From
the desk of
Bill Ramey
2/24/15
COMMENTARY & OPINION
SPECIAL REPORT
HEADS UP FOLKS --- THIS IS A GAME
CHANGER
WND
Exclusive
Prayers to God in wrong spot?
Temple Mount 'misplaced': 'We're sitting on
kryptonite'
Published: 2 days ago
Leo Hohmann is a news editor for WND. He
has been a reporter and editor at several suburban newspapers in the Atlanta and Charlotte, North Carolina, areas and also served as managing editor
of Triangle Business Journal in Raleigh,
North Carolina.
It has been called the most contested
plot of land in the world — the fissure at which three major faiths come
together, and break apart.
There have been holy wars fought over it
and holy writ foretelling of battles yet to come. It’s Jerusalem’s
Temple Mount.
But what if history got it wrong? What
if the spot where Solomon built the first Jewish Temple,
and Herod built the second, was actually about 600 feet to the south, in a
place known as the ancient City of David?
Enter Robert Cornuke. He travels the
world solving Bible mysteries: Noah’s Ark,
the Ark of the Covenant, he’s studied them in depth. Now, he’s obsessed with
the Jewish Temple.
His self-deprecating sense of humor and
easy-going style have helped him gain access to some of the world’s most
sensitive archaeological sites.
But don’t be fooled.
He attacks each mission with the
doggedness of a street cop skilled in investigations. That’s because he was a
street cop for nearly a decade in California
before a three-hour gun battle with a man holed up with 700 rounds of ammo some
years ago caused him to rethink his career options.
His new book, “Temple:
Amazing New Discoveries that Change Everything About the Location of Solomon’s
Temple,” is turning heads in scholarly circles for its pure audacity.
To suggest that the traditional Temple
Mount, where Jews have prayed at the Wailing Wall and where Muslims pray at the
Dome of the Rock, is actually not the holy ground they believe it to be, is
sacrilege to many historians and archaeologists, not to mention clerics.
Yet, his case is so well researched that
it’s hard to ignore. Many are reading, and re-reading, perhaps hoping to find
some obvious blunder that would allow them to discount its conclusion.
Because, if it is true, that means the
unthinkable for Muslims, and opens new possibilities for Jews.
image:
http://www.wnd.com/files/2015/02/bob-cornuke.jpg
Robert Cornuke
“We have an opportunity to impact
history, positively or negatively,” Cornuke said. “What we’re sitting on is the
kryptonite of Bible archaeology.”
He was careful to point out this was not
his idea. He merely followed up and expanded upon the work of Ernest L. Martin,
an archaeologist who wrote the 1994 book, “The Temples that Jerusalem
Forgot.”
Filmmaker Ken Klein has also delved into
the subject in his documentary, “Jerusalem
and the Lost Temple of the Jews.”
“This is not my brainchild,” he told
WND. “I’m the benefactor of Dr. Martin, who really came up with this research
but his book didn’t get much attention because it contained a lot of minutia
that people had to wade through. I tried to write a book that is readable.
“The site has been misdiagnosed and been
accepted for so long that no one has ever dared challenge it,” Cornuke
continued. “I researched it to the best of my ability, from the standpoint of a
police investigator, and came up with a reasonable conclusion.”
Because he’s dared to question what has
become historically sacrosanct – the location of the first and second
Jewish temples – he’s getting a lot of phone calls.
“I’ve had a lot of scholars, guys with
PhDs and working on PhDs, going over this with me, and two are now doing their
doctoral dissertations on where the temple was located, because this has opened
up a whole new vein,” Cornuke said. “It seems preposterous but these guys are
calling me and saying, ‘Wait a minute; this is crazy, and why haven’t we ever
seen this before?’”
His book has only been out about six
months, but it’s starting to upset the apple cart.
“It’s just one of those things, word of
mouth, where people are talking about it, and literally I can’t get much work
done now because I’m taking calls and referring people to our distributor,” he
said. “It started small at first and is really catching on now.”
He realizes some will scoff while others
will read and appraise the body of evidence on its merits.
“Bible archaeology is considered to be
the most controversial subject within archaeology, and the Temple Mount is the
most controversial part of Bible archaeology, according to Discovery Channel,”
Cornuke said. “Literally, what I’m doing is taking on the most controversial
subject in archaeology. So I’m surprised I have not received a personal email
or someone hasn’t called me or confronted me and said, ‘You’re wrong with this
premise, and here’s why.’”
So, exactly what is the proof behind his
premise? And if the Western Wall is not the ruins of the ancient temple, then
what is it?
