Does Daniel 9 Predict a Future Antichrist?

Daniel 9:24 assigns the seventy weeks to six accomplishments: finishing transgression, making an end of sins, reconciliation for iniquity, everlasting righteousness, sealing vision and prophecy, and anointing the most Holy. Every one of these is Christ's work. The natural subject of verse 27 is the "Messiah the Prince" of verse 25 — the only person introduced in the prophecy who could confirm a covenant.

Jesus spoke of "my blood of the new testament [covenant], which is shed for many" (Matthew 26:28) — echoing "confirm the covenant with many." He began preaching "the time is fulfilled" (Mark 1:15), and Paul says He came "when the fulness of the time was come" (Galatians 4:4).

Baptized in AD 27 at the start of the seventieth week, Jesus ministered three and a half years and was crucified in AD 31 — "in the midst of the week." At His death the temple veil was torn from top to bottom (Matthew 27:51), signaling the end of the sacrificial system's meaning: the true Lamb had died, and the shadow offerings had met their substance. The gospel then went to the Jews exclusively for the remaining three and a half years, until the stoning of Stephen and the turn to the Gentiles around AD 34.

The idea that verse 27 describes a future Antichrist who makes and breaks a seven-year treaty requires detaching the seventieth week from the other sixty-nine and inserting a gap of two thousand years — something the text never does. The seventy weeks are presented as one continuous, determined period (Daniel 9:24, "seventy weeks are determined"). The gap theory became prominent in modern dispensationalism; historically, a version of it was developed in the Counter-Reformation to redirect the Reformers' identification of the Antichrist away from the papacy toward a future individual.