together.

What Daniel actually says

Daniel has been praying about Israel’s sin and Jerusalem’s desolation. He understands from Jeremiah that the Babylonian desolation would last seventy years, confesses the sins of his people and pleads for mercy upon God’s sanctuary and holy city.

Gabriel then gives an answer which expands the horizon from seventy years to seventy “weeks” or sevens:

“Seventy weeks are determined upon thy people and upon thy holy city, to finish the transgression, and to make an end of sins, and to make reconciliation for iniquity, and to bring in everlasting righteousness, and to seal up the vision and prophecy, and to anoint the most Holy” (Daniel 9:24).

The prophecy concerns Daniel’s people and Jerusalem, but its purposes reach beyond the reconstruction of ruined buildings. It speaks of transgression, sins, reconciliation, everlasting righteousness and the completion of prophecy.

Gabriel continues:

“Know therefore and understand, that from the going forth of the commandment to restore and to build Jerusalem unto the Messiah the Prince shall be seven weeks, and threescore and two weeks: the street shall be built again, and the wall, even in troublous times” (Daniel 9:25).

Then comes the decisive sequence:

“And after threescore and two weeks shall Messiah be cut off, but not for himself: and the people of the prince that shall come shall destroy the city and the sanctuary; and the end thereof shall be with a flood, and unto the end of the war desolations are determined” (Daniel 9:26).