The answers Cornuke gives to these
questions, if proven true, could rock the prophetic world and shake the Middle East to its core.
‘Not
one stone left upon another’
He starts his story with the strategic
placement of the Dome of the Rock and moves on to the teachings of Jesus and an
eyewitness account by Jewish historian Flavius Josephus.
The Arab caliph Adb al-Malik built the
Dome of the Rock in 691 A.D. on a site chosen largely because it overshadowed
the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the place where Jesus is believed to have
risen from the dead. Muslims see their religion as the perfection of Judaism
and Christianity and this supersessionist mentality influences their
architecture throughout the Middle East. To
build the Dome of the Rock larger and above the church commemorating Christ’s
resurrection was meant as a statement to Christians, who were the dominant
religion in the area before the Muslim invaders arrived.
Then comes the prophecy of Jesus. In
Matthew 24, He and His disciples exited the Temple, and Jesus said to them, “Do you not
see all these things? Assuredly I say to you, not one stone shall be left here
upon another that shall not be thrown down.”
But the Western Wall where Jews still
pray has thousands of stones remaining intact. They believe it is the western
wall of their temple and, therefore, a holy place, often referred to as the
Wailing Wall.
But historical accounts say the Romans
so fully destroyed the Jewish Temple
in 70 A.D., it became nothing but a field of weeds. Many Jews were carried off
to captivity, and those who were left with a memory of the true location
eventually died off, Cornuke argues.
Josephus’s
account of Roman fortress
But there is a written account from
Josephus, the first century author of “Jewish Wars,” whose works are considered
highly credible on other topics, but for some reason his description of the
temple location is denigrated and dismissed by modern historians.
Josephus wrote that the site that today
is considered the Temple Mount was actually a Roman fort called Fort Antonia.
The fortress was large enough to support the Roman Tenth Legion, about 6,000
soldiers plus support staff for a total of about 10,000 personnel.
“The Roman fort would need at least the
area of the present day Temple
Mount (36 acres) to
sustain itself,” Cornuke writes. “Josephus wrote that the fort was said to be
much larger than the temple, but scholars say the temple area is much bigger than
the fort. Again, who is right? According to many academics, Josephus
exaggerated and is the culprit.”
image:
http://www.wnd.com/files/2015/02/Wailing-Wall-Jerusalem.jpg
View of the western “Wailing Wall” with
Dome of the Rock in the background, Jerusalem,
Israel.
In 1973, the famous historian Michael
Avi-Yonah made a model of first-century Jerusalem
showing the Roman fort as a small appendage to the temple on the northwest
corner.
This fits nicely with tradition while
ignoring eyewitness accounts, Cornuke says. “This has all resulted in us having
today almost every television documentary on the subject of the temple showing
the Avi-Yonah model as an ‘accurate in every way’ illustrative prop.”
There’s only one problem: That prop is
far too small to accommodate the Roman legion described by Josephus.
And there is another caveat to consider.
Apparently a translator of Josephus’s work mistranslated a word, tagma, or
legion as a “cohort,” which is a much smaller contingent of about 480 men.
Every other time Josephus uses the word tagma, he uses it to describe much
larger numbers of soldiers, such as the fifth, 10th, 12th and 15th legions.
“A small Roman cohort would certainly
harmonize with a small Roman fort as we have in the Avi-Yonah model,” Cornuke
writes.
But would 480 men have been sufficient
to maintain order in a province populated by riot-prone Jews? During religious
festivals, Jerusalem’s
population swelled from about 175,000 during the time of Christ to upward of
300,000.
Not to mention, the Book of Acts says
Paul was arrested and escorted by 470 men from Fort
Antonia to Caesarea.
“So, are we to believe that a garrison of only about 480 men would send 470 of
them off to Caesarea to protect a single prisoner bound in chains, and then
leave the entire garrison practically empty with a handful of soldiers to
defend and control as many as a quarter million, depending on festival crowds?”
Cornuke asks.
Another
eyewitness and clues from the Bible
Another eyewitness was Eleazar Bin Jari,
commander of the Jewish rebels at Masada. He
described Jerusalem as lying in total ruins: “It
(Jerusalem) is
now demolished to the very foundations, and hath nothing left but that monument
of it preserved, I mean the camp of those (the Romans) that hath destroyed it,
which still dwells upon its ruins.”
In other words, nothing was left
standing in Jerusalem other than the Roman Fort Antonia,
with its high stone walls still intact. Eleazar said the temple was completely
gone, even its very foundation uprooted, fulfilling the prophecy of Jesus.
