outhouse

I didnt say that all jews made the journey from the far end of the levant.


so stop with the BLATANT misinformation.

All jews were required to show, but most didnt need the requirement they wanted to come. It was their religion and this was a important event for them.

And it didnt matter where they lived if they were jewish. if you cant see how "the levant" is a generalization, no wonder you cannot comprehend the knoweldge to understand the poplulation of the temple during passover.


This IS a jewish holiday in which all jews loved and rejoiced at the thought of having a shared meal with god in his house while celibrating the passover traditions.


wake up dude, 37 acres that packed the temple to overflowing and they called it the "Passover of density"

37 acres of wall to wall people ata given rate of even 20,000 people an acre, hell even 10,000 people an acre would do.

and thats not counting the rest of the city within the walls, jews were not allowed to eat their sacrifice outside the city unless they were X amount of distance away on their journey

Duke Leto

FINE. Give us a rough breakdown of how many were native to Jerusalem and how many came from outside, broken down by province. You know, a straight answer we can come back to for reference?

You seem to have missed the point of the post on distances. (Assuming you read it.) Galilee is too damned far to travel! We're talking half a month to a month EVERY year spent on this pilgrimage. Every 5 miles further from Jerusalem you get adds another day to the round trip travel time. The Levant may have had more Jews than Judea alone but the Levant is a VERY big place and the distances you need to travel basically negates any added population you can draw in to the temple from it.

So forget about "All the Levant". Unless all your "oppressed" Jews owned fast horses and had the money to buy feed for them at every post stop on the road.

Iskander

The magic number of 28 legions is available to mere mortals from the internet and it is only one of many numbers mentioned by every tom, dick and harry.
http://www.preteristarchive.com/Rome...ary/index.html


These 28 legions were the elite of the roman armed forces. Auxiliary troops serving in the roman army numbered about 125000 making a total of 275000 infantry.


And:

Tacitus, Annals IV 5

In addition the Roman forces counted 30000 naval personnel and siege specialist troops and cavalry regiments.

In addition the Roman state, like the USA today, could count on military support from its client states; Titus commanded troops provided by King Agrippa, king Antiochus and the Arabs as well as volunteers serving for the occasion in the expectation of booty.

outhouse

I havnt research it.

I dont know.



your the one trying to tear down scholars, why dont you answer your own question?

Boloney

the roman roads were amazing, ill have you go and research how far Paul was said to have traveled.

15 miles is porbably more accurate.


and these would be the places not all the population would go. Its also why the jewish population as a whole did not show up ever passover.

it doesnt mean some didnt come.


and those that were late were able to stay in town and have a second passover a month later



No we dont forget, unless you know for a fact NO jew would travel if he lived X amount of distance away from the temple.

you act like these peasant jews had stable life and cultures that had roots. Some may have but many were just fine taking trips like nomads.


again im not claiming all the jews came, we kow they didnt. but im not stupid enough to claim I know what distance they would not come to the most important jewish required festival of the year ignoring all other evidence showing the temple packed them in to capacity.

thats 37 acres of capacity of which 10,000 a acre gives me my number, and we have showed that in certain conditions 30,000 a acre is possible. and that is only the temple size, NOT the walled city they all were allowed in for the meal.

Duke Leto

Fine, so how many soldiers total DID Titus have with him including his 4 legions at Jerusalem?

And before you go quoting how 300,000 MUST be the minimum number of persons in the city because Tacitus said 600,000, remember Tacitus also said that Tiberius left Caligula a treasury full of 5 billion sestercii and that Caligula spent it all in less than two years. The wage of a Roman legionary was a little less than 1000 sestercii a year. If we indulge in a flight of lunacy for a moment and imagine soldiers worked for one tenth what the average Roman worker was paid, Caligula would have had to be employing half the population of Rome building and producing things full time, over and above what they would normally have been building and producing. (Put another way, he'd have to have increased employment throughout the Empire by 5 million if you go by the more reasonable 1000 sestercii wage. With an Empire of 60 million, that would be fiscal stimulus moving unemployment from 30%->0% in 18 months. (Actually much more because of the multiplier effect.)) If there wasn't a major depression to start with inflation would have gotten out of control pretty fast and Suetonius doesn't mention either of these.

