Paul Calvert spoke with Dudi Mevorach from the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, about the history of the model of Jerusalem in the late Second Temple period, and how it's changed over the years in response to archaeological excavations.

These two phenomenons are very non-Jewish activities. They are very Roman Pagan ones, but this is also a feature of Jerusalem of the first century, this combination between a very Jewish city to the Hellenistic Roman culture that comes in from the outside.

Paul: So as archaeology improves things, you change the model as well.

Dudi: Yes, but we do it very moderately and very carefully.

We are looking at the Temple of the Second Temple period, but in fact the hill we standing on is actually a sort of a concentration of Temples of sorts, if you may use that expression.

If we lift up our eyes from the model for a moment, we see the Israeli Parliament, the Knesset, architectonically it is built like a Greek shrine. Looking further to the east you can see the Dome of the Shrine of the Book, another sort of temple. If we look to the west we see the National Library in the Hebrew University, a different kind of temple for knowledge. If we turn to the south you see the Museum itself, which is built like a temple on the hill and is a temple for culture, so it's a cluster of temples concentrated around, and as I said divine intervention got this ancient temple to join all these modern temples.

We are standing west of the city now and we are looking towards the walls and the gates, the gate that you see right here is more or less the Jaffa Gate of today. If you look further north you see that the wall makes sort of a curve and there is another little gate next to it. On its side there is sort of a quarry, this is the place of Golgotha and it is intentionally placed outside of the walls as we know it was. This is the place where the Holy Sepulchre is built on top of the assumed place of the crucifixion, and the tomb of Jesus. If you walk into the Old City of today through the Jaffa Gate and you go down David's Street, then take a left, it would lead you exactly to that place to the Holy Sepulchre of today. So people wondering where the Holy Sepulchre is within the city of the Second Temple, how did it relate to the Temple Mount, or how did it relate to the Antonia where Jesus was arrested and to the Flagellation place next to it, it gives you a very good orientation to where these things happened and how close they are to each other.