How Big Was Jerusalem in Jesus’s Time? A Population of About 20,000 to 40,000

Jerusalem in Jesus’s day was a small city, home to perhaps 20,000 to 40,000 people, as archaeologists reckon from its walls and houses. Inside the walls it covered about 230 acres (93 hectares), close to the size of today’s Old City. At Passover, pilgrims may have numbered more than twice the residents, though not the millions Josephus reported.

Small as it was, a whole people came up to it. Three times a year the Law called the men of Israel to the sanctuary, and at Passover Jerusalem spilled past its walls into the villages and onto the hills around it. Jesus lodged out there too, at Bethany and on the Mount of Olives, among the pilgrims. Scholars still argue over how many people lived inside the walls, but we know why the others came.

No census of the city survives, so every figure is an estimate, and the estimates differ in two ways: the method used and the decade described. Most archaeologists start from the area inside the walls and multiply it by the number of people an ancient town could hold. Magen Broshi of the Israel Museum, writing in Biblical Archaeology Review in 1978, allowed 160 to 200 people per acre, the density found in excavated towns and in old cities still lived in, such as Aleppo, Damascus and the Old City of Jerusalem in 1918. For Herod’s city, enclosed by the walls that still stood in Jesus’s day, he reckoned “almost 40,000”.

Two scholars writing in 2014 gave smaller figures for the larger city of the decades before AD 70. Ronny Reich of the University of Haifa, writing in the Revue Biblique, changed two of the inputs, the density and what counts as housing area, and his abstract gives about 30,000 for “the big Temple City” of the late Second Temple period, at 500 people per hectare. Hillel Geva of the Hebrew University argued the same year, in the journal Tel Aviv, that a density formula does not suit Jerusalem at all, because of “the city’s unique religious and political history”, and assessed the city one neighbourhood at a time instead. Biblical Archaeology Review, reporting his study, gives his figure for the city at its destruction in AD 70 as 20,000.

The figure many older books give comes from Joachim Jeremias’s Jerusalem in the Time of Jesus, built almost entirely on written sources: the Old and New Testaments, Josephus and the rabbinic writings. Siegfried Horn, reviewing the 1969 English edition, reports that in the earlier editions, whose first part appeared in 1923, Jeremias put the residents at about 55,000, counting those who lived in suburbs outside the walls, and that New Testament scholars used his estimates “for almost half a century”. In the 1969 edition he cut the figure to 25,000 to 30,000.

Scholar, year	Residents	City described	Method
Jeremias, earlier editions (from 1923)	about 55,000	Jesus’s time	Written sources
Jeremias, 1969	25,000–30,000	Jesus’s time	Written sources
Broshi, 1978	almost 40,000	Herod’s city, 37–4 BC	Area × density
Broshi, 1978	about 80,000	Just before AD 70	Area × density
Reich, 2014	about 30,000	Enlarged city, late Second Temple	Redefined housing area × 500 per hectare
Geva, 2014	20,000	Enlarged city, AD 70	Neighbourhood by neighbourhood

Between Herod’s death and AD 70, Jerusalem spread north into a new quarter called Bezetha, and Josephus explains that “as the city grew more populous, it gradually crept beyond its old limits”. Reich’s 30,000 and Geva’s 20,000 both describe that enlarged city, and for the same city Broshi, with his density formula, reckoned about 80,000. So most of the gap between these figures comes from method. Biblical Archaeology Review, surveying the field in 2016, found that for the city at its destruction “several put the number around 75,000” and “a number of others estimated between 25,000 and 75,000”, while one scholar’s estimate reached “nearly a quarter million”. Even the highest of these is small beside Rome, which in the century before Jesus may have had about a million people.

For Jesus’s own day, then, the two ends of the range come from different methods. The top is Broshi’s figure for Herod’s walls at what he calls “the maximum density in built-up areas”, and the bottom is Geva’s figure for the larger city of AD 70. The one estimate aimed at Jesus’s day itself, Jeremias’s 25,000 to 30,000 from 1969, falls between them.

