Topic considered in Deuteronomy 33 - the meeting place of the 120 disciples

Here is another interesting topic - the 120 disciples and their meeting place - considered in the footnotes in An Exposition of Deuteronomy 33

Pages 108-113. In commenting on Deuteronomy 33:2, Parkinson includes this extensive note dealing with the subject of the 120 disciples and their place of meeting during the time of Pentecost, as given in Acts 1:12-15. He believes that “to suppose, as some do, that they (the 120) were all the disciples of Christ then at Jerusalem, is utterly unreasonable,” for there were above 500 persons whom He showed himself to after His Resurrection. Parkinson then goes on to demonstrate that the place where these disciples met was not in a private residence, but in the temple, the house of God, “for had they not met there on that day,” he argues, “how could their meeting there on successive days be called, as in verse 46, a continuing daily in the temple? The suggestion of some, that the Jews would not have permitted it, vanishes at the recollection that HE whose ‘dominion ruleth over all,” could with infinite ease restrain their opposition, that the transactions of that notable day, by their occurring at the temple, might be the more public and the less liable to contradiction. Thereby also fulfilling his ancient promise, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all people,’ Isa. 56:7.” The place of meeting on the day of Pentecost was not the “upper room” mentioned in verse 13 (which instead was the place where they abode the ten days preceding), but probably in “the great court” of Israel, which, Parkinson tells us, was a “spacious enclosure under the care of the Levites, the use of it might the more readily be granted to the disciples through the influence of Barnabas, generally believed to have been one of the seventy, and who was a Levite, Acts 4:36. Moreover, its adjacency to the still larger court, commonly called the outer court, or the court of the Gentiles, easily accounts for the convenient approach of the multitude, where, in divers languages, they heard the miraculous gift exemplified, at which those who understood the languages spoken, were amazed.”