How big was Jerusalem?

No ancient source measured Jerusalem’s population, what exists are modern estimates and ancient claims, and they must be kept apart. The modern estimates of the pre-70 AD resident city span a factor of four, differing mainly in method: John Wilkinson ~70,400 (from water-supply capacity, 1974) · Magen Broshi ~80,000 (walled area × density, 1978) · Lee Levine 60,000–70,000 (2002) · Hillel Geva no more than ~20,000 (counting only excavated dwellings, his “minimalist view,” 2014). At the festivals the city swelled: Josephus claims 2,700,200 Passover participants, his number, written for a Roman audience, and most historians doubt it; Joachim Jeremias reckoned from the Temple courts’ capacity to roughly 125,000 pilgrims, and common modern treatments land in the low-to-mid hundreds of thousands. On any of these figures the picture is the same: at Passover the city multiplied overnight, with pilgrims in tents and borrowed rooms on every hillside, the world of the borrowed upper room (Mark 14:13–15).