VIDEO: "The Temple | Bob Cornuke"--Koinonia House (31 min.)
What if everything you have been told about the location of Herod's Temple was wrong? That is what I experienced when I read "Holy Irony! Israelis Wailing at the Roman Fort" by Laurent Guyénot (h/t Vox Popoli).
As any student of the Bible knows, Christ had predicted that a day would come when the Jewish Temple would be cast down and torn apart so no stone would be left standing atop another. That day turned out to be in 70 A.D. and was recorded by Josephus:
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.
Which leaves us with a conundrum. If the temple was torn apart, what are the more than 10,000 stones that comprise the Western (or Wailing) Wall?
The answer is that the Wailing Wall are the remains of the Roman fort called Fort Antonia, which was the only structure left intact after the Romans retook Jerusalem in 70 A.D. And, as the article points out, we know that it survived because it continued to house "the Roman Legion X Fretensis until 289 AD, when the Legion was transferred to Ailat on the Red Sea." Moreover, the "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." This also solves the question of why archeologists have never found any remains of the Roman fort (although it survived the destruction of Jerusalem) but there are plenty of ruins associated with the Temple (although it was utterly destroyed).
There are other pieces of evidence that fit. For instance, both the Old Testament and other classical age historians noted that there was a spring of water located in the Temple precincts. Yet the only spring extant is "[t]he Gihon Spring is situated below the southeast ridge of Jerusalem, 1000 feet away from the Haram esh-Sharif which has always needed citterns [sic: cisterns] for water supply." This is illustrated in the photograph below:
The article goes on to briefly discuss other evidence, so be sure to read the whole thing. The video, above, also addresses this theory.
More:
- "Antonia: The Fortress Jerusalem Forgot"--Popular Archeology. This article discusses the differences between the Roman fort as described by Josephus, who knew it firsthand, and what is the current narrative.
- "In Search of King Solomon’s Temple"--AMEU. Similar to Guyénot's article, but in much more detail.
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