Before calculating anything, we should observe the order supplied by the text:

```text Jerusalem is restored ↓ An anointed ruler appears ↓ The anointed one is cut off ↓ The city and sanctuary are destroyed ```

The cutting off precedes the destruction.

That sequence is more secure than some of the chronological calculations constructed from it. Christians have proposed different starting decrees, calendars and ways of relating the seven, sixty-two and final one week. Those questions deserve examination, but the argument in this article does not depend upon pretending that every chronological detail is undisputed.

The text itself gives us the essential historical boundary: the anointed figure is cut off before the destruction which follows.

Does “Messiah” necessarily mean Jesus?

The Hebrew word māšîaḥ means an anointed person. Kings and priests could both be anointed. Cyrus, a Persian ruler, is even called the LORD’s “anointed” in Isaiah 45:1 because God appointed him for a particular task.

The original Hebrew manuscripts did not contain an English capital letter announcing that every occurrence of the word referred to the final Messiah. Nor does the Hebrew use the definite article here in the same way an English reader might expect from “the Messiah”. Some translations therefore render the expression “an anointed one” or “an anointed prince”.

There is also a dispute about the division of Daniel 9:25. The KJV joins the seven weeks and sixty-two weeks in the movement towards “Messiah the Prince”. Other interpreters understand an anointed ruler after the first seven weeks and another anointed figure after the following sixty-two.

These observations prevent us from arguing in a circle:

Daniel uses a word translated “Messiah”; Jesus is called Messiah; therefore Daniel must be speaking of Jesus.

That would be insufficient.

The proper question is comparative:

Which proposed figure best explains the identity, timing, cutting off, redemptive setting and destruction which follows?

The title begins the investigation. The entire passage must decide it.

What does “cut off” mean?

The verb translated “cut off” is kārat. It can refer to cutting something physically, making a covenant, or removing and destroying a person. When used of a person under judgement, it frequently carries the force of death or decisive destruction.

In Daniel 9:26, the anointed figure does not merely step down from office peacefully. He is cut off and left with nothing. Something hostile and terminal happens to him.

The KJV continues, “but not for himself”. That wording has naturally been read in the light of Christ’s substitutionary death. Yet the underlying Hebrew expression is brief and difficult. It may convey that the anointed one has nothing, or that no one remains for him. We should therefore not make this one English phrase bear the entire doctrine of atonement.

Scripture establishes substitution clearly elsewhere:

“But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed” (Isaiah 53:5).

And:

“For Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God” (1 Peter 3:18).

Daniel contributes something different but complementary: an anointed figure is violently removed within a prophetic programme concerned with sin, reconciliation and everlasting righteousness.

Was Daniel 9 written after Christianity began?

No.

This conclusion does not depend upon assigning Daniel to the sixth century BC, although there are substantial arguments for the book’s own historical claims. Even the customary critical position places the final form of Daniel in the second century BC, during the crisis under Antiochus IV Epiphanes.

That concession still places Daniel 9 long before Jesus was crucified and more than seven centuries before the Qur’an.

What the Dead Sea Scrolls establish

Several manuscripts of Daniel were found at Qumran. They demonstrate that the book circulated within pre-Christian Judaism and was copied alongside other scriptural works.

The manuscript evidence must nevertheless be stated exactly.

4QDanielᵃ, catalogued as 4Q112, contains substantial portions of Daniel, but it does not contain chapter 9. A different fragmentary manuscript, 4QDanielᵉ or 4Q116, preserves small portions of Daniel 9:12–17. Those verses belong to Daniel’s prayer. They do not include the seventy-weeks prophecy in verses 24–27.

Therefore, no currently identified Dead Sea Scroll preserves the statement that the Messiah would be cut off.

The scrolls establish the pre-Christian circulation of Daniel and preserve part of Daniel 9. They do not provide a physical pre-Christian copy of Daniel 9:26. The distinction is not damaging to the Christian case; it is simply the truth.

The Old Greek witness

Daniel also circulated in ancient Greek. The earlier Old Greek translation arose within Jewish transmission before it was displaced in most Christian manuscripts by the version associated with Theodotion.

The Old Greek and Theodotionic versions are not identical to one another or to the later standard Hebrew text. Daniel 9 contains differences of wording and chronology. That means the Greek cannot be quoted as though it reproduced every word of the KJV.

But those differences make one fact particularly clear: Daniel 9 passed through more than one ancient textual stream. Christians did not compose the prophecy after the crucifixion and insert it seamlessly into an otherwise unsuspecting Jewish Bible.

The prophecy was already there.

The disagreement concerns its interpretation, not a Christian invention of the passage.

How did Jews read it before Christianity?

No surviving pre-Christian rabbinic commentary gives us a line-by-line exposition of Daniel 9:24–27. Formal rabbinic literature was compiled later, and claims that “the ancient rabbis all admitted this was Jesus” should not be repeated.

We do, however, possess evidence of pre-Christian Jewish interpretation.

First Maccabees uses the expression “abomination of desolation” for the pagan outrage committed under Antiochus IV. The Old Greek translator also handled Daniel 9 in the light of the suffering and expectations of Second Temple Judaism.

Most strikingly, the Qumran composition known as 11QMelchizedek appears to use Daniel 9:25 within an eschatological interpretation of Jubilee. Written before Christianity, it looks towards a climactic deliverance involving liberty, atonement, judgement upon evil and an exalted Melchizedek. It refers to an anointed herald associated with Daniel’s words.

11QMelchizedek does not say that Daniel’s anointed one would be crucified. It does not identify Jesus. Its fragmentary wording must not be forced into a Christian creed.

What it does demonstrate is still significant. Some Jews before Christianity did not treat Daniel’s chronological and anointed language as a closed relic with no future messianic horizon. Daniel could be read in connection with eschatological deliverance, atonement and an anointed figure.

Christianity did not create that whole interpretative world after the event.

The strongest alternative: Onias III

The most serious non-Christian interpretation should not be hidden.

Many critical scholars identify the anointed figure who is cut off with Onias III, a legitimate Jewish high priest murdered in the second century BC. On this reading, the surrounding events concern Antiochus IV, the persecution of faithful Jews and the desecration of the Temple.

This view possesses genuine explanatory strengths:

Onias was an anointed priest.
He was violently killed.
His death occurred during the developing Antiochene crisis.
Antiochus inflicted terrible violence upon Jerusalem.
Pagan worship profaned the sanctuary and interrupted its sacrifices.
Other chapters of Daniel plainly devote considerable attention to Antiochus.

Onias is not a desperate invention produced merely to avoid Jesus. He is a historically recognisable candidate arising from the Second Temple context.

The question is whether he exhausts the prophecy.

Antiochus desecrated and plundered the Temple, but the sanctuary survived and was rededicated. Daniel 9:26 describes the city and sanctuary being destroyed, followed by war and continuing desolations. That language finds a more complete historical correspondence when Roman forces destroyed Jerusalem and the Second Temple in AD 70.

The purposes announced in verse 24 also exceed the achievements of the Maccabean restoration. The Temple was cleansed, but transgression was not finished, sin did not reach its final answer, everlasting righteousness did not fill the world, and prophetic expectation did not cease.

Pre-Christian Jewish interpretation itself continued to reuse Daniel’s timetable and jubilee expectations after Antiochus. That does not prove the Christian interpretation, but it shows that Daniel’s significance was not universally considered exhausted in the second century BC.

Most importantly, Jesus took Daniel’s language seriously and directed it towards events still future to His hearers:

“When ye therefore shall see the abomination of desolation, spoken of by Daniel the prophet, stand in the holy place, (whoso readeth, let him understand:)” (Matthew 24:15).

Jesus did not deny the Antiochene pattern. He treated that pattern as capable of a further and greater fulfilment. Antiochus becomes a precursor rather than the final horizon.

The Christian reading can therefore acknowledge an immediate Second Temple background without surrendering the prophecy’s culmination in Christ and the events which followed Him.

Jesus and the sequence of Daniel 9

The Christian case is cumulative.

Jesus is the Messiah

The New Testament does not attach the title to Him incidentally. His identity as the Christ governs the Gospel testimony.

Peter confesses:

“Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Matthew 16:16).

Jesus then begins to teach His disciples that He must go to Jerusalem, suffer, be killed and rise again (Matthew 16:21). The Messiah’s identity and the Messiah’s death are joined in His own instruction.

Remarkably, the Qur’an also calls Jesus the Messiah. It announces one “whose name is the Messiah, Jesus, son of Mary” in Surah 3:45 (Pickthall) and again calls Him “the Messiah, Jesus son of Mary” in Surah 4:157.

Islam preserves the title but gives it little explanatory content. The biblical record supplies the history and theology from which the title comes.

Jesus was cut off

Jesus was publicly crucified under Pontius Pilate. This is established by the early New Testament testimony and corroborated by non-Christian historical sources. The evidence was examined in the earlier article, “Did Jesus Really Die?”

Here the relevant point is chronological: Jesus was killed while the Second Temple still stood.

The city and sanctuary were destroyed afterwards

Jesus foretold the destruction of the Temple:

“Verily I say unto you, There shall not be left here one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down” (Matthew 24:2).

In AD 70 Roman forces under Titus destroyed Jerusalem and burned the sanctuary. Jesus had been crucified approximately forty years earlier.

The order corresponds to Daniel:

