How Many People Were in Jerusalem When Jesus Was Crucified?

Is there any information about how many people there would have been in Jerusalem at the time of the Passover when Christ 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 says that the normal population of Jerusalem in the New Testament era was in the neighborhood of two hundred to two hundred fifty thousand. 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, said that Jerusalem’s normal population was about fifty-five thousand, and that some one hundred twenty-five thousand additional people visited the city at Passover time (79-83).

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

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 time.

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