S. Matt. xxiii. 28.

LIX.

The Fall of Jerusalem foretold.

S. MARK XIII. I-13.

OUR Lord's last words of threatening to the rulers of the people, "Behold, your house is left unto you desolate," seem to have taken the

Wars, v. 5. 2.
Antiq. xv.

II. 3.

disciples by surprise, and made a deep impression upon their minds. Built as the Temple was, it is hardly to be wondered at that they should have been staggered by the bare thought of its overthrow. As they were passing out of its courts with the sentence ringing in their ears, all its splendour and magnificence kindled their admiration afresh; and as it were to remind Him of the hard thing of which He had just spoken, they begged Him to look at the building whose impending ruin He had just foretold. Joseph. There were the porches and corridors and columns of unrivalled magnificence, its different parts vying with each other in beauty and splendour. Indeed, such was the grandeur of the whole that the Rabbis used to say that a man did not know what a fine building was till he had seen the Temple of Herod. There were the huge blocks of marble, quarried on a scale of magnitude never equalled in the history of architecture,1 and placed in position by a skill that puts to Talm. Bab. shame even the boasted mechanics of the nineteenth Bathra, 4 a. century; and besides all these, there lay around them fresh materials for use, for the work of building was still in progress.2 Could it be that the fruit of all that labour was about to be destroyed, that the vast preparations with which they were still busied would be thus prematurely stopped?

Bava

Joseph.
Wars, vii.

1. I.

Jerus. Talm.
Taanith,
iv. 5 in fin.

There was no hesitation in our Lord's reply. It mattered nothing that all the skill and labour of the world had been concentrated on its building; its purpose had been contravened, its use abused, and nothing could stay the avenging hand. "There shall not be left," He said, "one stone upon another that shall not be thrown down." How that prediction was fulfilled, history tells us. When Jerusalem was destroyed, the walls were razed to the ground, and even the foundations rooted up. The Jews themselves have recorded how Turnus Rufus, the General whom Titus left to complete his work, "ploughed up the Temple and the places about it." And Gentile writers also testify how three centuries later, in the reign of the Apostate Julian, a Theodoret, great effort was made to defy the ancient prediction and rebuild the Temple. Whether it be only a rhetoric figure to express the unsurmountable diffiSozomen, culties the builders experienced, or a fact of actual occurrence, must always appear somewhat uncertain, but it is said that the attempts to lay those gigantic stones upon their base again, were defeated by an earthquake and lightning, and globes of fire issuing from the foundations, which killed many of the workmen. And though here and there some portions of the walls still remain, many modern writers

Ammianus Marcellinus in loc.

Hist. Eccl.

iii. 15. Socrates,

H.E. iii. 17.

H.E. v. 22.

come to

Antient

have narrated how our Lord's words have literally Thrupp, pass, and every trace of building, in the area Jerusalem, on which the prophecy was delivered, has entirely Robinson, disappeared.

398.

Bib.

Researches,

The answer of their Master silenced the Apostles. i. 437. Leaving the Temple by the Golden Gate, they descended together into the Valley of Jehoshaphat, and turned up the slopes of Olivet on their way to Bethany. It is said that there is a bend in the road where the view of the Temple is exceptionally grand. It was doubtless at that spot that they sat down to rest. With their minds full of the dark forebodings, the four who were with Him-and we notice that Andrew is for once admitted to the inner circle of companionship-broke the silence that must have followed upon that terrible prediction, and asked, "When shall these things be?" The question was not directly answered, but Jesus gave them certain premonitory signs to prepare them for the

event.

They had asked Him to tell them, not only when the Temple would be destroyed, but when the end of the world would come; and we can only understand what follows aright, by remembering the twofold object which was before His eyes. The language of His answer has for the most part both a

primary and a secondary application; but at the same time some things of which He speaks can be appropriated literally only to one of the two events in view, either the destruction of Jerusalem or the dissolution of the world.

He begins by foretelling a succession of troubles and disasters-agitations caused by religious fanatics, widespread wars, clashing of nationalities, earthquakes and famine. All of these happened as never before within the next generation. And such convulsions and revolutions as they were to witness He told them they must regard as "the beginnings of sorrows." We lose a great deal in our translation by not characterising, as the original does, the nature of the " sorrows." They were the pains as of a woman in travail; the birth-pangs which should issue in the regeneration of the world; and as such they were in a still higher sense the commencement of that labour, out of which, at the consumRev. xxi. 1. mation of the ages, the new heavens and the new earth will be born.

From these premonitory warnings of a general character, our Lord proceeds to enumerate those which were more strictly personal. For almost 5 all that follows refers immediately to the Twelve. Before the destruction of Jerusalem all the Apostles