HistoricalChristian.Faith

Does the temple "still standing" in Revelation 11 require a pre-70 date?

Type: supporting argument (off-timeline) · Assessment: contested — the plain-sense reading of Revelation 11:1–2, 8 as historical Jerusalem is real and not fringe, and the passage does carry a pre-70 flavour; but the inference from it to a pre-70 composition of the whole book has to clear two independent, mainstream defeaters — the symbolic reading of the temple (dominant given Revelation's own use of naós and 21:22) and the source-critical reading (which grants the pre-70 situation yet assigns it to an incorporated oracle, not the finished work). Strong given a literal reading plus compositional unity, it evaporates under either alternative — a genuinely disputed inference, not a decisive one. · advanced by Kenneth Gentry; contested by Beale, Aune, and Yarbro Collins

Related arguments: the internal case for the early date — see also Do the "seven kings" of Revelation 17:9–11 date the book to Nero's reign? and Does 666 = "Nero Caesar" (Revelation 13:18) date Revelation to Nero's reign?

The claim

"And there was given me a reed like unto a rod: and the angel stood, saying, Rise, and measure the temple of God, and the altar, and them that worship therein. But the court which is without the temple leave out, and measure it not; for it is given unto the Gentiles: and the holy city shall they tread under foot forty and two months."

— Revelation 11:1–2 (KJV); and 11:8, which calls the city "the great city, which spiritually is called Sodom and Egypt, where also our Lord was crucified."¹ Early-date advocates argue this depicts a functioning Jerusalem temple under threat but not yet destroyed — John is told to measure the sanctuary and the altar and its worshippers, while the outer court is "given unto the Gentiles" who will "tread under foot" the holy city for forty-two months. Verse 8 identifies that city, unmistakably, as the historical Jerusalem "where also our Lord was crucified." If John wrote c. AD 95, so the argument runs, a vision of measuring a temple that had lain in ruins for twenty-five years would be, in Kenneth Gentry's phrase, "terribly anachronous." Hence John must be writing before the temple fell in AD 70.

Who advances it

The standing temple is the leading internal argument of the modern early-date case. Kenneth Gentry makes it central in Before Jerusalem Fell, pressing three supports: that "the holy city" is a fixed biblical name for Jerusalem (Isaiah 48:2; Matthew 4:5); that Revelation 11:2's "tread under foot… forty and two months" echoes Jesus' own prophecy that "Jerusalem shall be trodden down of the Gentiles" (Luke 21:24); and that the forty-two months answer to the span of the Jewish War itself, from spring AD 67 to the temple's burning in August AD 70. The same argument runs through Moses Stuart in the nineteenth century and the whole preterist line, for whom a pre-70 date lets Revelation's "great tribulation" be the Roman war and the destruction of Jerusalem.²

The pivot: a literal temple, or a symbolic one?

The argument stands or falls on whether the temple of Revelation 11 is a building of stone. Here the majority reading of Revelation's imagery cuts hard against it. G. K. Beale observes that the Greek word for the sanctuary, naós, is used everywhere else in Revelation — without exception — for the heavenly temple (7:15; 11:19; 14:15, 17; 15:5–8; 16:1, 17) or the eschatological one (3:12; 21:22), never for the Herodian building; and the only other occurrence of the exact phrase "temple of God" is 11:19, the heavenly sanctuary opened just eighteen verses later. On this reading the "temple," "altar," and "them that worship therein" symbolize the people of God — a metaphor the New Testament uses constantly (1 Corinthians 3:16–17; 2 Corinthians 6:16; Ephesians 2:19–22; 1 Peter 2:5; Revelation 3:12) — and the measuring is God's sealing of them for spiritual preservation, drawn from Ezekiel 40–48, where an angel measures a temple in vision without any implication that it stands. Sam Storms and much of the modern commentary tradition read all of 11:1–13 this way, of the Church in the present age. And the book closes by denying a temple altogether: of the New Jerusalem John "saw no temple therein: for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the temple of it" (21:22).³