Another way to look at that figure is in terms of GDP % going to budgetary surplus. The distribution of wealth in Rome was pretty nastily skewed to the right of the curve, then and again the distribution of wealth at the left end of the curve was negative, so the middle may be closer to the American mean than all that. The USA's per Capita Income is ~$48,000 and the Median Family Income of something like ~$24,000. If we use our Legionary's 1,000 sestercii as the Median Income, we can make a wild guess as to Rome's Per Capita of between 500 and 750 sestercii. (Average family being 4, per capita 2 or 3 times median.) With a population estimated at 60 million, that gives Rome a GDP of 45 billion sestercii. OK, looks reasonable enough, Tiberius reigned 23 years so if we give him a surplus in 20 of those years that's 250 million a year for an annual surplus around 0.50% of GDP per year.

Looks reasonable doesn't it? Here come the problems.

First it's very hard to keep a balanced budget, wars and military issues come up and things need to be built. Most monarchs in history haven't been able to manage it. Off the top of my head I can think of 3 English Kings who left their successor a treasury instead of a debt: William I (the treasury being given to his son Henry who used it to depose his brothers and become Henry I), Edward IV (stolen by his brother-in-law to prevent it from falling into the hands of Richard III), and Henry VII (whose son Henry VIII pulled a Caligula.) Maintaining a balanced budget over 20 years is almost unheard of in history prior to decent financial accounting circa 1750. Even since then it's always politically convenient to go negative since it's easier to increase spending than it is to increase taxes and easier to decrease taxes than cut spending, even for an absolute monarch.

Second thing that should attract your attention is the size of the average surplus wedge. We in the US have not had substantive surpluses as a percentage of GDP for some time owing to high defense and social spending and some gratuitous decreases in taxes. The biggest surplus in 40 years was about 0.5% in 2000, and that was when the total tax revenue coming in was nearly 21% of GDP. Without extensive social spending, he only provided a grain dole to Rome itself, the total amount of spending can not have been anywhere near 20% of the economy because there were provincial taxes over and above the imperial revenue. But the surplus probably can't have been more than a tenth of imperial revenue. That would be 5% of GDP or 1.25 billion.

What was Tiberius spending all this money on? The military, allowing 3000 sestercii for the pay and equipment of every legionary and auxillia along with a fleet of 100,000 sailors would eat it up, but the auxillia were not regular troops and it's a little tough to see how the number could get so high, even including the retirement bonus of farmland for each legionary. 400 million looks a lot more reasonable.

Roads and infrastructure? If we imagine 400 million being expended on this we have to imagine 400,000 workers building aquaducts and roads on a constant basis (I'm rolling the labor used to make the materials into this). Does it take 400 men to build a half mile of Roman road a day? Charlie Crocker used a few thousand workers to lay 10 miles of railroad track in one day in 1869. The grade had been in place for some time, of course, and Roman roads are rather more complicated to make then railroad track. Let's be conservative and say it takes 40,000 man/days to lay down one km of Roman road. That means at 400 million sestercii, Tiberius would be laying down 3,652.5 km of road per year, for a grand total of almost exactly 84,000 km of high quality Roman road in his entire reign. By astonishing coincidence, that's 3,500 km more then all the improved Roman roads ever built.

There are Tiberius's villas on Capri and the new palace on the Palatine Hill, but Versailles is supposed to have taken merely 2000 man/years plus materials, although the amount gold and silver sunk into that thing was pretty ludicrous. Tiberius is not supposed to have been a blinged out kind of guy.

Grain dole? Do we want to assume the cost of grain was 100 sestercii per Roman? A grafitti from Pompeii gives the cost of grain of 3.2 sestercii per day at what one assumes is a pretty expensive inn. (The guy also paid 3.2 sestercii "for women", and even accounting for slave labor that's got to be a good amount bread to equal multiple prostitutes or a hell of a tip to the waitresses.) Let's say 1 sestercii for each Roman on the dole per day, which would get towards 300 million because not all of the supposed 1.25 million Romans were on the dole.

Realistically, I don't think we can give Tiberius credit for more than ~800 million sestercii per year, which we can round up to 2% of GDP, and that has him banking 0.5% as a surplus, or a fifth of his revenue. That's one of the biggest surpluses compared to spending in history. He'd have come under pressure from the Senate to cut taxes or the army to raise pay. The first thing the army did after the death of Augustus was to mutiny for better pay. Do you think they wouldn't do it again if they figured out he was banking enough to give them a 100% pay increase?

And that's assuming I've got the per and GDP worked out right, if I have the per Capita inflated the tax rate and spending go up as percentages of GDP, but then so does the Surplus, and Caligula's spending splurge gets even more outrageous.

I could do this same analysis with Tacitus' account of Germanicus' war against Arminius, but you get the general idea.

The point of all this, good sir, is that you have to take any number from an ancient writer with extreme skepticism, however reliable their accounts of events might be. Even early modern historians are not to be treated without skepticism.