```text Jesus appears as Messiah ↓ Jesus is crucified ↓ The Roman people destroy Jerusalem and the Temple ```

Daniel says that “the people of the prince that shall come” destroy the city and sanctuary. It was the Roman people and armies who carried out that destruction. The text does not require the anointed one and the coming prince to be the same person.

His death answers the redemptive purpose

Daniel’s opening objectives concern sin, reconciliation and righteousness. The death of Onias may fit the cutting off of an anointed priest, but his death did not make reconciliation for iniquity.

Christ’s did.

“For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him” (2 Corinthians 5:21).

“And, having made peace through the blood of his cross, by him to reconcile all things unto himself” (Colossians 1:20).

Not every purpose of Daniel’s seventy weeks has reached its final historical consummation. Daniel’s seventieth week and the promised restoration of Israel belong to the larger prophetic programme. Yet the objective ground of reconciliation and everlasting righteousness has already been established in Christ.

Jesus does not merely match a date. He explains why the prophecy’s chronology is embedded within a revelation about sin and reconciliation.

What Islam denies

The Qur’an says:

“And because of their saying: We slew the Messiah Jesus son of Mary, Allah’s messenger—they slew him not nor crucified him, but it appeared so unto them” (Surah 4:157, Pickthall).

Muslim interpreters differ over precisely what “it appeared so unto them” means. The familiar substitution theory—that another person was made to resemble Jesus—is supplied in different forms by later interpretation rather than explained in the verse itself.

The mainstream Islamic conclusion, however, is clear: Jesus was not crucified and killed by His enemies.

That denial already collides with the historical evidence. Daniel adds another layer. An earlier Jewish prophecy describes an anointed figure being cut off before Jerusalem and its sanctuary are destroyed. Jesus bears the title, suffers the event and stands in the required historical order.

The Qur’an arrives six centuries later and denies the central event.

Preservation of the word “Messiah” cannot compensate for removal of the history which explains it.

But does Islam formally accept Daniel?

Daniel is not named in the Qur’an. It is therefore inaccurate to say that Judaism, Christianity and Islam all accept Daniel in precisely the same way.

Later Islamic traditions know Dāniyāl. Muslim writers variously treat him as an Israelite prophet, a righteous man or a figure associated with ancient wisdom and apocalyptic prediction. That reception makes Daniel relevant to Islamic intellectual history, but it does not turn his book into a text explicitly named and canonised by the Qur’an.

A Muslim may therefore attempt to escape the argument by saying:

“I am not required to accept the book of Daniel as uncorrupted revelation.”

That response avoids a simple formal contradiction. It does not answer the evidential case.

