Pentecost, the Church, and the 120 in the Upper Room

Pentecost is affectionately referred to as the “birthday of the Church”. There is a clue in the biblical account of the gathering in the Upper Room (Acts 1:12ff) that helps us in better understanding the Church and its institutional structure.

In Scripture, numbers are important. They often point to fascinating truths. For example, is there a significance to Jesus choosing twelve apostles, or was that just an arbitrary number? Arbitrary? No! It was theologically significant. The Twelve Apostles represent the Twelve Tribes of Israel. In building his Church, “the Lord Jesus instituted the Twelve as ‘the seeds of the new Israel and the beginning of the sacred hierarchy’” (CCC, 877).

Knowing that the New Testament is based on the Old, it’s wise to investigate numerical correlations with the Old Testament and the Jewish perspective. This is called cultural literacy, or, as the Catechism says, in interpreting Scripture, “the reader must take into account the conditions of their time and culture” (CCC 110).

In other words, it doesn’t matter what we think the Bible means; what’s important is what the original writer meant 2000 years ago, and how his contemporary readers understood it. To understand Scripture, especially the figures of speech and cultural nuances, we need to step out of our current time and immerse ourselves in the biblical milieu.

After the Ascension of Jesus, the eleven apostles returned to the Upper Room to pray along with Mary and a “company of persons”. St. Luke describes the number of people using terminology that is pregnant with theological and Jewish meaning. His readers would have understood the implications, whereas modern readers may miss it.

St. Luke records, “In those days Peter stood up among the brothers (the company of persons was in all about 120)” (Acts 1:15).

The parenthetical statement about the 120 seems to be an added explanation inserted within the main line of thought, though incidental to it. Luke need not add this to advance his narration, but includes the side note to signal us to a deeper meaning embedded in the current storyline.

This seemingly unnecessary insertion triggered my curiosity. Why would Luke add this if it were not significant? He often embeds deep spiritual insights between the lines, imperceptible to the casual reader. Just consider the charming account of the Visitation—pregnant Mary visiting her relative Elizabeth. Just below the surface, this short vignette contains a marvel of typology, revealing Mary as the Ark of the New Covenant. It is only perceptible to those immersed in the saga of Israel and the Old Testament.

With piqued interest, I looked more closely at this phase inserted into the account working up to Pentecost. Luke uses the word “about,” which made me wonder if the number 120 was consequential, maybe even symbolic, rounded up to indicate something of a numerical significance. “Sometimes [Luke] uses about to relativize a number in order to introduce a biblical allusion.”¹ I realized something was going on in this nine-word phrase. It was as though Luke were nodding his head to say, “Good, dig deeper and discover the cultural significance.”

Then I noticed some Bible translations add a notation in the margin informing English readers that in the original Greek, the word for “persons” is onoma (ὄνομα), meaning name. In Greek, the language in which Luke wrote, the expression is literally “the crowd of names was about one hundred and twenty.” I thought it a bit strange to refer to a group of people as names. It would be like me saying, “On our pilgrimage, we had 55 names on the bus.” This would only be appropriate if I were checking off a list. This is the only time in Luke’s writing that he substitutes onoma for the word “person”.

He might be referring back to Numbers 1:11ff., where Israel “assembled the whole congregation together, who registered themselves by clans, by fathers’ houses, according to the number of names (onoma)”. They were taking a census by creating a list of names. Sounds similar to Acts 1:15.

The word Luke uses for “gathered” might be an additional clue. It is literally “a crowd of names”. Similar to Number 1:11ff., where the census of names established a national register; here it is used to establish the registry of a new civic organization—the Church. Luke’s phrase “all together in one place” (Acts 2:1) derives from the Greek Septuagint translation of yahad (epi to auto), meaning “at one” or “together”. The Essenes at Qumran used the word hayaḥad as almost a technical term for the community.²

So the crowd that gathered is not just a “fellowship of believers” but a legally constituted community.

Now comes the interesting part—the number “one hundred and twenty”. This really kindled my curiosity. I searched to see whether that number was significant in Jewish history, if it had any unique significance. After all, it might have been a symbolic number for Luke. He writes “about one hundred and twenty”. My search was fruitful. I landed in the Jewish Mishnah, a compilation of the oral tradition of Jewish law. It is part of the Talmud, the body of Jewish civil and ceremonial law. The Mishnah was the key that opened the significance of Luke’s number. It reads: “And how many residents must there be in a town so that it may be suitable for a sanhedrin? One hundred and twenty.”

First, we must define Sanhedrin for those unfamiliar with its full meaning. It was a group that served as the judicial authority for the Jews, including in criminal matters. In moral and spiritual matters, all Jews worldwide fell under its authority. There was the Great Sanhedrin in Jerusalem, and lesser Sanhedrins in smaller communities modeled on it. The word was not exclusive to the Jews. “In the Hellenistic world, the Greek synedrion referred to gatherings or meetings of high officials, such as city councils.”³

We learn from the Commentary on the New Testament from the Talmud & Midrash that, “120 people were already considered to be a large community. So a town of 120 inhabitants was even permitted to claim a Sanhedrin unto itself.⁴

The Jerome Biblical Commentary says, “Not an accidental number. The Mishnah (Sanhedrin 1:6) enacts that any community’s officers will number one-tenth of its numerical strength; 120 was the minimum number for a small Sanhedrin.⁵

Biblical scholar Bruce Metzger writes, “There were 120 Christians of Jerusalem present and that number is not without significance in Jewish constitutional law. According to the Jewish concept a town congregation must have at least 120 men, in order to elect members to the Sanhedrin.⁶

(As an interesting side note, today’s Israeli parliament, known as the Knesset, has 120 members.)

In the New Testament, the word “church” is ecclesia from the root word ekkaléō, which means “to call out”. The Church is a gathering of those “called out” to a distinct assembly or community. To leave the main community and to form a new one, the Jews needed 120 registered. In the Upper Room, a new civic community was formed, called out to be members of a unique society known as the Church.

In summary, the number 120 is significant in Jewish law because that’s the minimum number of people required to establish a new community.

By mentioning this detail, Luke draws attention to the fact that the Church is a newly called-out institution registered with enough names to form its own civic and religious courts. Like the Sanhedrin of Jerusalem, the Church also has worldwide authority. It is not merely a denomination or a random group of Christians, but the Church founded by Jesus Christ, with a (canon) law, lawyers, courts, and a governing hierarchy, just as we see today in the Catholic Church.

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