Jesus Foretells Destruction of the Temple

⁵ And while some were speaking of the temple, how it was adorned with noble stones and offerings, he said, ⁶ “As for these things that you see, the days will come when there will not be left here one stone upon another that will not be thrown down.” ⁷ And they asked him, “Teacher, when will these things be, and what will be the sign when these things are about to take place?”  Luke 21:5-7 esv

Today I would like to look into some of the significance of Jesus’ prophesy of the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem.

There is an interesting correlation about this destruction that helps to refute the skeptics idea that the New Testament was written many generations after the death of Jesus. Because of the idea of this late date of the origins of the text, they think that many fables and fabrications to the story crept in because there were no eye witnesses around to be able to correct any errors.

The time stamp for an earlier dating of the texts seems most reliably found in the book of Acts. The information that is significant is what is missing from this scripture. There is no mention of the destruction of the temple in Acts. Certainly, this is of major significance if Jesus had predicted its destruction. So, if Acts was written after the temple’s destruction, it would have certainly been mentioned there.

You see, Acts is a recording of the history of the early church. Much of the information found involves the life of Paul. We also see that Paul’s death is not recorded either.

From history, we know factually that the temple in Jerusalem was destroyed in 70 A.D. We also can assume that Paul died within about 50 years after the death of Jesus. This would have been about 70 to 80 A.D.

Furthermore, we know that the book of Acts was a sequel to the Gospel of Luke, so the book of Luke was written beforehand.

This early dating of the scriptures is significant in that people were still alive at the time of the writing so as to be eye witnesses of what actually took place.