Two further details blunt the literal-historical read. The forty-two months is not a war calendar but a stock apocalyptic figure — the "time, times, and half a time" of Daniel 7:25 and 12:7 — and Revelation itself deploys it symbolically three more times in the surrounding chapters: the two witnesses prophesy 1,260 days (11:3), the woman is nourished 1,260 days (12:6), and the beast is given authority forty-two months (13:5). A number the book uses elsewhere for the symbolic period of trial is a slender peg on which to hang the exact duration of the Jewish War. And measuring worshippers "with a rod" is, on its face, an act that fits people only figuratively — part of why the symbolic reading arose in the first place.⁴

The source-critical detour — a defeater that grants the standing temple

The sharpest objection is not that the passage is symbolic but that, even read literally, it dates the wrong thing. Since Julius Wellhausen it has been widely held that Revelation 11:1–2 is a fragment of a pre-70 Jewish (Zealot) oracle — a prophecy uttered as Jerusalem's doom drew near, that the Romans would take the outer court and the city but not the inner sanctuary — later taken up and reworked into the finished Apocalypse. David Aune, a leading late-date commentator, adopts this and lists the marks of it: the passage is introduced abruptly, with none of Revelation's usual "I saw / I heard" formulae and an unspecified speaker; the command to measure is never carried out; the Jerusalem temple is mentioned nowhere else in the book and is otherwise no concern of the author; and, tellingly, nothing is said of the temple's destruction — only that the outer court and city are overrun. On this account the "standing temple" is inherited material whose pre-70 outlook says nothing about when the whole book was composed. J. A. T. Robinson grants that the oracle "must bespeak a pre-70 situation"; Adela Yarbro Collins agrees the verse is "much too concrete and historical" to be flattened into pure symbol — and both are conceding exactly the point that dissolves the argument, because a source can be pre-70 while the composition that quarries it is not.⁵

Adversarial assessment

What holds. The early-date camp is right that Revelation 11 is not thin air. Read at surface level, verses 1–2 and 8 describe a temple with a functioning altar and worshippers, an outer court trampled by the nations, and a "holy city" pinned to history as the place "where also our Lord was crucified" — and this is a genuinely awkward thing for a writer twenty-five years after that temple's end to depict without a word of its fall. The literal-Jerusalem reading of this passage is not a preterist eccentricity: even Yarbro Collins, a late-dater, resists reading it as bare symbol, and the source critics grant it a pre-70 provenance. So far the argument has real weight, and it is fair to say the raw material of Revelation 11 leans toward a pre-70 horizon.

What is overstated. The trouble is entirely in the leap from that horizon to the date of the book. The inference needs two things at once, and each is contested by the mainstream: (1) that the temple is literal — against Revelation's own uniform use of naós for the heavenly sanctuary, the symbolic 1,260-day/42-month reckoning running through chapters 11–13, and the "no temple" of 21:22; and (2) that a literal, pre-70 passage dates the whole composition — against the source-critical reading, on which an old oracle sits inside a later book. The decisive fact is that a committed late-date scholar (Aune) can affirm the pre-70 flavour of 11:1–2 and still date Revelation to c. AD 95, because the two are simply different questions. Gentry's "terribly anachronous" therefore proves less than it claims: it is telling against a unitary, literal Revelation, which is precisely the reading in dispute, and question-begging against a book its own imagery invites us to read symbolically. The argument does not fail — the plain sense is a real datum — but it cannot bear the weight of settling the date on its own.

Assessment

Contested. As an inference from Revelation 11 to a pre-70 date for the book, this is strong on one set of premises and empty on another, with no knockdown either way. Grant that the temple is the literal Herodian building and that Revelation is a seamless composition, and the early date follows almost of itself — John could hardly stage a vision of measuring a temple that no longer existed. Grant instead the dominant symbolic reading (the temple as the people of God, the 42 months as the stock apocalyptic period, the book's own "no temple" in the end), or the widely held source-critical reading (a genuine pre-70 oracle folded into a later book), and the passage tells us nothing about the date of composition at all. Because the argument's force depends on exactly the questions — literal versus symbolic, unity versus redaction — that the wider Revelation debate has not resolved, it is best rated a real but non-decisive early-date consideration. It rightly keeps the early date in play; it does not settle it. (This rates the inference from Revelation 11 to a pre-70 composition, not the preterist reading of Revelation as a whole.)

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