XVII. SOLOMON’S PORCH AND THE BEAUTIFUL GATE

Acts 3:1, 2.—“Now Peter and John went up together into the temple at the hour of prayer, being the ninth hour. And a certain man lame from his mother’s womb was carried, whom they laid daily at the gate of the temple which is called Beautiful, to ask alms of them that entered into the temple.”

Peter recovers the cripple. The fame of his miraculous cure is instantly spread abroad.

“And as the lame man which was healed held Peter and John, all the people ran together unto them in the porch that is called Solomon’s, greatly wondering.”—ver. 11.

There is a propriety in the localities of this miracle which is favourable to a belief in its truth.

Josephus speaks of a great outer gate (that of the Porch), “opening into the court of the women on the East, and opposite to the gate of the temple, in size surpassing the others, being fifty cubits high and forty wide; and more finished in its decorations, by reason of the thick plates of silver and gold which were upon it.”—(Bell. Jud. v. 5. § 3.)

But in another passage of the same author we read as follows:—“They persuaded the king (Agrippa) to restore the Eastern Porch. This was a porch of the outer temple, situated upon the edge of a deep abyss, resting upon a wall four hundred cubits high, constructed of quadrangular stones, quite white, each stone twenty cubits by six, the work of King Solomon, the original builder of the temple.” (Antiq. xx. 8. § 7.) Thus it appears that a gate, more highly ornamented than the rest, looked to the East; that a porch, of which Solomon was the founder, looked also to the East; that both, therefore, were on the same side of the temple, and accordingly that it was very natural for the people, hearing that a cripple who usually lay at the Beautiful Gate, and who had been cured as he lay there,—it was very natural for them to run to Solomon’s Porch, to satisfy themselves of the truth of the report [See Hug, Vol. i. p. 19.]