The Seventy Weeks
Daniel 9:24-27, the prophecy with a date, as the early church read it
Of all the Old Testament prophecies, Daniel's "seventy weeks" is the one with a clock on it. From a decree to rebuild Jerusalem, a fixed span of weeks is measured out "to make reconciliation for iniquity" and "to anoint the most Holy," after which "Messiah shall be cut off," and then the city and sanctuary are destroyed. The early church seized on it as proof, against those still waiting for the Messiah, that He had already come and been "cut off" before Jerusalem fell in AD 70. Tertullian (around AD 200) actually does the arithmetic, year by year, to show Christ arrived inside the window. His words below, with a plain restatement.
The Father's words are verbatim and attributed (Tertullian, An Answer to the Jews, in the Ante-Nicene Fathers, public domain; selected from the running prose, the long year-by-year reckoning tables omitted for readability). The box marked "In plain terms" is our own restatement, never the Father's words.
Daniel 9:24 · KJVSeventy weeks are determined upon thy people and upon thy holy city, to finish the transgression, and to make an end of sins, and to make reconciliation for iniquity, and to bring in everlasting righteousness, and to seal up the vision and prophecy, and to anoint the most Holy.
"Accordingly the times must be inquired into of the predicted and future nativity of the Christ, and of His passion, and of the extermination of the city of Jerusalem… the times of the coming Christ, the Leader, must be inquired into, which we shall trace in Daniel; and, after computing them, shall prove Him to be come, even on the ground of the times prescribed… In such wise, therefore, did Daniel predict concerning Him, as to show both when and in what time He was to set the nations free; and how, after the passion of the Christ, that city had to be exterminated."
TertullianTertullian's whole strategy is the boldest one in the Bible: he takes a prophecy that names a timeframe and checks the calendar against it. Daniel, he says, told us "both when and in what time" the Messiah would come, do His work, and be put to death, and that after His passion the holy city would be destroyed. So the question is not whether a Messiah will come but whether One already came inside the measured weeks, before Jerusalem fell.
Daniel 9:25-26 · KJV…from the going forth of the commandment to restore and to build Jerusalem unto the Messiah the Prince shall be seven weeks, and threescore and two weeks… And after threescore and two weeks shall Messiah be cut off, but not for himself: and the people of the prince that shall come shall destroy the city and the sanctuary…
"And then 'righteousness eternal' was manifested, and 'an Holy One of holy ones was anointed'—that is, Christ—and 'sealed was vision and prophet,' and 'sins' were remitted, which, through faith in the name of Christ, are washed away for all who believe on Him… He is the signet of all prophets, fulfilling all things which in days bygone they had announced of Him."
Tertullian"And thus, in the day of their storming, the Jews fulfilled the seventy hebdomads predicted in Daniel… the unction, too, was 'exterminated' in that place after the passion of Christ… in order that all things might be fulfilled which had been written of Him."
TertullianTertullian's reading runs the weeks straight through to Christ: the "anointing of the most Holy" is the coming of the Anointed One Himself ("that is, Christ"), whose advent "seals vision and prophet" because every prophecy points to and is fulfilled in Him. The "cutting off" of Messiah is the cross; and the destruction of "the city and the sanctuary" by "the people of the prince that shall come" is the Roman storming of Jerusalem in AD 70, after which Israel's "unction," its priesthood and sacrifice, ceased and has never resumed in that place. The clock, he insists, ran out exactly where it pointed.
Where the traditions diverge
This passage is one of the great interpretive forks, and it is worth laying the views side by side. The historic Christian reading (Tertullian here, and Julius Africanus, Hippolytus, Eusebius, and the mainstream after them) runs the seventy weeks continuously from a Persian decree to the coming and "cutting off" of the Messiah, with the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70 as the predicted ruin of city and sanctuary; the prophecy thus pins the Messiah's advent to a window that closed in the first century. The dispensational reading agrees the first sixty-nine weeks reach to Christ but inserts a long "gap," the entire church age, between the sixty-ninth and seventieth week, placing that last week as a still-future seven-year tribulation with a rebuilt temple and reading "he shall confirm the covenant" of a coming Antichrist; the early church knew no such gap and read the weeks as running unbroken to Christ and the fall of Jerusalem. The critical reading refers it all to Antiochus Epiphanes in the second century BC, denying it any predictive sense at all. The drift the Fathers would warn against, on the one side, is severing the seventieth week from the others to make room for a future scheme, and on the other, emptying the prophecy of the Messiah it so plainly dates. (See the Olivet discourse and the thousand years.)
Patristic text from Tertullian, An Answer to the Jews (ch. 8), in the Ante-Nicene Fathers (public domain), selected from the running prose; the long year-by-year reckoning tables are omitted for readability, and nothing is added or paraphrased within the quotation marks. Scripture in the King James Version; the plain-language lines are our own restatement. This passage in the Study Bible; Daniel 9 at BibleHub.