Destruction of the Second Temple (AD 70)

The revolt broke out in AD 66. Titus invested Jerusalem in the spring of 70 with four legions — V Macedonica, X Fretensis, XII Fulminata, XV Apollinaris. Josephus, who had surrendered at Jotapata and was attached to the Roman command, describes in War 5.499-511 the answer to the famine and the flood of deserters: Titus threw a wall of circumvallation around the entire city, thirty-nine stadia — roughly four and a half miles — studded with thirteen forts, and finished it in three days.

Josephus dates the burning of the sanctuary to the tenth of the month Lous, the Hebrew Ab, and notes that it was the same day of the year on which the Babylonians had burned the first temple (War 6.250). Titus then ordered the city and temple demolished, sparing only the three towers Phasael, Hippicus and Mariamne and a stretch of the western wall to quarter the garrison of Legio X Fretensis (War 7.1-4). Josephus says the site was so thoroughly dug up that visitors could not believe it had ever been inhabited.

The destruction is under the modern city. Nahman Avigad's 1970 excavation in the rebuilt Jewish Quarter uncovered the Burnt House: a first-century basement workshop sealed beneath ash and collapse, with an iron spear leaning against a wall, the skeletal forearm of a young woman near the doorway, coins struck in years two through four of the revolt (AD 67-69) as the latest datable objects, and a stone weight inscribed "Bar Kathros" — a priestly family named and cursed in the Talmud's lament over the high-priestly houses (Pesahim 57a).

At the Temple Mount itself, Benjamin Mazar's 1968 excavation recovered from the rubble at the southwest corner an inscribed stone block 84 centimetres long reading "to the place of trumpeting to de—": the parapet from which a priest sounded the shofar to open and close the Sabbath, the very spot Josephus describes (War 4.582). It is in the Israel Museum.

Below it, the Herodian street running along the western wall was found crushed under a heap of platform ashlars pushed off the top; they still lie where they landed, open to visitors in the Jerusalem Archaeological Park.

Rome advertised the victory for decades. Vespasian and Titus issued the IVDAEA CAPTA coinage in gold, silver and bronze — a bound captive and a mourning woman beneath a palm. The Arch of Titus, dedicated by Domitian after Titus' death in AD 81, carries the spoils relief on its inner passage: the seven-branched menorah, the table of showbread, and the temple trumpets carried through the Forum.

Yeshiva University's 2012 scanning of the relief detected traces of yellow pigment on the menorah.

The consequence is permanent and checkable. Sacrifice, the priesthood's daily function, the Day of Atonement rite — the whole cultic apparatus of a nation stopped that summer and has never resumed. Matthew 24:34 puts a clock on the prediction: "this generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled."

Roughly forty years elapsed between the saying and the fire.

No one disputes the destruction. Josephus, Tacitus (Histories 5), the coinage, the arch, and the ash layer agree. The live question is the date of the Gospels: the majority place Mark around AD 65-75 and Matthew and Luke in the 80s, which turns the prediction into a report.

The minority case runs on internal evidence — Acts ends with Paul alive under house arrest about AD 62, with no notice of Nero's persecution, the executions of James, Peter and Paul, or the war itself, which is a strange silence for an author who on the late dating had all of it behind him. C. H. Dodd argued in 1947 that Luke's siege language is quarried from Septuagint descriptions of 586 BC rather than from AD 70, and notably omits the fire that actually destroyed the building.