Welcome to this replay of Ask NT Write Anything, where we go back into the archives to bring you the best of the thought and theology of Tom Wright, answering questions submitted by you, the listener.

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ebooks. That's premier unbelievable.com. And now for today's replay of Ask EntWrite Anything podcast.

Welcome back to the program and we're going to be talking about the Old Testament today, Tom.

Now obviously your speciality is the new, not the old necessarily, but I think you've got a few things to say about the Old Testament as well. Lots of these questions are actually, and the ones that most commonly seem to come up regarding the Old Testament, are either to do with the way God is portrayed in the Old Testament, and we've done a podcast on that.

If people have questions on that, I do recommend going back in the archive to look that one up.

But also a common theme is the historicity of the Old Testament.

People who say it feels like we've got this quite historical grounding for the New Testament,

and you've done a lot of work in that yourself but the Old Testament well that's just that much further away

and just much harder to get behind and so on so I'm going to bring a variety here um firstly

questions on one specific book book of Daniel and I had about three people actually send questions in on this. So I'll read all three. Alex and Kent says, Bart Ehrman said that modern biblical scholars say the book of Daniel was not written in the 6th century BCE by a Hebrew prophet named Daniel, but much later, chapter 7 to 12, around the time of the

Maccabian revolt in the 160s CE.

How would you respond to this?

Spencer in Mead Buffalo, New York, says, what do you make of Porphyry's attack on the

historicity of the book of Daniel?

Again, mentions Bart Ehrman asserts that his view is widely accepted by contemporary historians. To what extent is Porphyry's argument credible? And if it's true,

what would be the implications for Christianity? And finally, Kevin in Donegal, was Daniel a prophet in

the sixth century or a historian in the second? So that's a nice summarized way of asking the previous two questions.

So, yes, I think anyone who starts to look into the, you know, history of the Old Testament

and specifically books like Daniel will soon run up against commentaries and historians who

say, no, this was written a lot later than it's presented as in the book, the book of Daniel.

So, yeah, general responses to this and perhaps to some of the specifics of these questions.

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