WRITING AUTHORITY IN LATE MEDIEVAL ... - Cornell University

We can understand why Gower would be attracted to this story in constructing a way of writing
that could operate without reflecting on an exterior way to limit meaning. After all, the story of
Nebuchadnezzar’s first dream oddly begins by referencing a real event as narrative time. Despite
specifically putting the dream’s occurrence “In the second year of the reign of Nebuchadnezzar,”
the story’s date, by itself, does not depict the dream as a veridical chronicled event. This is
because the first chapter of The Book of Daniel claims that Daniel and his friends were only
brought before Nebuchadnezzar three years after their capture, and if “in the second year” is to
be an accurate depiction of time, then there is an obvious logical leap between the time in which
the dream occurred and the time when Daniel could have interpreted it.
To surmount this logical difficulty, Jerome, borrowing from Josephus, provides the
reader an alternate timeline in his commentary to this verse: “The Hebrews solve the difficulty
[in Daniel’s dating] in this way, that the second year refers here to his reign over all the barbarian
nations.” 156 Complementary interpretations of history are common medieval resolutions to
conflicting biblical dates, and Daniel is no exception. However, Jerome lists this alternate
timeline only as merely possible, without resolutely adopting the dating of the “Hebrews” as his
own. This hesitancy to see the dream as reflecting an absolute temporal timeline is even
mimicked in his defense of Daniel’s canonicity in his Prologue to the book:
Porphyry wrote his twelfth book against the prophecy of Daniel, denying that it was composed by
the person to whom it is ascribed in its title, but rather by some individual living in Judaea at the
time of the Antiochus who was surnamed Epiphanes. He furthermore alleged that “Daniel” did not
foretell the future so much as he related the past... But this very attack testifies to Daniel's
accuracy. For so striking was the reliability of what the prophet foretold, that he could not appear
to unbelievers as a predicter of the future, but rather a narrator of things already past. 157
In refuting Porphyry, Jerome claims that the certainty of what Daniel predicts has to do with a
temporal equivocation between narrative verisimilitude about the future comes and the prophet’s
156 Jerome, Jerome’s Commentary on Daniel, trans. Gleason Archer (Grand Rapids: Baker Book, 1958) 26.
157 Jerome Commentary on Daniel 15-16.
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