For scarcely any two leading commentators agree as to details;--or even as to any fixed principles by which they profess to determine the date at which the period of seventy weeks is to begin or is to end;--or whether they are to be reckoned continuously, or with arbitrary misplacements or discontinuations;--or even whether they are not purely symbolical, so as to have no reference to any chronological indications;[630]--or whether they are to be interpreted as referring to one special series of events, or to be regarded as having many fulfilments by "springing and germinal developments." The latter view is, however, distinctly tenable. It applies to all prophecies, inasmuch as history repeats itself; and our Lord referred to another "abomination of desolation" which in His days was yet to come.[631] There is not even an initial agreement--or even the data as to an agreement--whether the "years" to be counted are solar years of three hundred and forty-three days, or lunar years, or "mystic" years, or Sabbath years of forty-nine years, or "indefinite" years; or where they are to begin and end, or in what fashion they are to be divided. All is chaos in the existing commentaries. As for any received or authorised interpretation, there not only is none, but never has been. The Jewish interpreters differ from one another as widely as the Christian. Even in the days of the Fathers, the early exegetes were so hopelessly at sea in their methods of application that St. Jerome contents himself, just as I have done, with giving no opinion of his own.[632] The attempt to refer the prophecy of the seventy weeks primarily or directly to the coming and death of Christ, or the desolation of the Temple by Titus, can only be supported by immense manipulations, and by hypotheses so crudely impossible that they would have made the prophecy practically meaningless both to Daniel and to any subsequent reader. The hopelessness of this attempt of the so-called "orthodox" interpreters is proved by their own fundamental disagreements.[633] It is finally discredited by the fact that neither our Lord, nor His Apostles, nor any of the earliest Christian writers once appealed to the evidence of this prophecy, which, on the principles of Hengstenberg and Dr. Pusey, would have been so decisive! If such a proof lay ready to their hand--a proof definite and chronological--why should they have deliberately passed it over, while they referred to other prophecies so much more general, and so much less precise in dates? Of course it is open to any reader to adopt the view of Keil and others, that the prophecy is Messianic, but only _typically_ and _generally_ so.