WRITING AUTHORITY IN LATE MEDIEVAL ... - Cornell University

ability to sound like “a narrator of things already past.” The ambiguity of Daniel’s rhetoric
proves that the real Daniel witnessed events first hand and not that “some individual” disguised
past history as future prophecy. As such, accurate dating matters little to Jerome because he sees
Daniel as a book in which the depiction of time has no fixed rhetorical expectation of time even
as time (particularly in the notion of things-to-come) is the book’s central narrative concern.
Jerome, in a sense, admits that Daniel’s rhetoric confuses how a reader approaches time
even as he claims that the book accurately sets “forth the very time at which [Christ] would
come.” 158 In fact, the second chapter of Daniel, being a prediction of the passage of human
empires and the coming kingdom of God first seen at an ambiguous historical date, exemplifies
this tendency to blur temporal expectations yet demand historical accuracy. First, the dream
paradoxically happens to the king as an individual at the same time when his individuality is
dissolved into universal history. Nebuchadnezzar’s dream is only a historical reality as it occurs
at a time when history coincided for “all the barbarian nations” of the world—i.e. when his
unique experience of time was not his own but that of the generalized human race. Second, since
the narration of dream is a narration of the whole of history, it must encompass both the time in
which it is narrated and that when it is interpreted, making the events that lead up to
Nebuchadnezzar’s dream part of the dream itself.
This is why Jerome describes the dream as an eschatological vision from the historical
time of Daniel’s interpretation forward: “either these ‘last days’ are to be reckoned from the time
when the dream was revealed to Daniel until the end of the world, or else at least this inference
is to be drawn, that the over-all interpretation of the dream applies to that final end when the
image and statue beheld [in the dream] is to be ground to powder” [My emphasis]. 159 To Jerome,
158 Ibid.
159 Ibid. 30.
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