Render what unto Caesar?

Today’s sermon concerned the Gospel of Matthew 22:15-22, in which Jesus advises his listeners to “render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s”.

In this well-known story (also found in Mark 12:13-17 and Luke 20:20-26), Jesus is asked the loaded question, “Is it lawful to give tribute to Caesar, or not?”

Those posing the question clearly wish to catch Jesus out in some way. The Gospel-writers say as much. A negative answer could be construed as being seditious, while an affirmative answer might lose him support among his natural constituency, the poor tax-burdened provincials.

Jesus circumvents the problem by asking to see the money with which tribute is paid. (The word used for “tribute” is κῆνσος, census, meaning the poll-tax.)

For everyday transactions, most Judaeans would have used the copper coins (known as prutot) issued by their own authorities. The example shown here is a coin of Herod Archelaus issued at Jerusalem between 4 BC and AD 6; it carries his name in Greek characters, ΗΡWΔΟΥ (“belonging to Herod”), inscribed around a bunch of grapes on the vine. (Greek, of course, was the lingua franca of the eastern Roman empire.)

However, this is clearly not the coin handed to Jesus. In fact, it has been claimed, on good authority, that the Jews paid their taxes using Tyrian silver, on account of its purity.

Those arriving at the Temple to pay their annual “Temple tax” would have exchanged their everyday prutot for a Tyrian half-shekel.

Like the example shown here, the half-shekel typically carried the image of the god Melqart, patron deity of Tyre, who was equated with the Greek Herakles and the Roman Hercules. It appears to have been worth a little more than a Greek drachma or Roman denarius.

The question is: how did the Jews pay their Roman poll-tax? Did they use this same coin? Unfortunately, the answer seems to be: we don’t know.

In fact, the only evidence appears to be this passage from the Gospels, where Jesus, having been shown the relevant coin, asks “whose image and inscription does it have?” It is true that Mark alone refers to the coin as a δηνάριον (denarius), but the others do not.

And so, we are left with the rather weak argument that the coin must have been a Roman denarius, because it carried Caesar’s image and Caesar’s name. In fact, the most common example (by a long way) circulating in the Roman empire at this time was the coin of Tiberius shown here. Curiously, it remains true to this day that very few denarii have ever been found within the borders of Roman Judaea.