Holy Irony!

Israelis Wailing at the Roman Fort

In 70 AD, Herod’s Temple was leveled to the ground by the Romans, fulfilling Jesus’s prediction for this “den of thieves” (Mark 11:17): “There will not be one stone left upon another that will not be thrown down” (Mark 13:2). Whether Jesus really said that, or the prophecy was attributed to him in hindsight, the person who included it in his gospel in the early 70s AD would not have put it in those terms if it had been proven false.

The utter destruction of the temple is confirmed by another eyewitness, the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus. The words he ascribes to Eleazar, the Jewish commander at Masada, around 73 AD, make clear that nothing was left of the city but the Roman fort:

Where is this city that was believed to have God himself inhabiting therein? It is now demolished to the very foundations, and it has nothing left but that monument of it preserved, I mean the camp of those [the Romans] that hath destroyed it. (Jewish War, VII, 8, 379)

According to Josephus, every stone of the Temple was overturned because it contained huge amounts of gold, which melted during the fire and descended into the cracks of the stone foundations. The Tenth Legion had the Jewish captives dig up every stone to recover the gold (Jewish War, VI, 6, 1). All the gold recovered from the Temple and from various hiding places (64 according to the Copper Scroll), was instrumental to the ascension of Vespasian and Titus on the imperial throne.

About 180 AD the Greek geographer Pausanias wrote about “the City of Jerusalem, a city that the Roman king destroyed to its foundations” (Guide to Greece, VIII, 16). According to Epiphanius, who lived in Palestine in the fourth century, when emperor Hadrian visited the city in 130 AD, “he found it utterly destroyed and God’s Holy Temple a ruin, there being nothing where the city had stood but a few dwellings and one small church” (On Weights and Measures, IV). Hadrian built a new city on the ruins of the old one, which he named Aelia Capitolina (the Arabs would call it Iliya), but used the temple site as the city dump. Eusebius, who also lived in Palestine in the fourth century, wrote:

The hill called Zion and Jerusalem, the buildings there, that is to say, the Temple, the Holy of Holies, the Altar, and whatever else was there dedicated to the glory of God, have been utterly removed or shaken down, in fulfillment of the Word. (Proof of the Gospel, VIII, 3, 405-406)

We have two major problems here. First, Roman and Christian literary sources agree with Jesus that not one stone of the Temple was standing on another. How can we reconcile this with the fact that the walls of the alleged Temple Mount still have more than 10,000 stones standing upon another? Secondly, Josephus, an eyewitness, says that that the only major building that the Romans spared in 66-70 was their own imperial headquarter, the Roman fort called Fort Antonia, built by Herod the Great and named after his patron Mark Anthony. Where is this fort? Archaeologists have been digging for it in vain, and can’t even agree where it was located. Here is what Israeli archaeologist Shlomit Weksler-Bdolah has to say:

Surprisingly, despite the long duration of military presence in Jerusalem, … no archaeological remains have been attributed with certainty to the military camp and its site has not yet been identified. … One cannot underestimate the difficulty caused by the absence of irrefutable evidence of the Roman army camp in Jerusalem. … At this stage, there is no acceptable solution to the problem of the “lack of remains”.[1]

Fort Antonia housed a legion, that would number at least 5000 men and about 5000 support personnel. Josephus tells us it was like a city in size, dominating the Jewish city. It was so large that troops could perform military maneuvers within the enclosure, in mock war training exercises. We know that Fort Antonia was not destroyed in 70 because it continued to house the Roman Legion X Fretensis until 289 AD, when the Legion was transferred to Ailat on the Red Sea.[2]

So while the sources tell us that the Temple was demolished down to the bedrock and the Roman fort remained in use for 200 years, we are nevertheless asked to believe that the opposite happened: the huge fortified Roman fort disappeared entirely, while the Temple compound is still perfectly recognizable, with its four walls almost intact.

By some additional miracle, that alleged Temple compound, the Haram esh-Sharif on which now stand the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque, fits the standard design and size of the Roman forts scattered throughout the empire, and built after the pattern of the Praetorian Camp in the northeastern part of Rome.

There is only one way to make sense of this absurd situation: the Roman fort has been mistaken for the Temple Mount. As Professor George W. Buchanan put it in a 2011 article for the Washington Report for Middle East Affairs: “While it has not been widely published, it assuredly has been known for more than 40 years that the 45-acre, well-fortified place that has been mistakenly called the ‘Temple Mount’ was really the Roman fortress — the Antonia — that Herod built.”[3]

The full demonstration was provided by Ernest L. Martin in the 490 pages of his book The Temples That Jerusalem Forgot, published in 1999. Martin built on the work of Benjamin Mazar, “the dean of biblical archaeologists,” and of his son Ory Mazar, who believed that the temples of Solomon and Zerubbabel were located at the lower end of the southeast ridge, where the original “Mount Zion” fortified by King David was located, as it is now unanimously accepted. According to Ernest Martin, “modern scholars and religious leaders over a hundred years ago properly returned ‘Mount Zion’ to its original location on the southeast ridge, but they failed to return with it the ‘Temple Mount’ as common biblical sense would have demanded.”[4]

It was the discovery in the 1880s of the Hezekiah tunnel, from the Gihon Spring to the Pool of Siloam under the southeast ridge, that convinced scholars that the original Zion of King David was located there. “Within the biblical period,” writes Martin, “historical records show the original Temple was located over the Gihon Spring, and modern geological surveys reveal that the only spring within five miles of Jerusalem was the Gihon.”[5] The Gihon Spring was ritually indispensable within the Temple precincts, as the priests needed living water to cleanse daily from the blood of sacrifice. Ezekiel 47:1 describes “water flowing out from beneath the threshold of the temple toward the east.”

