BackGround on the temple

Mark 13 is all about the temple, the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD, and the parousia of Jesus Christ at the end of the age. THAT is our topic for Sunday. Gonna post much about these topics because Sunday will be skating over the text, focusing on the big 3 ideas of chapter 13.

from Derek Thomas:
This is the second temple; this is the Herodian temple, the temple that had begun to be rebuilt after the Babylonian exile, and Nehemiah...And then in 19 B.C., Herod the Great, for all kinds of reasons, began a construction project that was to last much, much longer than our construction project is going to last. It began in 19 B.C. and actually was still going on in 64 A.D., and of course the temple would be destroyed in 70 A.D., some six years after it had been completed. Most of the construction had been completed around 9 B.C. It took about ten years to do most of the expansion work, and it was a colossal project. Josephus tells us that some of the stones, the foundation stones of the retaining wall, were 42 feet by 11 feet by 14 feet, and each one weighing over a million pounds. And that’s just the retaining wall! We’ve not discovered any of those stones, and Josephus did have a tendency to exaggerate, so it may not be that accurate. But certainly, if you go to excavations of Wilson’s Porch and look down, you can see gigantic foundation stones, and then as you would have gone up into the esplanade of the temple there were columns, Corinthian columns that it is said would take three grown men arm in arm to circumnavigate those columns. It was a magnificent sight. There was no temple like it in all the world for its sheer magnificence.