For about three hundred years, Christians ran Jerusalem. They had the money. They had the emperors. They had the stone and the workmen and the whole city in their hands.
They never rebuilt the Temple. Not once. Not one altar. Not one lamb.
The only man who tried had already walked away from Jesus.
The empty spot on the map
In the year 324, a Christian emperor took the East, and after that the building never stopped. Churches went up over the tomb. Churches went up in Bethlehem. Churches went up on the Mount of Olives and in the garden where he prayed. Pilgrims saved for years just to come and see them.
And the most famous piece of ground in the whole city sat bare.
No Temple. No altar. No sacrifice. The great platform where the house of God had stood was just wide open stone. That is a strange thing. If you took over the holiest city on earth, and you had three centuries and an empire’s treasury, wouldn’t you put the biggest thing back?
The Christians who ran the city did not. And nobody wrote a big argument about why, because nobody seems to have thought it needed one.
Two things he had already said
To understand the silence, you have to hear two things Jesus said.
The first he said to a woman at a well, a stranger from the wrong side of an old fight. She asked him the question everybody argued about. Which hill? Which city? Where is God’s address?
Jesus saith unto her, Woman, believe me, the hour cometh, when ye shall neither in this mountain, nor yet at Jerusalem, worship the Father. Ye worship ye know not what: we know what we worship: for salvation is of the Jews. But the hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth: for the Father seeketh such to worship him. God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.John 4:21-24
The middle line is the one people leave out. Salvation is of the Jews. Then he moved the whole thing off the map. Not her mountain. Not his city.
The second thing he said later, standing with his friends while they pointed up at the Temple like tourists. Look at the stones, they said. Look how big.
And Jesus said unto them, See ye not all these things? verily I say unto you, There shall not be left here one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down.Matthew 24:2
In the year 70 the Romans burned it down, and it stayed down.
The one man who tried
Someone did try to put it back.
In the year 363, a Roman emperor named Julian gave the order. He handed the job to a man called Alypius of Antioch, and the work began.
But Julian was not a Christian. He had been raised in the faith and he had walked away from it, and history still calls him Julian the Apostate. He brought back the old gods, and he wanted very much to prove Jesus wrong. Rebuild that Temple, and the stones would be sitting on top of each other again, and the famous words would be a lie.
It stopped almost as fast as it started. Our best witness is a man named Ammianus Marcellinus, who was not a Christian either. He was a pagan who had served under Julian, so he had no reason at all to help the church’s story. He wrote that balls of fire burst out of the foundations, burned the workmen, and made the place impossible to work. The project was set aside. Julian died in Persia on the twenty-sixth of June that same year.
Sit with the shape of that. In three hundred years, the one man who tried to rebuild the Temple was the one man who had rejected Jesus. The Christians who held the keys to the city never picked up a shovel.
Not “they couldn’t.” “They didn’t.”
Somebody usually says at this point, maybe it just was not possible.
It was possible.
In 614 a Persian army took Jerusalem, and Christian rule broke for about fifteen years. During that gap the city was handed to a Jewish leader named Nehemiah ben Hushiel. Sacrifice actually started again on that platform, the first in roughly five hundred years. He began making plans for a third Temple. Then the politics turned, and he was killed, and it ended.
But it happened. In that world, with those tools, on that ground. So the long Christian silence was not a wall they could not climb.
It was a choice.
The part that hurts
Now the honest part, and I am not going to dress it up.
Those ruins were not only left bare out of good theology. They were partly kept as a trophy. Christian writers of the day liked the look of that broken ground, because they read it as proof that God had punished the Jewish people and picked them instead. Jews were shut out of the city. They were let in one day a year to mourn. A traveler from Bordeaux wrote it down in the year 333, a stone the Jews came to, once a year, to weep over. And Christians watched that grief with satisfaction.
That is ugly. It is not the spirit of the man at the well who said salvation is of the Jews.
So this is the truth about our own record. Those Christians got the conclusion right for reasons that were partly wrong. They kept his sentence without keeping his heart.
That was us
And then we broke the other half.
In 1099 Christian armies marched across the world and stormed that city. A massacre followed. They set up a kingdom and crowned a king in the place where their Lord had worn thorns.
What the Crusaders did not do matters as much as what they did. They still did not rebuild the Temple. They did not restore the sacrifices. They never made the city the direction you had to pray toward, because Christians faced east when they prayed, not Jerusalem.
They kept the “no Temple” half of what Jesus said. They broke the “no city” half, with swords.
That was us. We did it too. We had his words in our own book, and we went anyway.
You are not the building
I want to say something to you before you go.
Maybe you have felt like you are only close to God in the right room. The right building, the right music, the right people, the right seat. And when you are outside of it, on a hard week, sitting in your car, standing in a hospital hallway, you feel like you have lost the signal.
Hear this. The men who ran the holiest city on earth, with an empire behind them, did not build God a house there. Not because they were better than you. Some of them were worse. But even they had taken in the one thing he said. God is a Spirit. He is not waiting at an address. He is not stuck in a room you are not standing in right now.
You do not have to travel to reach him. You never did.
Come walk with us. We are New Testament Only, and this is what we do all week, slow and plain walks through the old stories, with the hard parts left in. It is free. Put your name in at newtestamentonly.com and the next one will find you. Wherever you happen to be standing.