John 2:20. The Jews therefore said, Forty and six years was this temple in building, and wilt thou raise it up in three days? They answer only by another question, not an inquiry, but really an indignant and scornful rejection of His words. It was at the close of the year 20 B.C. or the beginning of 19 B.C. that Herod the Great began the rebuilding of the temple. The temple itself was completed in eighteen months; the extensive buildings round it required eight years more. So many additions, however, proved necessary before the work could be regarded as finished, that the final completion is assigned by Josephus to the year 50 A. D., seventy years after the commencement of the undertaking, and but twenty years before Jerusalem was destroyed. The ‘forty and six years' bring us to the year 28 A.D. It is perhaps strange that the Jews should associate the long term of years with the rebuilding of the sanctuary and not the temple as a whole; it is, however, very likely that, at all events, the ornamentation of this building might still be incomplete. Moreover, in their indignant rejoinder to the saying of Jesus, they not unnaturally take up the very term which He had used, even though it applied in strictness only to the most sacred portion of the structure.

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Old Testament