Matthew 24:1

ἐπορεύετο. placed after ἀπὸ τοῦ ἱεροῦ. The change is certain and much improves the sense.

1. ἐπορεύετο. For the reading see critical notes. He was going on his way across the Valley of Kidron, when his disciples came to Him and stopped Him, and prayed Him to look at the buildings of the Temple where full in view it rose with its colonnades of dazzling white marble, surmounted with golden roof and pinnacles, and founded on a substructure of huge stones. It was in the freshness of recent building, ‘white from the mason’s hand,’ still indeed incomplete, but seeming by its very beauty and solidity to protest against the words of doom just spoken.

Josephus (B. J. Matthew 24:2) gives a full description of the Temple which is well worth reading in the original. He speaks of the brilliant effect of ‘the golden plates of great weight which at the first rising of the sun reflected back a very fiery splendour, causing the spectator to turn away his eyes as he would have done at the sun’s own rays. At a distance the whole Temple looked like a mount of snow fretted with golden pinnacles.’

τὰς οἰκοδομὰς τοῦ ἱεροῦ. ‘The various parts of the Temple-building.’ οἰκοδομή, according to Phrynichus, non-Attic, either (1) ‘a building’ for the more usual and classical οἰκοδόμημα, a form not found in N.T., or (2) ‘act of building,’ for which the classical and older forms οἰκοδομία (or οἰκοδομιά) and οἰκοδόμησις do not occur in the N.T., or (3) ‘edification.’ This beautiful figure for the orderly and continuous growth of religious life in individuals and in a society appears to be a purely Christian thought; it is a frequent one with St Paul, ἄρα οὖν τὰ τῆς εἰρήνης διώκωμεν καὶ τὰ τῆς οἰκοδομῆς τῆς εἰς�, Romans 14:19; εἰς οἰκοδομὴν καὶ οὐκ εἰς καθαίρεσιν ὑμῶν, 2 Corinthians 10:8. If the image did not actually spring from the Temple, it gained force and frequency from the building, the stately growth of which must have been an ever prominent sight and thought with the existing generation of Jews; the perfect joining of the stones (πᾶσα οἰκοδομὴ συναρμολογουμένη),—which gave the appearance of one compact mass of rock,—and the exceeding beauty of the whole, suggested an inspiring figure for the progress and unity of the Church.