Page 135 - Advanced Life of Christ - Student Textbook

remains of the western wall of Herod’s temple.

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According to Eusebius, a 3 century historian, said, “The hill called Zion and Jerusalem, the building
there, that is to say, the temple, has been utterly removed or shaken.” This means completely destroyed
or utterly gone. As Christ prophesized, “Not one stone shall be left upon another that shall not be
thrown down.” Josephus (who was alive at the time of the destruction of the temple) said, “It was so
thoroughly laid even with the ground by those that dug it up to the foundation, that there was left
nothing to make those that came thither believe it had ever been inhabited.” Eleazer Ben Jair, the
commander at Masada, wrote “It (Jerusalem) is now demolished to the very foundations, and hath
nothing left but that monument of it preserved, I mean the camps of those Romans that hath destroyed
it, which still dwells upon its ruins.” This commander said that Jerusalem and the temple were gone, but
the Roman fort was still there. It has been suggested that the square walls of the temple mount today
are really where the Roman Fort Antonia was.

By the latter part of the fourth century, the Temple Mount had disappeared completely from the
landscape of Christian Jerusalem. The pilgrim Egeria who visited Jerusalem in the early 380s provided a
detailed description of the city in letters to her friends, but she made no mention of the Temple Mount.
Similarly, the mosaic world map of Medaba from the mid-sixth century depicts Jerusalem in great detail
but omits the Temple Mount altogether as does a seventh-century Armenian account of the city's holy
places (https://www.meforum.org/3556/temple-mount). It is evident that that no structure existed at this
time that could be identified as the Temple Mount.

Most recently, researcher and author Marilyn Sams has advanced the argument that Fortress Antonia,
represented by tradition as a monumental or castle-like structure located during Herodian times just
north of the Second Temple on the periphery of the large rectangular temple precinct, was actually a
much larger complex, more akin to the typical standard Roman fortress layout that existed during the
st
time of 1 century Jerusalem, the time of Jesus. “Josephus described it [the fortress] as being “erected
upon a rock of fifty cubits in height” on a “great precipice,” Sams quotes Josephus. “It had “all kinds of

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