Mark Chapter 13 verse 1 Holy Bible

Pulpit Commentary

Pulpit CommentaryVerse 1. - And as he went forth out of the temple, one of his disciples saith unto him Master, behold, what manner, of stones and what manner of buildings! This would be in the evening. According to St. Luke (Luke 21:37), our Lord, during the early part of this week, passed his nights upon the Mount of Olives, taking his food at Bethany with Martha and Mary, and spending his days in the temple at Jerusalem, teaching the people. It is most probable that he left the temple by the golden gate on the east, from whence the view of the temple would be particularly striking. We learn from St. Matthew (24.) that our Lord had just been predicting the fall of Jerusalem. It was, therefore, natural for the disciples to call his attention at that moment to the grandeur and beauty of the building and its surroundings. The temple at Jerusalem was one of the wonders of the world. Josephus says that it wanted nothing that the eye and the mind could admire. It shone with a fiery splendor; so that when the eye gazed upon it, it turned away as from the rays of the sun. The size of the foundation-stones was enormous. Josephus speaks of some of the stones as forty-five cubits in length, five in height, and six in breadth. One of the foundation-stones, measured in recent times, proved to be nearly twenty-four feet in length, by four feet in depth. But all this magnificence had no effect upon our Lord, who only repeated the sentence of its downfall

Ellicott's Commentary

Ellicott's Commentary for English ReadersXIII.(1) One of his disciples.--Note St. Mark's vivid way of giving the very words of the disciple, instead of saying with St. Matthew that they "came to show" the buildings of the Temple.Here, again, the juxtaposition of narratives in St. Mark gives them a special point. The "stones" of Herod's Temple (for it was to him chiefly that it owed its magnificence) were of sculptured marble. The "buildings," or structures, included columns, chambers, porticos that were, as St. Luke tells us (Luke 21:5), the votive offerings of the faithful. The disciples gazed on these with the natural admiration of Galilean peasants. In spite of the lesson they had just received--a lesson meant, it may be, to correct the tendency which our Lord discerned--they were still measuring things by their quantity and size. They admired the "goodly stones" more than the "widow's mite." They were now to be taught that, while the one should be spoken of throughout the whole world, the other should be destroyed, so that not a vestige should remain. We cannot say who spoke the words, but it is at least probable that it came from one of the four who are named in Mark 13:3.