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We have two major problems here. First, Roman and Christian literary sources agree with Jesus that not one stone of the Temple was standing on another. How can we reconcile this with the fact that the walls of the alleged Temple Mount still have more than 10,000 stones standing upon another? Secondly, Josephus, an eyewitness, says that that the only major building that the Romans spared in 66-70 was their own imperial headquarter, the Roman fort called Fort Antonia, built by Herod the Great and named after his patron Mark Anthony. Where is this fort? Archaeologists have been digging for it in vain, and can’t even agree where it was located. Here is what Israeli archaeologist Shlomit Weksler-Bdolah has to say:

Surprisingly, despite the long duration of military presence in Jerusalem, … no archaeological remains have been attributed with certainty to the military camp and its site has not yet been identified. … One cannot underestimate the difficulty caused by the absence of irrefutable evidence of the Roman army camp in Jerusalem. … At this stage, there is no acceptable solution to the problem of the “lack of remains”.

Fort Antonia housed a legion, that would number at least 5000 men and about 5000 support personnel. Josephus tells us it was like a city in size, dominating the Jewish city. It was so large that troops could perform military maneuvers within the enclosure, in mock war training exercises. We know that Fort Antonia was not destroyed in 70 because it continued to house the Roman Legion X Fretensis until 289 AD, when the Legion was transferred to Ailat on the Red Sea.

So while the sources tell us that the Temple was demolished down to the bedrock and the Roman fort remained in use for 200 years, we are nevertheless asked to believe that the opposite happened: the huge fortified Roman fort disappeared entirely, while the Temple compound is still perfectly recognizable, with its four walls almost intact.

By some additional miracle, that alleged Temple compound, the Haram esh-Sharif on which now stands the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque, fits the standard design and size of the Roman forts scattered throughout the empire, and built after the pattern of the Praetorian Camp in the northeastern part of Rome.

There is only one way to make sense of this absurd situation: the Roman fort has been mistaken for the Temple Mount. As Professor George W. Buchanan put it in a 2011 article for the Washington Report for Middle East Affairs: “While it has not been widely published, it assuredly has been known for more than 40 years that the 45-acre, well-fortified place that has been mistakenly called the ‘Temple Mount’ was really the Roman fortress — the Antonia — that Herod built.”