James Turner Barclay (born May 22, 1807 in King William County, Virginia, † October 20, 1874 in Wheeler, Alabama)[1] was an American missionary and explorer of Ottoman Palestine.

[2] In 1809, James' father, Robert Barclay, drowned in the Rappahannock River, and the widow married John Harris, a wealthy cotton merchant and owner of large estates in Albemarle County.

He enabled his stepson James Turner Barclay to study medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, which he completed in 1828 with a PhD.

The couple settled in Charlottesville, where James Turner Barclay ran a pharmacy and devoted himself to drug development.

[2] In 1861, at the eve of the US Civil War, he published a series of articles for the Disciples' journal, The Millennial Harbinger, entitled "The Welfare of the World Bound Up with the Destiny of Israel," in which he began to encourage the immigration of Jews to the Holy Land.

In 1906, Barclay's remains were exhumed and interred at Campbell Cemetery in Bethany, Brooke County, West Virginia.

[14] During the time in which he had access to the Haram, Barclay continues, he discovered part of a closed gate system in the Buraq mosque in the direct vicinity of this ancient lintel; but the guards of the holy place had been so restless about his presence there that it seemed advisable to him to make a hasty sketch and never come back.

[15] Indeed, in ancient times, one could ascend through a gallery with stairs from the Barclay Gate to the height of the Herodian temple platform.

[17] Barclay also explored a subterranean passageway leading from the Virgin's Fount (now called Gihon Spring), which channel led to a point within a short distance from the Mugrabin Gate, where it turned abruptly to the west, and where he could proceed no further because of it being blocked by stones and fallen debris.

Barclay was avant-garde in tracing the remains of a Roman-era built aqueduct, which led from Artas (in southwestern Judea) to the Temple Mount, in Jerusalem.