The Law of Moses called the men of Israel to the sanctuary three times a year: “Three times in a year shall all thy males appear before the LORD thy God in the place which he shall choose; in the feast of unleavened bread, and in the feast of weeks, and in the feast of tabernacles” (Deuteronomy 16:16). In the Gospels we see the custom kept. Mary and Joseph “went to Jerusalem every year at the feast of the passover”, travelling home in a company large enough for them to lose their twelve-year-old son in it for a day (Luke 2:41–44). Before Jesus’s last Passover, “many went out of the country up to Jerusalem before the passover, to purify themselves” (John 11:55). There is more on what the feast itself meant in what Passover represents in the Bible.

We can only estimate how many came. While Jeremias still put the residents at 55,000, he allowed for “up to 125,000 pilgrims”, which by Horn’s summary of his figures would make about 180,000 people at the feasts. A crowd that size could not have slept inside walls that held no more than about 40,000 at Broshi’s density, and many pilgrims lodged in the villages and on the hills around the city. Jesus did the same: after his first day in the Temple “he went out unto Bethany with the twelve” (Mark 11:11), and in his last week “at night he went out, and abode in the mount that is called the mount of Olives” (Luke 21:37).

By Broshi’s measurement, the walls that stood in Jesus’s day enclosed about 230 acres, or 93 hectares. That is close to the size of the walled Old City that visitors walk through now, which Encyclopaedia Britannica gives as “roughly one square km”, a quadrilateral “about 3,000 feet (900 meters) long on each side”. The two outlines overlap without matching, for Jesus’s city ran further south, over the City of David and Mount Zion, which lie outside the Ottoman walls built in 1538–40.

Josephus, writing in the 70s AD about the city as it stood before its fall, describes it as “built upon two hills”: a higher one carrying the Upper City and a lower one carrying the Lower City, with a valley between them running down to the spring of Siloam (Jewish War 5.4.1). Herod’s Temple platform stood on the eastern side, and Broshi, who measures it at 36 acres, about a sixth of the city, leaves it out of his count of homes because nobody lived on it.

Two walls enclosed the city Jesus knew. The First Wall, which Josephus calls the old wall, began at the tower of Hippicus, where the Citadel stands today beside the Jaffa Gate, and ran around the southern city to the Temple. The Second Wall took in a northern quarter as far as the Antonia fortress. Whether Herod or one of the Hasmonean kings before him built it is uncertain, and the Israel Antiquities Authority notes that most of its route “is only presumed”. The Third Wall came after Jesus: Herod Agrippa I began it during his reign, from AD 41 to 44, to protect the new northern quarter, but stopped for fear of the emperor Claudius, and the defenders finished it in haste on the eve of the Roman siege. John places the crucifixion just outside: “the place where Jesus was crucified was nigh to the city” (John 19:20). How long that last walk was is the subject of how far Jesus carried his cross.

The city Jesus walked through was the one Herod the Great had built up in his reign, from 37 to 4 BC. In the words of the Israel Antiquities Authority, he “built palaces, strongholds, mansions and water systems”, “reinforced the Temple Mount, renewed the Temple and built the Antonia fortress”. The work outlived him: “Forty and six years was this temple in building”, Jesus’s hearers told him (John 2:20), and the Authority notes that the building projects went on until the city’s destruction in AD 70. One of the disciples was as impressed as any visitor: “Master, see what manner of stones and what buildings are here!” (Mark 13:1). Parts of the Temple platform’s supporting walls still stand on three sides, the Western Wall among them.

The Gospels name places a pilgrim could find. Near the sheep market was “a pool, which is called in the Hebrew tongue Bethesda, having five porches” (John 5:2). Towards the south of the city lay “the pool of Siloam”, where the man born blind washed and came back seeing (John 9:7). On the night of his arrest, Jesus “went forth with his disciples over the brook Cedron, where was a garden” (John 18:1), across the Kidron valley that ran below the eastern wall. What happened in the Temple courts that week is told in Jesus cleansing the Temple.