The Qur’an presents itself as confirming earlier divine revelation. It calls the Torah “guidance and a light” and says that Jesus received the Gospel containing “guidance and a light” (Surah 5:44, 46). It repeatedly places itself within the history of God’s dealings with Israel and identifies Jesus using Israel’s title “Messiah”.

Islam cannot reasonably invoke that history when it supplies prophetic authority, then dismiss an ancient Jewish witness merely when its sequence converges upon the crucifixion.

If Daniel is rejected, the rejection still requires reasons.

Islam’s available answers

The dilemma should not be overstated. A Muslim has possible replies. The question is which reply can bear the entire evidential burden.

“Daniel was corrupted”

Where is the evidence?

Daniel circulated in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek textual traditions. The witnesses contain real differences, but those differences do not disclose an earlier Daniel in which the anointed figure survives or the destruction precedes his cutting off.

No manuscript has been produced showing Christians adding verses 24–27 after the crucifixion. A hypothetical corruption proposed only because the surviving text causes theological difficulty explains nothing.

“The anointed one was Onias III”

This is the strongest exegetical alternative and deserves more than dismissal. Onias explains an anointed priest, a violent death and the Antiochene setting.

But the interpretation must also explain why the city and sanctuary are destroyed after the cutting off, why Daniel announces purposes as extensive as reconciliation and everlasting righteousness, why Jewish interpreters continued to project Daniel’s expectations forwards, and why Jesus fits the later sequence of Messiah, death and Roman destruction so completely.

A partial correspondence is not automatically the best explanation of the whole.

“Cut off does not mean killed”

The expression can encompass removal, but the context describes a hostile termination followed by destructive judgement. Reducing it to peaceful dismissal is lexically possible only by ignoring its force in context.

It also fails to explain why a merely deposed figure should stand at the centre of a prophecy concerned with iniquity, righteousness and the destruction which follows.

“Jesus was the Messiah, but He escaped death”

This preserves the Qur’anic denial only by separating Jesus from the most compelling historical fulfilment of the earlier prophecy.

It must also overturn the unanimous direction of the earliest Christian testimony, explain why hostile and non-Christian sources knew Jesus as executed, and account for the rise of a resurrection proclamation in Jerusalem itself.

Islam does not resolve Daniel’s difficulty by denying the crucifixion. It deepens the difficulty by forcing Scripture and history to be rewritten together.

The dilemma stated precisely

The Daniel dilemma is not the claim that every Muslim is logically compelled by the Qur’an to recognise Daniel as canonical Scripture.

It is this:

If Daniel is genuine prophecy and Jesus is its anointed figure, then the Messiah was to be cut off before the destruction of the Second Temple—precisely the death Islam denies.

If Jesus is not the figure, Islam must identify another candidate who explains the title, chronology, cutting off, redemptive purpose and destruction more completely.

If Daniel is rejected or declared corrupted, Islam must explain why this ancient Jewish prophetic witness should be discarded without manuscript evidence, particularly when Islam retains the Jewish title “Messiah” for Jesus.

Each escape carries an evidential cost.

Christianity does not require the removal of Daniel, the rewriting of the crucifixion or the invention of an unnamed substitute. It allows the earlier prophecy, the historical event and the theological meaning to illuminate one another.

The cumulative verdict

Daniel did not name Jesus of Nazareth in advance. It did something recognisably prophetic: it established a pattern which history would later fill.

An anointed ruler would appear.

He would be cut off.

The city and sanctuary would afterwards be destroyed.

The whole revelation would concern God’s answer to sin, reconciliation and everlasting righteousness.

Onias III can account for an anointed priest murdered during the Antiochene crisis. Antiochus can account for a terrible desecration which became a pattern of later abomination. Those correspondences should be granted.

But Jesus explains more.

He is not merely an anointed priest but the Messiah confessed by His disciples and acknowledged by the Qur’an. He was not merely removed from office but publicly crucified. He died while the Second Temple stood. Jerusalem and the sanctuary were destroyed by Roman forces afterwards. His death, unlike the murder of Onias, provides the reconciliation and righteousness announced at the beginning of the prophecy.

The Christian framework can account for the Antiochene pattern, the continuing Jewish expectation, the historical crucifixion, the destruction in AD 70 and the redemptive purpose of the passage.

The Islamic framework cannot preserve all those facts together. It must reject the prophecy, replace its figure, weaken its language or deny the event towards which the evidence converges.

That is why Daniel poses a dilemma for Islam.