Duke Leto

Oh good grief, outhouse, ignoring posts on population and logistics and you switch right on back to the area on the Temple Mount again? (You still haven't explained how all these people and lambs got up the stairs.)

OK, a normal pedestrian could go between 12 and 15 miles per day on an improved Roman road according to Wikipedia. Tough tits, there was no direct Roman Road between Galilee and Jerusalem.



The Galileean pilgrims would have to either cross the Jordan or go around the lake to pick up the road on that side and then crossed the mouth of the Jordan to up past Jericho and on to Jerusalem, or crossed the mountains into Phoenicia and head down the via maris towards Caesarea way and turned inland from there. They could take the straight route through Samaria and have to hike through the hill country, or they could have done what Jesus is supposed to have done (I do not take the Gospels as reliable but the author Mark may have had the slightest idea what he was talking about geography-wise) and head down the west bank of the Jordan and then turn inland. I don't care how you cut it the Galileeans were looking at a minimum 5 day walk, probably closer to 7. It's half a month to two-thirds of a month every year and only a fraction of the well off are going to do it.

Southern Syria, how many Jews are we talking about there? Not many are coming. Another 50-100 miles North, even if the majority is traveled on the improved vias is adding another half a month to a month of travel getting up to two months. The guys from Antioch and Damascus at LEAST have the advantage of coming most of the way on roads, but 450 miles means they're taking a minimum of 2 months.

Nobody but the very well off can afford to take more than a two week vacation today. You want your poor oppressed Jews abandoning their farms, shops and wharves in Galilee and taking a three week vacation instead of minding the land and earning a living?

Since you ask, here's my estimate. Based on the Ottoman census and the estimated population of the Empire, the combined population of Idumenea, Judea, Samaria and Galilee would be no more than 300,000. I would divide it in parts so that Galilee had the largest population and Idumenea the smallest, leaving Judea proper with 80,000 and Idumenea maybe 30,000. Let's say 50,000 for Samaria and 140,000 for Galilee. Based on the proportions of arable land, that looks about right.

In the time of the alleged Jesus, we'd be looking at 230 acres of enclosed land around Jerusalem. With a maximum reasonable population density of 40 per acre (2/3rd Hong Kong Island in 2012), we'd be looking at an urban population of 8000 with a suburban population of another 10,000 or so. That's basically a quarter of the population of Judea. Of the remaining 62,000, around 12,000 in Caesarea will be Greeks. That leaves 50,000 Jews in Judea who are a reasonable distance from Jerusalem, of whom, let's say about 2/5ths will actually go, particularly those within a single day's journey. Of the 30,000 Idumeneans, most of whom are reasonably close, but I don't think all of them are Jewish and of those many were forcibly converted by the Maccabees, in comparatively recent times, so the turnout from here will be much smaller. Let's say 2,000. Samaria is off the board. In Galilee, I'd guess only half the population is Jewish. Of those 70,000 only a fraction can afford to make the trip, I'll be really generous and say 2,000. From Southern Syria the number of Jews in the population is not immense and only a very few can make the trip overland, certainly not annually. No more then 100 from here.

NO ONE will make the overland trip from Alexandria. Sinai no longer contains staff driven water fountains and collectable manna at this point. Some VERY wealthy individuals will come by sea from Rome, Antioch and Alexandria, perhaps 250.

So.

Local Jews: 18,000
Greater Judea: 20,000
Idumenea: 2,000
Galilee: 2,000
"The Whole Levant": 100
Wealthy travelers from major cities by sea: 250.

That's 42,350 in a pretty good year around Pilate's time.

Add another 10-20,000 post Herod Agrippa to reflect his expansion of the city and a somewhat more prosperous Judea.

Titus's Army is 25-35,000 with at most 60,000 people in Jerusalem during the siege, probably more like 40,000, with no more than 18,000 defenders.

That's about right.

outhouse

walked

outhouse

fail

outhouse

based on your post above, i'd keep your day job.


Your not in the same league as the scholars who state the proper numbers.


Your also not Josephas who was a EYE WITNESS even if we cut Josephas numbers back by 3/4 we still get almost 300,000.. he may have exageratted, but he wasnt writing fiction either.


the temple mount alone could hold the people and acording to records the temple at times overflowed, to the point not all on the roads could get in, so special laws were introduced for those caught on teh road so they could attend a month later.

Toto

Mr. John "outhouse" Winford:

This is getting old. Please stop including an insult with every post that is longer than 2 words. Please stop making nonspecific references to authorities until you can show specifically what that authority is based on and how it supports you.