One crowd, or two?

During the Palm Sunday liturgy, we read about Jesus hailed as a king by the adoring crowds outside Jerusalem.  Then we read the Passion narrative where a crowd calls for His crucifixion.  A lot of times I hear a homily remarking that the crowd turns on Jesus like this.  On Sunday, He's a king, and by Friday the same crowd is calling for His death.  But it was never obvious to me that this is the same crowd.

Jerusalem was a big city, and in the buildup to Passover it was even bigger. The city would have been bursting at the seams with Jews coming to spend Passover. People would have been camped outside the city, perhaps (as I've read) the "city limits" would have been extended during the period of Passover so that people who were physically unable to get inside the city walls could still say that they spent Passover in Jerusalem, as commanded.  In such a place, is it impossible to imagine that there were two crowds: one that lauded Jesus and another that feared Him, and perhaps another completely unaware of the controversy.

I live in a suburb of Dallas. Dallas has a number of controversial public figures. City Councilmen and County Commissioners may be hailed as a hero by their constituents and derided as a nuisance in other districts.  Why couldn't the same be the case in Jerusalem.

In 2013, the History Channel showed a ten-episode miniseries called The Bible.  It had an interesting theory about this.  When Jesus was being tried, the Pharisees made sure only "their" people were let into Pilate's court.  I hadn't ever considered that possibility but it makes sense.

I don't know why people always assume it was the same crowd on Palm Sunday and Good Friday, and I'm not sure why it bugs me when they do.  For some reason it seems like a liberal interpretation, but I can't explain why.   

But mainly, the idea that a massive crowd could turn so suddenly on someone, to me, belies the experience of the Church.  I mentioned earlier that a city the size of Jerusalem could easily accommodate more than one crowd: one could love Jesus, one could loath Jesus and another one could be completely unaware and indifferent.  The Church lives out Jesus' life on Earth today. There's a group that loves it, another group that hates it, and another group, probably the biggest of all, that doesn't care.  People may move from one camp to another, but generally they don't all move at the same time.  Certainly the haters of the Church seem more organized and more vocal than the lovers of the Church.  That's the experience when Brenden Eich get's the ax at Mozilla, and that's the experience of the Proposition 8 kerfuffle in California and that's the experience with the current brouhaha in Indiana, and that's the likely experience of Jesus in Pilate's court.  There were people in Jerusalem who wanted to see Jesus freed, but they were too disorganized, too weak, too afraid, too few to counter the organized resistance of the rulers of society.

Isn't that more likely?  How often do your friends completely turn on you when things get tough? On the other hand, how many times do your friends stay silent instead of defending you?  The enemy has been planning this attack for a long time.  He has taken every precaution.  Your friends are completely unaware of the danger and unprepared to do anything.

Perhaps that's what Jesus meant when He told his disciples to always be on their guard.