The Greatest Historical Miracle You've Never Heard Of

[RollTide1987]

The following is an excerpt from an article detailing the Roman Emperor Julian’s attempt to undermine Christianity by rebuilding the Temple of Solomon.

For Julian, persecution, oppression, and financial extortion of Christians weren’t enough. In the second year of his reign, in 362, he conceived an extraordinary plan to undermine the credibility of Jesus Christ by annulling one of his prophecies. In Matthew 24, while the disciples were pointing out the temple buildings, Christ told them, “You see all these things, do you not? Amen, I say to you, there will not be left here a stone upon another stone that will not be thrown down.” As students of history will remember, this was fulfilled with the destruction of the temple in 70 AD, during the First Jewish-Roman War.

For Julian, the solution was simple: all he had to do was rebuild the temple.

Signs of trouble immediately appeared: after the first day, the workers awoke to find the soil they had removed had shifted back into place. Undaunted, they resumed work when “of a sudden a violent gale blew, and storms, tempests and whirlwinds scattered everything far and wide,” according to the account of the ecclesiastical historian Theodoret.

Then calamity struck: an earthquake rocked the site, followed by fireballs that burst out of the unfinished foundations for the temple, burning some men, and sending the rest in flight. Some rushed into the church that had been built by Constantine’s mother, St. Helena, only to have its doors shut in front of them by “an unseen and invisible power,” according to one account.

Some accounts of the disaster read like a retelling of the plagues visited upon Egypt: the fountains by the old temple stopped working, a famine broke out, and two imperial officials who had desecrated some sacred vessels met with grisly deaths. One was eaten alive with worms. The other “burst asunder in the midst.”

All this culminated with the appearance of the cross—either in the sky or sprinkled like stars on the garments of the workers, according to early Church accounts.

But how credible are the accounts of the miraculous events that halted the construction? The above synopsis is taken from five Church writers, all of whom lived during the events they described or immediately afterwards when eyewitness testimony would still have been available. Though they vary in some details, all five agree on three essentials of the narrative—the earthquake, the fire from somewhere below the temple, and some miraculous appearance of a cross symbol.

The article goes on to quote a pagan Roman historian who also talks about the fire that erupted from the pillars, corroborating the accounts of the contemporary Christian historians.

Catholic Exchange Article

 

[Gripper]

It is great. I remember years go telling this to a protestant and he wouldn’t believe.