Josephus describes Jerusalem’s walls in detail, and the Israel Antiquities Authority calls that description “an important source”, but his crowd figures are another matter. In Jewish War 6.9.3, in William Whiston’s translation, he says that Cestius Gallus, the Roman governor of Syria, wanted to show Nero “the power of the city” and asked the high priests to count the Passover lambs. They found “two hundred and fifty-six thousand five hundred”, and at “no more than ten that feast together” Josephus makes “two millions seven hundred thousand and two hundred persons”. In another passage he says that “not fewer in number than three millions” crowded round Cestius at the feast (Jewish War 2.14.3), and he puts the dead of the siege of AD 70 at 1,100,000. The Roman historian Tacitus heard that “the total number of the besieged of every age and both sexes was six hundred thousand”.

The first thing that counts against these numbers is space. Even the enlarged city of the AD 60s covered only about 450 acres inside the Third Wall, and at 200 people to the acre, the most Broshi allows an ancient city, it had room for fewer than 90,000. That area follows the line for the Third Wall proposed by the 19th-century American scholar Edward Robinson, about 600 feet north of the Old City’s present northern wall; Broshi adopts it but calls the wall’s line “a matter of hot dispute”. The other line once proposed, the present northern wall itself, would make the city smaller still. Broshi also reckoned, from the area of its towns and separately from the grain its land could grow, that the population of the whole country west of the Jordan “did not exceed a million persons” at any time in antiquity. Jerusalem also drew Jews from abroad, “devout men, out of every nation under heaven” (Acts 2:5), but 2.7 million would still be close to three times that ceiling.

Another is the way ancient writers used numbers. Broshi calls Josephus “usually quite exact with figures” but “unrealistic when it comes to population figures”: he gives Galilee 204 villages, the smallest with 15,000 inhabitants, “an obvious impossibility”. Ancient population figures, Broshi wrote, are “almost invariably untrustworthy” and “often grossly exaggerated”. A rabbinic text, the Tosefta, has a count of its own, in which King Agrippa had the priests set aside part of every Passover lamb and counted 1,200,000, twice the “six hundred thousand on foot that were men” who left Egypt (Exodus 12:37). The Jewish Encyclopedia, published between 1901 and 1906, judged that “these figures are evidently exaggerated, and are based on the desire to double the 600,000 of the Exodus”. Jeremias, in Horn’s summary, found the siege figures of Josephus and Tacitus “so fantastic that they cannot be regarded as historically useful”.

The last, and the weakest, is Josephus’s own arithmetic. In Whiston’s translation, 256,500 lambs at ten people each make 2,565,000, not 2,700,200; in the Greek text, 255,600 lambs make 2,556,000, not 2,700,000. Josephus also says that “many of us are twenty in a company”, so ten to a lamb was a low reckoning, and the mismatch matters less than the limits of space.

By Magen Broshi’s reckoning, the whole land west of the Jordan, which takes in Judea, Samaria and Galilee, held fewer than a million people in Jesus’s day. In 1973 A. Byatt, writing in the Palestine Exploration Quarterly, gathered 18 published estimates for the land in the first century AD; they ran from 6,000,000 down to under a million. Broshi read that spread as a sign of “serious faults in both the available data and in the methods of reckoning”. His own two reckonings, published in 1979, put the whole country west of the Jordan at no more than a million people even at its peak, which he placed in the late Byzantine period around AD 600.

Modern Jerusalem covers 126 square kilometres (49 square miles), roughly 135 times the walled city of Jesus’s day. Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics estimated its population at 1.063 million in May 2026, more than 25 times Broshi’s figure for Herod’s city. The Old City at its centre, roughly one square kilometre, is the walled core from which the rest has grown; the first neighbourhoods outside its walls were built from the 1860s onward. That small core is the city the Law sent Israel up to three times a year, and the one the psalmist was glad to hear named: “I was glad when they said unto me, Let us go into the house of the LORD” (Psalm 122:1, KJV).

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