We also have the eyewitness account of an Egyptian named Aristeas who around 285 BC saw that the Temple was located over an inexhaustible spring that welled up within the interior part of the Temple. 400 years later the Roman historian Tacitus gave another reference that the Temple at Jerusalem had within its precincts a natural spring of water that issued from its interior (History, V, 12). The Gihon Spring is situated below the southeast ridge of Jerusalem, 1000 feet away from the Haram esh-Sharif which has always needed citterns for water supply. Here is an illustration from George Buchanan’s web article, and below, a tentative reconstitution from Ernest Martin’s book (with a Temple much too big and too high, some now argue).

Second to the Temple being above the Gihon Spring, another argument in Martin’s theory concerns “the Rock” that is now underneath the Dome of the Rock. There is an ancient and persistent tradition that this was “the Rock Pavement” (Lithostrotos in Greek, Gabbatha in Hebrew) inside the Praetorium, on which Jesus stood before Pilate, according to John’s Gospel (19:13); “the Christians from the fifth century onward believed the footprints of Jesus were to be seen on the ‘Rock’ where he stood before Pilate. This belief is a cardinal factor in making a proper identification of the site.”[6] It was there that Christians built a Church of the Holy Wisdom, which Sophronius, the Archbishop of Jerusalem at the time of the caliph Omar, called “the House of the Stone” (it was destroyed in 614 when the Persians conquered Jerusalem with the help of the Jews).

Islamic chronicles say that when Omar conquered Jerusalem in 638, he wanted to know where the Temple had stood, but paid little attention to the Haram esh-Sharif and its rock. It was only under Abd al-Malik, who built the Dome of the Rock in 691, that the Rock started to take special significance for Islam. It became the place where Abraham was about to sacrifice his son, and later the Rock whence Muhammad ascended to heaven.

But it was only 400 years later, during the Crusades, that the “Rock” was “metamorphosed into being the literal site of the Holy of Holies of the Jewish Temples.” This was facilitated by the fact that, when the crusaders took control of Jerusalem in 1099, the Jews were banned from entering the city for over 50 years. “This ‘abandonment of Jerusalem’ was a turning point in the history of Judaism. When the Jews finally returned after 50 years, they adopted a different approach to the significance of the City of Jerusalem.”[7]

Ernest Martin’s theory has been taken up by self-taught Biblical archaeologist Robert Cornuke, whose investigation is presented in the film “The Temple”. This article on popular-archaeology.com by Marilyn Sams is also an excellent introduction, with useful illustrations. Sams also published a book in 2014, The Jerusalem Temple Mount Myth, dedicated to Martin.

After reading carefully Martin’s book, and checking the attempts to refute it, I am convinced that he is right. It is not difficult to understand, though, why his theory is denigrated as a conspiracy theory by Jewish and Israeli institutions. Biblical archaeology is highly political. As Marilyn Sams notes, citing Nadia Abu El Haj’s book Facts on the Ground: Archeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society (2001), “the temple mount myth is used by archaeologists as part of their nation-making narrative, crucial to the Jewish identity, a memorial to their long, enormously influential past.”[8]

Yet, to quote again from Ernest Martin, it is pretty certain that,

the present religious authorities exalt to the highest esteem and respect an enclosure as the site of the Temple that was in Jesus’ day the chief architectural symbol of Rome’s claim to imperial world power. … Even the worshippers at the “Wailing Wall” are directing their present devotions and venerations to a Roman edifice that their ancestors in Herod’s time held in utter contempt.[9]

What a great irony, for a people so used to fool the world, and so confident in the power of their own symbols! If, unbeknownst to them, their prayers are really going up to the gods of Rome, will they bring down the return of the Tenth Legion on their head?

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[1] Shlomit Weksler-Bdolah, Aelia Capitolina – Jerusalem in the Roman Period: In Light of Archaeological Research, Brill, 2020, pp. 21-22, 42-43.

[2] Ernest L. Martin, The Temples That Jerusalem Forgot, ASK Publications, 2000, p. 50.

[3] Gregory Wesley Buchanan, “Misunderstandings About Jerusalem’s Temple Mount,” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, August 2011, www.wrmea.org/011-august/misunderstandings-about-jerusalem-s-temple-mount.html

[4] Martin, The Temples that Jerusalem Forgot, p. 3.

[5] Martin, The Temples that Jerusalem Forgot, p. 289.

[6] Martin, The Temples that Jerusalem Forgot, p. 102.

[7] Martin, The Temples that Jerusalem Forgot, p. 153.

[8] Marilyn Sams, The Jerusalem Temple Mount Myth, self-published, 2014, p. 4.

[9] Martin, The Temples that Jerusalem Forgot, pp. 2-3.