Is the Bible True?

Is the Bible True?

pagan temple in the eastern part of his kingdom. His action so enraged

local inhabitants that they killed him, bringing him to an inglorious end

(verse 19).

Ver se 2 0 :

According to 2 Maccabees 3:7-40, Antiochus’ other son,

Seleucus IV,

was also financially distressed by the tribute to Rome

(2 Maccabees is an apocryphal book that reports on these events). Seleucus sent one of his chief officials,

Heliodorus,

to collect taxes, even

through plundering the temple at Jerusalem. Heliodorus went to the holy

city but obtained nothing. Seleucus was later poisoned by Heliodorus

and was thus killed—“but not in anger or in battle.”

Antiochus Epiphanes

Daniel 11:21-35:

These verses speak of the infamous

Antiochus IV

(Epiphanes),

the brother of Seleucus IV,

who had earlier been taken

hostage to Rome. He was a

“tyrannical oppressor who

did his utmost to destroy the

Jewish religion altogether”

Antiochus passed laws

that forbade the practice of

the Jewish religion under

penalty of death. He was a

man of incredible cruelty.

On his orders “an aged

Scribe, Eleazar, was flogged

to death because he refused

to eat swine’s flesh. A mother and her seven children were successively

butchered, in the presence of the governor, for refusing to pay homage

to an image. Two mothers who had circumcised their new-born sons

were driven through the city and cast headlong from the wall” (Charles

Pfeiffer,

Between the Testaments,

This refers to the momentous events of Dec. 16, 168 B.C.,

when a crazed Antiochus entered Jerusalem and killed 80,000 men,

women and children (2 Maccabees 5:11-14). He then desecrated the temple by offering a sacrifice of swine to the chief Greek god, Zeus. This

outrage was a forerunner of a comparable event that Jesus Christ said

would occur in the last days (Matthew 24:15).

These verses appear to describe, on one level, the

indomitable will and courage of the

Maccabees,a family of priests who

resisted Antiochus and his successors. The Maccabees’ revolt against

the Syrian king was triggered when “Mattathias, the leading priest

in the city of Modein .

.

.

, after killing the officer of Antiochus who had

come to enforce the new decree concerning idolatrous worship .

.

.

, led

a guerrilla band that fled to the hills”

Mattathias was aided in his cause by five sons, most notably Judah or

Judas, nicknamed

Maqqaba

(Aramaic for “hammer,” whence derives the

name Maccabees). Many of these patriots died in this cause, but their

heroics ultimately drove the Syrian forces from the country.

On another level, these verses evidently refer to the New Testament

Church, with their references to mighty works, persecution and apostasy

continuing “until the time of the end” .

Indeed, with the explicit reference to the end time, Daniel’s prophecy

definitely takes on a different tone at this point. To quote

Expositor’s :

“With the conclusion of the preceding pericope , the

predictive material that incontestably applies to the Hellenistic empires

and the contest between the Seleucids and the Jewish patriots ends. This

present section  contains some features that hardly apply to

Antiochus IV, though most of the details could apply to him as well as

to his latter-day antitype, ‘the beast.’”

Liberal and conservative scholars “agree that all of chapter 11 up to

this point contains strikingly accurate predictions of the whole sweep

of events from the reign of Cyrus ... to the unsuccessful effort of

Antiochus Epiphanes to stamp out the Jewish faith” .

Interpreting the prophetic evidence

These scholars differ, however, on what this means. Speaking of the

two viewpoints, Archer says that to conservative scholars “this pattern of

prediction and fulfillment [serves as] compelling evidence of the divine

inspiration and authority of the Hebrew Scriptures, since only God could

possibly foreknow the future and see to it that his announced plan would

be precisely fulfilled. To the rationalists, however, who begin with the

premise that there is no personal God .

.

.

, there is no possibility of a

genuine fulfillment of prophecy .

.

.

“All biblical instances of fulfilled prophecy must be accounted for

as pious fraud in which only after the event takes place has the fiction

recording its prediction been devised .

.

.

This is what rationalists have

to say about all predictive portions anywhere in the Bible. For them there

can be no such thing as divine revelation of events to come. Otherwise

they must surrender their basic position and acknowledge the possibil

-

ity of the supernatural, as demonstrated by detailed fulfillment of events

The Jewish priest Mattathias triggered a rebel

-

lion against Antiochus Epiphanes when he

violently resisted the king’s enforced idolatry.