Annotatio CCXLVIII
”Seventy weeks are abbreviated [shortened].” — Daniel 9:24
Judas the Syrian [Judas Syrus], explaining this chapter in his commentaries, Jerome, in the catalogue of Ecclesiastical Writers, notes with these words:1 “Judas disputed most fully concerning the seventy weeks in Daniel, and produced their chronography, through the times of former [ages], down to the tenth year of Severus; in which he is convicted of error, because he said that the coming of Antichrist would be about his own times — that is, in the two-hundredth year after Christ: but this [he said] for this reason, because the magnitude of the persecutions portended the end of the present world.” These things he [Jerome]. For the same cause, long before, those faithful were led into the same error, whom Paul, admonishing in the second epistle to the Thessalonians, says:2 “We beseech you, by the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you be not quickly moved from your [right] sense, nor terrified, as if the day of the Lord were at hand.” There were also many other not ignoble authors in nearly the same opinion — among whom Lactantius Firmianus defined the space of two hundred years, from his own age even to the end of the world.
Return to Annotation 187.