The Fall of Jerusalem and the Destruction of the Temple

The event

Jewish resentment of Roman rule finally erupted into open revolt in AD 66, and after four years of brutal war, the future Roman emperor Titus laid siege to Jerusalem. In August of AD 70, Roman forces breached the city's walls, and in the fighting that followed, the Second Temple - the magnificent structure Herod the Great had spent decades expanding and beautifying - was burned and torn down. The Jewish historian Josephus, an eyewitness to the war, describes the devastation in harrowing detail: mass starvation inside the besieged city, enormous loss of life, and the systematic destruction of the Temple that had stood, in its various forms, for roughly six centuries.

For Christians, this catastrophe carried unmistakable theological weight. Decades earlier, Jesus had wept over Jerusalem and predicted that not one stone of the Temple would be left on another (Matthew 24:1-2; Mark 13:1-2; Luke 21:5-6), and had warned His disciples to flee to the mountains when they saw the city surrounded by armies (Luke 21:20-24). Early church historians record that Jerusalem's Christians, heeding warnings understood to fulfill this prophecy, largely fled the city before the final siege closed in, relocating to Pella across the Jordan and escaping the destruction that overtook the rest of the population.

The Temple's fall marks one of the great hinge points of redemptive history. With the Temple gone, the sacrificial system it existed to house came to a permanent end, and the priesthood and the sect of the Sadducees largely disappeared from history. For the church, already teaching that Christ's once-for-all sacrifice had fulfilled and superseded the Temple system, AD 70 stood as a visible, historical confirmation that the old covenant order had given way to the new - even as the church continued to affirm God's ongoing faithfulness to His covenant people.

Scripture references

• Matthew 24:1-2
• Mark 13:1-2
• Luke 21:5-24

Other witnesses

• Josephus, The Jewish War, Books 5-7

Further reading

• Bible Odyssey (SBL): The Destruction and Reconstruction of the Temple
• Bible Odyssey (SBL): Josephus — on the siege's chief eyewitness