Allah – By Jove! – Jerusalem Acropolis

Allah – By Jove! – Jerusalem Acropolis

Muhammad’s “night journey” to the “farthest temple” seems to be the only claim the Muslims have to the Noble Sanctuary and or Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

Since there were supposedly no standing buildings there on Temple Mount at the time of Muhammad’s dream, it is possible the “farthest temple” might not be in Jerusalem.

The present Dome of the Rock with the iconic gold dome on the Noble Sanctuary may or may not be a recycled Church of Sacred Wisdom built by Constantine.  Constantine in turn may have recycled a forecourt structure of Hadrian’s Temple of Jupiter complex on the destroyed previous Temple Mount complex, defunct as of 70 C.E..

If this is all confusing to you, it has been to me trying to figure out what this cultural dispute over the disputed real estate aka Temple Mount aka Nobel Sanctuary is all about.  In fact depending on which side you talk to, once you use the term TM or NS, the party you are talking to assumes your opinion and position on the negotiating end of things and shuts you out if you use their wrong term.

So, in the case of the disputed real estate in the vicinity of Solomon’s alleged temple site and Muhammad’s alleged night journey and on a raised man made stone platform or acropolis, I will, from this point in time forward, also refer to the area as Hadrian’s Temple of Jupiter Complex or HTJC or just plain Jerusalem Acropolis.

Bar Kochba's rebellion and occupation of the Jupiter Temple as the Third Jewish Temple around 132 C.E. is generally not recognized as fact and remains speculation until historical proof is found which is not likely. Titus scraped the acropolis clean in 70 C.E., followed by Hadrian and his vanity building project - Roman vision thing, followed by Constantine's turning the place into a quarry followed by the Arabs continuing the quarrying process to build their own sacred structures.  

Hadrian is also universally known for Hadrian’s Wall in Scotland, to the Pantheon in Rome, to his massive Smithsonian like private pleasure dome summer palace, at Tivoli, outside Rome to the greatest (biggest) temple ever built to Jupiter in Baalbek Lebanon, to his new unfinished Constantinople like project of Aelia Capitolina aka the former Jerusalem.  So much major construction and so little time.  Poor Hadrian.

Back to Temple Mount or I should say acropolis/HTJC.  I have read many, many Jewish, Christian theories on where the original Solomon/Herod temple stood on the HTJC acropolis area.  

And in most of these documents about the HTJC acropolis, they assume you know the north, south, east, orientation of the geography in question.  I have never been to Jerusalem so I got lost quite a few times reading about all this so-called dusty history mixed with more speculation more than with hard provable facts.

There is a theory and I will hopefully correctly attribute it to a Tuvia Sagiv that states something like the great builder Hadrian’s floor plan for Jupiter’s temple in Baalbek (above, below) may have the same architectural flow and or same floor plan in the Aelia Capitolina acropolis dedicated to Jupiter in the former Jerusalem.

The theory goes something like Hadrian was known to duplicate a lot of things.  It is said that he had a copy of the circular marble Cnidus Greece shrine including a copy of the famous Aphrodite by Greek sculptor Praxiteles.  Some tourists take home postcards or snapshots.  Hadrian brought home whole temples or duplicated them at his Tivoli palace.

So it is not so far-fetched that maybe the Aelia Capitolina Jupiter complex in the former Jerusalem might match the Baalbek complex as well to some exact degree.

The forecourt structure in Baalbek is six sided or hexagonal.  The same forecourt in the HTJC may have been eight sided or octagonal and match the base blueprint of the present Dome of the Rock shrine.  Just a theory. 

The thing is that the theory I have seen has no measurements. Beyond that the visual proportions of the forecourt, full court and temple of Jupiter seem to match this theory on a visual level.  So not only does the Dome of the Rock seem to fit as a later structure built on a forecourt structure, the famous Al Aqsa Mosque (below) at the far southern end of the Jerusalem acropolis would seem to have been built on the foundations of the Temple of Jupiter torn down by Constantine in need of stone for massive Christian shrine building as in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the totally defunct, later built by Justinian, Nea Church (left - above). 

These two structures, the recycled temple of Venus/Church of the Holy Sepulchre and Nea Church framed both ends of the grand boulevard, the Cardo Maximus, the massive  new main north south road of Hadrian’s new Roman city, Aelia Capitolina.  The long term city plan started by Hadrian continued up until the Arab conquest.

Constantine when he legalized Christianity with the Edict of Milan of 313 C.E., also decriminalized Judaism as part of that act of tolerance to all religions.  Rather than let the Jews have Temple Mount back to compete with his new designer religion of Christ(ianity), he sacked all the building stones of Hadrian’s acropolis to follow through on the original design and building of the new Roman city next to the acropolis.  This put the Jewish question back into political limbo.

The Church of Sacred Wisdom recycled into the Dome of the Rock may have not been standing at the time of the prophet’s night dream, earthquakes and all that.  The Nea Church, the biggest church in Christendom outside of maybe the Vatican Hill structure fell down and into disuse for many centuries not out of Islamic destruction but because of earthquakes.  A theory states that many of the stones of the Jewish temple first went into the building of the Jupiter temple before they made their way all up in time into the Nea Church as well as into the entire infrastructure of Roman, Byzantine and Medieval Jerusalem.

To the point is that there is not much left of the Jewish Temple there on the Jerusalem Acropolis.  Many historians agree that the original Jewish temple building and forecourt faced east and is probably able to fit in front of the al Aqsa Mosque if reconstructed after archeological digs, scientific studies etc.  Truth also is that if the original Solomon Temple thingy gets reconstructed for the tourists, religious fanatics etc. it would not only be in front of Al Aqsa but forty feet lower than that mosque. 

