Commentary on Daniel
Jerome’s verse-by-verse commentary on Daniel. Its prologue preserves the argument of the pagan philosopher Porphyry that the book was written in the time of Antiochus Epiphanes, and Jerome’s reply.
Read the text at tertullian.org ↗Translator’s introduction (tertullian.org) ↗
Jerome wrote his commentary on Daniel at Bethlehem early in the fifth century. It is the main surviving witness to the lost work of Porphyry, a philosopher of the third century AD, who devoted the twelfth book of his treatise against the Christians to Daniel. According to Jerome’s prologue, Porphyry denied that the book was written by Daniel and assigned it to someone living in Judaea under Antiochus Epiphanes, who related the past in the form of prophecy. Jerome names the Christian writers who had answered him and defends the traditional authorship.
The commentary is evidence for how the book was read and argued over in the early church, nearly a thousand years after the time in which its stories are set. See Daniel at the Babylonian Court.
Cited in
- about 605 BC to 536 BC, traditional date