the essay by Roberto Volpi- Corriere.it

Can statistics and demographics add anything to our knowledge of the historical figure of Jesus? The answer offered by Roberto Volpi, training and professional statistician and demographer, is resolutely positive. Not that there is a lack of considerations in this regard in the immense amount of publications on the so-called “historical Jesus” – that is, what can be said of him that can be said to be historically verifiable on the basis of the available documentation, regardless of any theological or faith considerations. However, the overall view offered by Volpi’s agile volume
During that time (Solferino) allows the reader to form an effective overall picture and the author to offer an interpretative approach, in some respects original, to the preaching of Jesus and to the very first diffusion of his message, until reaching, with Paul, well beyond the borders of Palestine.

Precisely with regard to the latter, Volpi establishes its total inhabitants at about four hundred thousand, of which between one hundred and one hundred and twenty thousand must have populated the Galilee region, where Nazareth was located and where almost all of Jesus’ preaching took place, destined to end dramatically in Jerusalem, where Jesus remained only a handful of days.

In more detail, from the information obtainable from the Gospels, especially the three synoptic ones (Mark, Matthew and Luke), it is possible to ascertain that Christ’s preaching took place for a period of one year or at most one and a half years in a geographically even more limited than Galilee itself, i.e the villages gathered around the so-called “Sea of ​​Galilee”, more precisely the lake of Tiberias. Located in the north of present-day Israel, it is about twenty kilometers long by a dozen wide and about fifty kilometers overall. Jesus generally moves on foot, however he frequently uses boats to move from one bank to the other, thus saving time and effort. Time and effort which instead consumed those who went to listen to him, coming from the nearest villages, when the news of his passage spread. Volpi hypothesizes for these journeys an average of a couple of hours or so for the outward journey and as many for the return journey, which would have allowed a very substantial part of the population of Galilee to come into direct contact with the preaching of Jesus.

So what were the characteristics of the inhabitants of this restricted area? First, it was a extremely young population, at least by our standards: one in three of the inhabitants of Galilee was under the age of 14; most of the population was between fifteen and thirty-five, with an average age of twenty-five. Very few must have been over fifty, given the probable mortality rates and the poor and disadvantaged conditions of the area.

Already from these observations, we can understand how the traditional representation of Jesus as a young man in his thirties, at most a “young adult” one would say today, risks being misleading: instead it was a question of a man in full maturity, even that he already had more than half of his life expectancy behind him. Volpi deduces from this that his preaching activity must have begun some time ago, well before the meeting with John the Baptist from which the story of the Gospels instead begins.

As known, it was destined to end in Jerusalem. Also in this case, Volpi provides some interesting quantitative indications: the city must have had between twenty and twenty-five thousand inhabitants, but with a decidedly high population density, as is typical of ancient cities, given that its surface did not exceed three square kilometers , with an extension of the walls, square in shape, of about seven kilometres. About ten doors opened on them, three of which gave direct access to the Temple Mount, the center of Jewish worship and the only place frequented by Jesus in Jerusalem, before the events that led to his death. From this seemingly narrow horizon, a story of universal significance will begin.