Bingowings said:
I'm taking Ben at his word which naturally generates problems with his track record. His. "the guardians of peace and justice" blurb carries over to TPM's crawl so clearly Lucas didn't intend them to be a couple of hundred people.
He could be puffing up the order. "Morgan Cartewell is the guardian of oral hygiene in the universe" (that sort of thing) but unlike Luke's family relationships Ben hasn't got a reason to exaggerate or fib and his claims seem to backed up by what the Rebel and Imperial leaders say so yeah...that implies a large body of people doing stuff in a very open way...to me.
I find this discussion fascinating because it brings out the imagined universes people create around these films. I agree that there are more Jedi Knights than just a couple hundred, but then again, it would be very difficult to exterminate an entire religious order if it was immersed within the galactic population and consisted of millions of individuals. Keep in mind that even though we assume that the Star Wars galaxy is much like our own, the Milky Way is very large for a galaxy. In fact, a galaxy can have as few as a thousand stars:
http://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/space/stories/just-how-big-is-the-smallest-galaxy-in-the-universe
If only one in five of these stars could have a habitable planet (as recent estimates claim), then this galaxy wouldn't need more than a few thousand Jedi to intensely police these two hundred worlds. Of course, the Star Wars galaxy has always been depicted as having spiral arms and a "bright center", implying that it is larger than this diminutive galaxy, but I don't think that it's a stretch to assume that the number of inhabited worlds is no more than a few thousand. Otherwise, the Empire's search of planets using "thousands of probe droids" would be absurd, and this sets a realistic upper limit on the number of stars in the galaxy. It certainly wouldn't make sense for the Empire to be searching the Milky Ways' 100 billion stars with a few thousand probe droids, especially if a ship can easily traipse across such a galaxy in a short amount of time.