This account also fulfills the prophecy
of Micah 3:12: It says “Zion (which is the City
of David) shall
be plowed like a field. Jerusalem
shall become heaps of ruins. And the mountains of the Temple like the bare hills of the forest.”
So, if Jerusalem was left with the
western wall of the temple still standing, that forces one to consider thinking
of Micah as a false prophet.
Cornuke cites a slew of other Bible
verses that support his theory about the temple site being at “the stronghold
of Zion” in the City of David.
A powerful clue can be found in 2
Chronicles 3:1, which describes the location where Solomon built the temple “on
Mount Moriah, where the Lord had appeared to
his father David, at the place that David had prepared on the threshing floor
of Ornan the Jebusite.”
This threshing floor, where wheat was
separated from chaff, had been purchased by David after he conquered a 12-acre
fortress on a hill south of today’s Old
City section of Jerusalem. That hill is today located within
the City of David Jerusalem Walls
National Park.
Another clue, the clincher for Cornuke,
came when he read the New Testament Book of Acts, Chapter 21: 27-32. It
describes a riot scene in which Paul was arrested at the temple by the
commander of the Roman garrison.
The commander “immediately took soldiers
and centurions, and ran down to them (toward the temple).”
“The ‘aha moment’ for me came when I
read Acts 21,” Cornuke said, “where it says they went down the steps to
get Paul. Well, there are no steps coming down from the traditional Temple Mount
complex. From a cop’s point of view, there’s no other way.”
Or, as he writes in his book, “If the Temple Mount
was the place of Paul’s riot scene, then the big question is where would
someone go down from to reach Paul?”
Of course the answer is, you couldn’t.
Unless the traditional Temple Mount was actually the Roman Fort and the true temple
site was below, at the City of David.
Clues
from scrolls and in water
Cornuke also found clues in the Dead Sea
Scrolls, which contained this cryptic instruction:
“You shall make a channel all-round the
laver within the building. The channel runs (from the building) of the laver to
a shaft, goes down and disappears in the middle of the earth so that the water
flows and runs through it and is lost in the middle of the earth.”
The description is of a natural spring
of water below the Jewish temple.
Tacitus, the Roman historian, likewise
recorded that the temple at Jerusalem
had a natural spring of water that welled from its interior.
There is only one spring this could be
referring to, the Gihon Spring, in the old City of David,
also called the stronghold of Zion
in Scripture.
“There is no other such spring anywhere
else in Jerusalem,”
Cornuke writes. “The spring connection, especially a robust gushing spring,
seems to be like a laser pointer aimed at the City of David
and not at the Temple
Mount as the temple
site.”
Cornuke cites Joel 3:18, which says, “A
fountain shall flow from the house of the Lord,” and Psalm 87:5,7, which says,
“And of Zion it
will be said … Both the singers and the players on the instruments say, ‘All my
springs are within you.’”
And another nugget is found in Ezekiel
47:1-2:
“Then he brought me back to the door of
the temple; and there was water, flowing from under the threshold of the temple
toward the east, for the front of the temple faced east; the water was flowing
from under the right side of the temple, south to the altar.”
The many animals slaughtered for the
temple sacrifices would have required a powerful water source to wash away the
tremendous amount of blood that would have been left behind. The City of David site has this water source, the traditional Temple Mount
would have been nearly a quarter mile away from the Gihon Spring.
By this point, the long-held narrative
of history’s writers begins to unravel. As a former cop, Cornuke is not so
surprised.
“You know how many people are sitting in
jail right now who were falsely accused, because you can always take somebody
and make him the bad guy but not everything fits,” Cornuke told WND. “It’s like
a Rubik’s cube that starts coming together, but you’re just a little bit off.
Or think of the wheel on a car. If you don’t have the right size wheel, the
holes aren’t going to align with the little studs, and so you have to find
parts that fit. And nothing really fit on the Temple Mount
complex; it just didn’t align there.”
Implications
‘staggering’ for Jews and Muslims
Bible scholar Chuck Missler, when
presented with Cornuke’s evidence, said the implications for the future are
staggering.
“As Chuck Missler told me, if this is
true, this changes everything,” Cornuke told WND. “This turns archaeology in
the Middle East on its head.”
It’s a game-changer because it releases
the Jewish people to start rebuilding on a site that is already in their
control.
