Few New Yorkers who read Simon Goldhill’s new book, “The Temple of Jerusalem,” (Harvard University Press, 208 pages, $19.95) will fail to be impressed by the parallel between that mythic building and our own World Trade Center. Until the Twin Towers came down almost four years ago, few of us could have imagined the intensity of that desire to resurrect that followed the temple’s destruction in 70 C.E. by the Roman armies under Titus.

Perhaps more than any other building in human history, the Temple of Jerusalem and the site it once occupied have become charged with political and theological consequence. Nothing of the temple now exists. (The Wailing Wall was never part of the structure, only of the retaining wall at the base of the hill on which it was perched.) This absence has inspired poets, architects, and archaeologists to exert their imaginations in the most fanciful reconstructions and the most elaborate dreams.

Once the temple occupied the spot on which we now find the Dome of the Rock, itself a beautiful thing and one of the sacred sites in Islam, built at the exact spot where Muhammad is thought to have ascended to heaven on a golden ladder. The site of the Dome of the Rock, and the mythology associated with it, attest to the overwhelming and enduring power of the temple, perched as it is at the highest and most central point of Jerusalem, the center of the world.

Mr. Goldhill’s book recounts the tumultuous history of the temple of Jerusalem. Solomon built the first around 1,000 B.C.E.; it was destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar in 586 B.C.E. A smaller and far less illustrious temple erected by Zerubbabel after the Jews returned from the Babylonian captivity in 536 B.C.E. Finally, in 43 B.C.E., Herod the Great built the one that Titus destroyed.

Even more interesting than Mr. Goldhill’s discussion of the meager archaeological evidence is his treatment of the long and convoluted cultural afterlife of the temple, the transformation of the place by the Arab conquerors, and the role it played in the lives of the Knights Templar, who lived there for a time after the first crusade.

It lives on as well in St. Paul’s Epistles, where he speaks of the body as a temple. This analogy between the bodies of Christians and the temple itself, in a way, diminishes the importance of the latter. It is no longer the primary place for worship: rather, that prestige has been decentralized, compartmentalized into the bodies of the faithful.

Also interesting are the Masons, so called because they claimed descent from the builders of Solomon’s Temple. As an interesting detail, Mr. Goldhill describes how, when most later artists, like Raphael, depicted the temple, they were really depicting the Dome on the Rock, which had replaced it.

Mr. Goldhill’s book is part of a new publishing venture, called “The Wonders of the World,” published by Harvard and intended to provide a brief account for laymen of the most notable and inspirational buildings in the world. Among these are titles on the Alhambra and the Parthenon, as well as one of their newest titles, “Westminster Abbey,” by Richard Jenkyns (224 pages, $19.95).

Westminster Abbey’s significance is as great for the English as the Temple of Jerusalem is for the world. Indeed, for Americans, its importance is only slightly less than it is for the English. It is not only the place where the kings and queens of England are crowned and interred. It contains over 4,000 tombs and memorials, commemorating some of the noblest minds of the British Isles. Among these are Chaucer and Ben Jonson, Tennyson, Macaulay, Newton, and Darwin.

Like so many monuments of the Medieval mind, the abbey is a composite structure. Going back to the earliest days of English history, it was first built up by William the Confessor in the mid-11th century and attained its present form only during the 17th, with the inclusion of Hawksmoor’s two towers in the front. In between it acquired a French-style nave – itself a product of several building campaigns – as well as the chapel of Henry VII, a dazzling triumph of the perpendicular style, from the end of the 15th century.

As beautiful as many parts of the building are, however, it cannot match the beauty of the Temple of Jerusalem, even though we have no real sense of how that earlier building looked. The temple, through its very immateriality, can become the amalgam of everything each of us finds most splendid in the architecture of his dreams. No actual building can ever match that. Doubtless it is for that very reason the World Trade Center towers seem so much more beautiful to us now that they are gone than they ever did while they were still standing.