Jerusalem falls
Destruction of the temple
Jesus said it would happen, and it did.
In 66 AD the Jewish people of Judea revolt against Rome. Four years later, the Roman general Titus — soon to be emperor — besieges Jerusalem. The city holds out with extraordinary tenacity. The defenders are brave, resourceful, and doomed.
The siege takes months. The food runs out. The historian Josephus, an eyewitness who had switched sides and was watching from the Roman camp, records scenes of starvation so extreme he says he cannot bring himself to describe them fully.
In August of 70 AD, the Romans breach the final walls and pour into the city. The temple — Herod's great temple, the most magnificent building in the Jewish world, the place where God's presence dwelled, the place where Jesus taught and Stephen was arrested and Paul was nearly killed — catches fire.
The soldiers are supposed to preserve it. Titus reportedly orders it saved. But the battle is chaos and the fire spreads and the temple burns.
The gold in the treasury melts and runs down between the stones. Soldiers pry the stones apart to get at it — fulfilling, stone by stone, Jesus's prophecy that not one stone would be left on another.
Josephus claims that over a million die and nearly a hundred thousand are taken into slavery — figures most modern historians regard as greatly inflated. The sacrificial system that had been at the center of Jewish worship for a thousand years ends in a single afternoon.
The Christians in Jerusalem, remembering Jesus's words, had mostly fled before the siege began. They were in a city called Pella, across the Jordan, watching the smoke rise.
“And when you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, then know that its desolation has come near. Then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains.”
— Jesus, Luke 21:20–21
“As for these things which you see, the days will come, in which there will not be left here one stone on another that will not be thrown down.”
The destruction of the temple was not the end of Judaism — the rabbis found a way to rebuild their faith around the synagogue and the Torah rather than the temple and the sacrifice.
And it was not the end of Christianity — the early Jewish Christians had already been displaced from temple worship, had already built communities around the breaking of bread and the reading of letters from Paul.
But it was the end of a world. The physical center of everything God had done through Israel for a thousand years was gone.
God had been preparing both communities for exactly this — a faith that did not depend on a building. A presence that could not be destroyed by fire.
The buildings always fall eventually. What is built in people does not.