Matthew24chapter 24

The disciples' admiration was not naive. Herod's temple platform was one of the engineering marvels of the ancient world, and some of its foundation blocks weigh well over a hundred tons; several are still visible in the western wall today. Josephus describes the sanctuary as covered in gold that blinded anyone looking at it in the morning sun. Saying not one stone would be left on another was a statement no one present could have taken calmly.

It happened. In AD 70, after a long siege, Roman legions under Titus took the city, burned the sanctuary, and levelled the buildings. Josephus, who watched it, wrote the account.

The abomination Jesus names had a precedent everyone knew. In the second century BC Antiochus IV had desecrated the altar and sacrificed a pig on it, provoking the Maccabean revolt. Within living memory of Matthew's readers, the emperor Caligula had ordered his own statue erected in the sanctuary around AD 40, and the province came close to open war before his death cancelled it.

The flight instructions assume that world's practicalities. Houses had flat roofs reached by an outside stair, so you could go down and away without entering; winter meant the wadis running full and the roads impassable; and travelling on a Sabbath meant either breaking the day or being stranded, since custom limited a Sabbath journey to about two thirds of a mile. The early historian Eusebius records that the Jerusalem believers, warned by an oracle before the war, left the city for Pella beyond the Jordan before the siege closed. It is a late report — nothing in the New Testament or in Josephus mentions it — and historians still argue over whether it happened. But it is the earliest Christian memory of what the church did when the armies came.