Book Review: The Coming Prince

The Coming Prince

Anderson, Sir Robert

KREGEL CLASSICS

Grand Rapids c1998

Softcover

lviii + 320 pp

 

         Back in May we featured a selection of ten prophecies already fulfilled in Christ. One of the prophecies centred on the exact time of His first coming, and referred to this book so we want to give a summary of Anderson’s conclusions. Much of The Coming Prince deals with various prophecies in the Book of Daniel but the main focus is Daniel’s Seventy Weeks in Daniel 9:24-26. Note that Anderson’s subtitle for the original edition of this book was The Last Great Monarch of Christendom, referring not to Christ but to Antichrist. Anderson very meticulously goes through the prophecy showing his interpretation of the first 69 weeks, then spells out 69 weeks of years, which come to 173,880 days (based on a 360-day prophetic year). The clock started ticking at “the decree of Artaxerxes, made in his twentieth year, recorded in Nehemiah 2:1-8.” Anderson had the Astronomer Royal calculate the date, based on new moons and Passovers, to be March 17, 445 BC and the 173,880 days brought him to April 6, AD 32, the very day Jesus rode the donkey into Jerusalem to the shouts of “Hosanna!”

        This book corroborates the accuracy of Daniel’s prophecy, whether you date it to Daniel’s time of   about 555 BC or accept the modernist date of only about 167 BC. Over the last 140 years, The Coming Prince has become a classic in Bible prophecy. It was validated by such preachers as Herbert Lockyer, F.A.Tatford, John Walvoord, and Alva McClain. It was quoted in great detail as an authoritative reference by J.Dwight Pentecost in 1958 in his own classic—we might almost say definitive— work, Things To Come. Again, in 1988, Anderson’s work was quoted multiple times in Unger’s Bible Dictionary from Moody Press.

        Robert Anderson was born in Mountjoy Square, Dublin in 1841, and later described himself as “an anglicized Irishman of Scottish extraction”. After primary school, a brief apprenticeship, and some study in Paris, he entered Trinity College, Dublin, got his B.A. in 1862, and was called to the Irish Bar in 1863.

        Through his father’s work for the Crown, he became involved in operations against the Fenians and, in 1868, he became an advisor on political crime to the Home Office.  In 1888, Anderson became Assistant Commissioner at Scotland Yard and it was during this period that “Jack the Ripper” committed his grisly murders. Anderson felt the case was correctly resolved but the press continued to sensationalize it.

        Robert Anderson was raised in a Christian home but it wasn’t until he had a personal conversation with evangelist John Hall in about 1860, that he exclaimed, “In God’s name, I will accept Christ.”

        A tribute after his death of Spanish Influenza in 1918 praised him as “one of the men to whom the country, without knowing it, owes a great debt.”