In 1690 a Bishop by the name of William Lloyd had set this idea forth. And it was challenged in 1726 by a Vicar named Peter Lancaster. As by this time Lloyd had died, a Rector by the name of Benjamin Marshall wrote a powerful answer to Lancaster.
As quoted by William Watson, Benjamin Marshall said:
"Those sixty nine Septenaries of Years ended in the year of Christ 32 ... Consequently a Propheitik Week, or one other Septenary of Years is still remaining, and without any Succesion of Time for it in the prophecy. However, this remaining One Week of the Seventy ... can possibly make no more than seventy Weeks ... we are not at a loss for it. Loo for it in the remaining Single Week of the Prophecy distinctly spoken of afterwards ... When the Angel had done with these two Periods of this Prophecy, he afterwards tells the Prophet expressly of another One Week only, distinguishing that more immediately in the Half Part thereof."
Unless I made a typographical error, this is exactly the words (including even the spelling) of Benjamin Marshall, in his work titled "Three Letters in Vindication of the late Bishop Lloyd's Hypothesis on Daniel's Prophecy of the 70 Weeks" (London, 1726), as quoted by William Watson on page 243 of his monumental work titled "Dispensationalism before Darby."
But of course, to you, mere Bishops and Rectors are not "leaders," because they did not teach what you want to believe.
And let us not forget that at about this time William Lowth, B.D., Prebendary of Winchester Cathedral, published what became for many years England’s most widely circulated series of commentaries on the Old Testament prophets.
In these works he spoke so many times of the prophesied return of "the Jews" to their land, and their eventual restoration to their God after returning there, that it amounted to insisting on the point. The number of times he commented on this in Just one of his many vlumes, his Commentary on the prophet Ezekiel, published in 1723, said it so many times that it took more than 10 pages just to quote them in the appendix to my book, "Ancient Dispensational Truth," which was published late last year.
Here is a link to Marshall's original treatise.
Notice the introduction:
“A Chronological Treatise Upon the Seventy Weeks of Daniel Wherein is Evidently Shown the Accomplishment of the Predicted Events, as Especially of the Cutting Off of the Messiah After the Predicted VII and LXII Weeks According to the Express Letter of the Prophecy...”
Not a hint of decapitation there.
From what PDF page numbers in this treatise did Watson copy what he asserted to be the basis for his decapitation claim?
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