While the Christians and Jews who want the second/first coming and in fact the end of the world, they would destroy the Dome of the Rock and Al Asqa to have a dominant Jewish only complex. Truth is that all standing at present major structures should be allowed to remain in presence of a reconstructed Jewish Temple below the present high point or grade of Hadrian’s Jupiter Temple Complex or acropolis.

In fact, image above points to the fact that Jews already and by tradition worship at the Western Wall below where the original Jewish temple once stood.  Image above of the Jerusalem Acropolis, left is Western Wall aka the Wailing Wall.  Dome of the Rome, top center,  Al Aqsa Mosque, bottom right.

What I envision if not getting a fully rebuilt temple, perhaps the old Jewish temple might be ghosted in structural steel to show its original presence, not unlike the Benjamin Franklin House in Philadelphia (below) where they have no historic evidence of what it actually looked like, though the foundation is still there. 

Will it be a functioning temple again? I don’t know.  I for one would object to animal slaughter. 

Anyway, maybe an eternal flame in the old Holy of Holies and for privacy, maybe an enclosed dome like covering like that of the British Museum Library courtyard.  Will not have to rub elbows with your neighbors.

Use your imagination.  It is time to unite that region in something other than mutual hatred.

Pleasant dreams. 

A Real Jesus and Simon Bar Kochba

I have mentioned The Jesus Seminar in several of my articles. At first I was reluctant to accept that this long term scholarly deconstruction of the faith was necessary. In many ways, the future Christian church and it will exist in the centuries to come, will be based on a new foundation. The old foundation gave way not unlike the old St Peter’s in Rome that had stood there a thousand years and was torn down around 1500 C.E. to make way for the present structure.

Besides the crumbling foundation being examined and the engineers of The Jesus Seminar trying to determine how to best assess the damage, there is also separate from scholarly review the cancer setting into the Christian Faith from a worldwide RC hierarchy covering up priest abuse and the whole question of celibacy as a major factor in that abuse issue.

Another part of the cancer on the faith is the rigid thoughtless absolute bible hugging notion that the Bible is the unerring word of God as in the unerring opinion (tin god punditry) of fundamentalists. Yeah right.

The Jesus Seminar has moved on from the five gospels (Thomas for the sake of argument was included) and is now dissecting The Acts of the Apostles.

Seminar on the Acts of the Apostles

I invite you to read some of their reports and their blackballing of Acts as more of a second century document than a reflection of first century Christianity as we think of it and or have come to know it.

I eagerly await their seminar on Paul.

In my own amateur studies of esoterics and religion I feel confident to move on with my own brand of Cultural Christianity.

When looking at the Gospel of Mark recently and in a new format, line by line -

Bible, King James Version (KJV)

It struck me that Jesus if he ever existed did not live on the timeline they claim that he did. In my opinion, Jesus and or his ministry happened after the destruction of Herod’s temple in 70 AD.

I say this because I already believe that the Gospel of John is at least two small gospels welded together in the middle to suit a political agenda and claiming legitimacy of the Peter Clique of Christians as the one and only authorized Jesus name brand.

That looking at Mark I see road directions, markers that want the reader to believe in these events occurring in a certain time period. That the beginning of each synoptic gospel has different timeline markers designed for different intended audiences. Mark has John the Baptist. Matthew has Herod the Great and the Persian Magi. Luke has a census ordered by Augustus, with a timeframe not easily found or reconciled anywhere else in writings from antiquity.

And looking at Mark the whole Pilate marker is an amateur writer in the early second century wanting to use a recognizable figure such as Pilate in that he on a verbal or oral scale was somebody the Jews were still talking about decades after his transfer out of Palestine.

The trial with the high priest in the gospels is so phony. An orthodox Jew says he is the messiah and the high priest tears his clothes. In real life the high priest would have most likely said something like “Of course you are the messiah, and so is my nephew and half the people I meet everyday”.

The amateur nature of Jew on Jew and noble Roman letting Jew kill Jew is not early first century drama but early second century drama. Simon Bar Kochba and his Revolt and recycling of Hadrian’s Temple of Jupiter as the new Third Temple was a very short lived but real drama. There are coins of this two, three year era when the Jews almost broke the back of the whole Roman army and deserved a Josephus Flavious to write ripe propaganda about it.

Alas there are no records, very few about Hadrian bankrupting the Roman Empire in his desire to subjugate a foreign people and destroy a unique belief system. Who would want to keep records of the genocide of hundreds of thousands of Jews?

Jesus and or his sayings as in the Gospel of Thomas got written into a post apocalyptic script and backdated to be in the old antebellum Temple before 70 C.E. and to fulfill a hundred real or imagined prophetic conditions of a messiah. A simpler setting in a simpler time was needed to explain the teachings of Jesus and not with the backdrop of the chaos and thunder of the collapsed Jewish Dream in 135 C.E..

A simpler setting but the anger and rancor and political Jewish State infighting appear not to be disguised. The Pharisees as a class were a far more important factor in every day Jewish life after the destruction of Herod’s temple in the year 70 that before its demise.

After Bar Kochba and the total destruction of the Jewish State, some had to backtrack and decide or fabricate who the real messiah had really been if not Bar Kochba. Jesus of Nazereth?

We live in a wonderful age. The words of Jesus, the real words of Jesus and their love, humanity and quest for justice will echo through the centuries to come and not be filled with the hate and anti-Semitism of the hack spec writer scripts of the synoptic gospels.