Daniel Without Make-up And Long Toes

Many books and articles have been written on the apocalyptic book of Daniel in the Old Testament of the Bible. A search by the authors for the expression Daniel’s Seventy Weeks on the Internet for example, turned up 574 000 results. One has to dig deep though, to find articles or books showing that the writer was prepared to look at Daniel without all the make-up imposed on it through pagan techniques of philosophy and modern spiritual philosophising.
The Book of Daniel is mostly the foundational starting point of the modern end-times doctrines and it is the book from which the so-called Antichrist world ruler to come is construed and upon which many calculations of end-times related dates have been made and remade over and over again.
The Christian faith has become the target of growing skepticism and outright derogatory accusations of following myths. Although wrong and twisted doctrines have made their contribution over a long time, this skepticism has been fuelled in no small way by modern end-times teaching and its abundance of unfulfilled predictions that have come and gone. The ‘make-up’ part of the title refers to the centuries of philosophised approaches and interpretations that have been applied to the book of Daniel, while the long toes idea comes from a chart of the statue in Nebuchadnezzar’s vision, depicting an inserted so-called church age as ten very long toes already covering some 2000 years. An important part of the authors' approach is to settle the contextual background before discussing the prophecies.