Dear Peter,Thanks for the clarification. I accept your apology.
If you or anyone else thinks that my comments were "inflammatory", I apologize. I certainly had no intention of offending you or anyone else.
I did not intend to claim that early followers of Jesus were the first to consider Daniel to be a prophet. In fact, we have no way of knowing whether a lot of early Christian doctrine was "adopted" from other Jewish groups, from pagans who were co-opted into the early church, or original to them. That's not the issue. Other Jews could have considered Daniel a prophet, but those who did not eventually became the "normative" position. On the other hand, to early followers of Jesus, Daniel's predictions were important, and so when the Christian canon was formalized, Daniel was included in the "prophetic" books.
As far as Malachi, if you prefer "this may not have been by chance", so be it. I think that you are giving the church fathers less credit than is their due.
Daniel was considered a prophet at Qumran <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qumran> (4Q174 [4QFlorilegium]) and later by Josephus <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephus> (/Antiquity of the Jews/ 10.11.7 ยง266) and the author (the "Pseudo-Philo <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudo-Philo>") of /Liber antiquitatum biblicarum/ (L.A.B. ["Book of Biblical antiquities"] 4.6, 8), and was grouped among the prophets in the Septuagint <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Septuagint>, the Jewish Greek Old Testament, and by Christians, who place the book among the prophets.If this is accurate, it was certainly not Christians who first called Daniel a prophet. I would suggest, although I would not expect Shoshanna to agree, that the reason he was ultimately rejected as a prophet in mainstream Judaism was because of the widespread and sometimes wildly speculative use of the book by fringe sects, including the very first Christians.
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