“What it means is, the Jews now have a
place they can rebuild their long-foretold temple, and for Muslims, they would
lose control, which they love having over the Jews,” Cornuke said. “They can
say, ‘You can pray here’ or ‘You can’t pray there,’ and the Jews are really
frustrated by all this. But if they can rebuild there, in the City of David, and can do it
tomorrow, what does that do with end-time prophecy, which says the antichrist
will go there and sit in the temple and that leads to the coming of Christ?
People have been fighting over that patch of real estate for thousands of years
and that now kind of changes the whole game in the Middle
East.”
Cornuke calls it “the biggest blunder in
archaeological history that no one has really challenged.”
“Every book I read said this is the one
place that is undisputed and that we can really rely upon, but archaeology is
not a science. It’s an art. You have to take a lot of things in to develop a
conclusion, and then it’s your best guess. It’s not empirical evidence. I’m not
an archaeologist. I have PhD in Bible and theology, and a background as a police
investigator, so what I do have is a very well-established background in
investigations. I used those skills.”
Cornuke said he lacks the professional
constraints of archaeologists, freeing him to take more risks.
“Scholars want to be published. They want
prestige, or they want to be promoted,” he said. “That’s the university system
they work under.
“Police detectives have a completely
different method: We’re interested in, what are the problems and what are the
possibilities?
“Josephus said the fortress overlooked
the temple. Nothing fits on the Temple
Mount, but the tour
guides have said it for so many years, the same thing year after year. After so
long, no one ever questions it. This is the way it is.”
By its very nature, university
scholarship is reluctant to “test the waters,” Cornuke said.
“They want to stay in the safe harbor
because testing things would open them up to scrutiny, and you’re going to get
hammered, whether you’re right or wrong, and most scholars don’t want to have
that, so they wait on others.
“I don’t want to bash scholarship,” he
continued. “I want to say, hey, this is the evidence, and the evidence is very
provocative to say the least.”
The
Jewish response
On a recent visit to the Temple Mount
in Jerusalem,
Cornuke said he did an informal straw poll of Jewish people at the Wailing
Wall.
“Everyone over 40 years old said, ‘I
don’t care what you say, or what evidence you have, it’s not going to change
the way I think. My father brought me here, my grandfather brought me here, and
it’s all been at the Western Wailing Wall.’”
Those under 40 were less wedded to
tradition.
“They said, ‘Cool, now we can rebuild
our temple.’ They were excited. They wanted to know more. Then their father
would come over and say, ‘Don’t talk anymore to this gentile.”
I even had a man who represents an
Israeli cabinet official that wanted to get my book to (Prime Minister)
Benjamin Netanyahu, so I signed it and he was delivering it that day to
Netanyahu.”
That was just two weeks ago.
“And I’ve had several rabbis that have
contacted me,” Cornuke said. “I gave a talk in New Hampshire where the Jewish community was
asked to come out and hear my presentation. Before I even started a father,
mother, daughter and son got up and walked out. They obviously wanted to make a
point. But after my presentation, the Jewish community, who was there in
numbers, stood up with tears in their eyes and said we are sorry we have missed
this in history, and thank you.’ I was astounded at that response.”
Cornuke says he can understand the
reluctance for Jewish leaders in Jerusalem to accept his theory, because to do
so requires them to come to grips with the fact that they’ve been praying at
the wall of a Roman fort all these years. But if evaluated objectively, he sees
the evidence as overwhelming.
“This is not a guess by me. As a police
investigator, I feel this book would win a jury over,” he said. “I didn’t write
it to be right; I wrote it as a gift to the Jewish people, so they can rebuild
their temple.”
But the response of older Jews at the
Wailing Wall was not positive.
“They kinda held up their hands, and
they pointed to the foundation and said, ‘Look, there are thousands of huge
stones, foundation stones, here,’ and your Jesus is wrong, because our Temple is here.’”
So Cornuke, or perhaps others following
up his lead have more work to convince the Jewish people they have a free and
clear site upon which to rebuild their holy temple
“There comes a time when you have to
force feed your mind past reason and logic to accept some of these things that
tradition teaches,” he said. “Jesus said: ‘Every stone will be thrown down,’
and every word of His prophecy has been fulfilled.”
If some aren’t ready to accept his
findings, that’s OK, he said.
“We will never discover anything,” he
said. “God reveals it in His time, in His way, for His glory, but He can always
use a knucklehead cop from California
to do this.”
Ramey comments:
I
have wondered for years about that one comment by Christ that Cornuke based
much of his research on --- i.e. "... there shall not be left here one
stone upon another..." Matthew
24:2.
There
are some things Bob Cornuke and I disagree on but this piece of research is not
one of them. I sincerely feel he is onto
something that is destined to change the world.
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