To Caesar. Love, Herod.

Directly opposite the harbor entrance, wrote the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, upon a high platform, rose the temple of Caesar, remarkable both for its beauty and for its great size. King Herod the Great, infamous in the New Testament for ordering the slaughter of infants, built the monumental temple and other grandiosities in the city of Caesarea, Israel, as a sign of his fidelity to Rome--but the temple had been lost until now. While excavating the foundations of a large sixth- century church in Caesarea, Kenneth Holum of the University of Maryland and his team turned up large stones that seemed to belong to another building. (After the Roman Empire converted to Christianity, churches were often built on the sites of temples.) This past year, Holum followed up on a hunch that the stones were part of the southern foundations of Herod’s temple. Guessing that the church was built with ...