By WAYNE JACKSON

January 23, 2001

This week, we will address several questions related to the Bible and statistics.
“I have heard it said that prophecy is one of the stronger proofs pointing to the fact that the Bible is from God. Can you tell me approximately how many ‘prophecies’ the Scriptures contain?”
Various books cite different figures, depending upon the manner in which one counts the prophecies. For example, one writer may count a single verse as a prophecy, while another may see three or four prophetic elements within the same passage.
J. Barton Payne’s, Encyclopedia of Biblical Prophecy (New York: Harper & Row, 1973) lists 1,239 prophecies in the Old Testament, and 578 prophecies in the New Testament, for a total of 1,817. These encompass 8,352 verses.
“Do we have any idea about how many people there were on earth at the time of the Flood?”
The Genesis narrative indicates that Adam and Eve were charged with the responsibility of multiplying and filling the earth (Gen. 1:28). By the time of the Flood, which seems to have been in the tenth generation of human history – and a span of at least 1,656 years (based upon the figures in the genealogical records), Moses records that “the earth was filled with violence” (Gen. 6:11,13). This suggests an extensive population already. The language indicates a tremendously rapid expansion. This conclusion is supported further by the fact that the Flood was designed to destroy living creatures of the entire globe (Gen. 7:19, 22).
Based upon a rather conservative rate of human expansion, in 1961 John Whitcomb and Henry Morris estimated that the population of the earth at the time of the Flood was approximately 1 billion people (The Genesis Flood, Grand Rapids: Baker). However, when he wrote his book, The Genesis Record (Grand Rapids: Baker), in 1976, Henry Morris opined that the earth’s population at the time of the Deluge was in the neighborhood of 7 billion (p. 144). Obviously he somewhat expanded the figures upon which the earlier estimate had been based.
One does not precisely know, of course, but the figure must have been significant.
“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 & Times of Jesus the Messiah (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1947), Alfred Edersheim says that the normal population of Jerusalem in the New Testament era was in the neighborhood of 200,000 to 250,000, which, he suggests, swelled enormously during feast times (Vol. I, p. 116).
On the other hand, noted scholar Joachim Jeremias, in his book, Jerusalem in the Time of Jesus (1962 edition), said that Jerusalem’s normal population was about 55,000, and that some 125,000 additional people visited the city at Passover time (pp. 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 180,000 people total.
In a later estimate, however, Jeremias suggested that the normal population of Jerusalem was only 25,000 to 30,000 at the upper limit (London: SCM, 1966, p. 84). This revision, of course, reduces the total from 180,000 to about 155,000 at Passover time.
The Jewish writer, Flavius Josephus, suggested that the population in the city, at Passover time, around A.D. 65, was 3 million souls (Wars 2.14.3). But many think that Josephus inflated figures on occasion.

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