How Many People Were in Jerusalem When Jesus Was Crucified?

There are conflicting data. We offer the following for your consideration:

In his book The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah, Alfred Edersheim estimates that the population of Jerusalem in the New Testament era was approximately 250,000. He stated that the population swelled enormously during feast times (1947, 116).

On the other hand, noted scholar Joachim Jeremias, in his book Jerusalem in the Time of Jesus, stated that Jerusalem’s normal population was about 55,000 and that some 125,000 additional people visited the city at Passover (79-83).

His estimates were based on the area available in the temple for offering sacrifices. Therefore, his figure for the city’s crowds at Passover would be about one hundred eighty thousand people.

In a later estimate, however, Jeremias suggested that the normal population of Jerusalem was only twenty-five to thirty thousand at the upper limit (1966, 84). This revision, of course, reduces the total from one hundred eighty thousand to about one hundred fifty-five thousand at Passover.

The Jewish writer Flavius Josephus reported that the city’s population at Passover time (ca. A.D. 65) was three million souls (Wars of the Jews 2.14.3). But many think Josephus inflated figures on occasion.