The Denarius Objection

I've been recently asked twice about an objection to the historicity of the story of the denarius and rendering tax to Caesar in the Synoptic Gospels, so I wrote up some comments. These comments are in rough form, even more so than usual for a blog post. I was asked to publish them publicly (having first written them for an email correspondence and then for a private Facebook group) and have decided to do so in the most efficient way possible rather than taking a lot of time to polish before publishing.

In the first instance obviously the objection is to the historicity of the entire incident. That is the thesis of Christopher Zeichmann, the author of the article. He thinks Mark made the story up to encourage Christians to pay the fiscus Iudaicus levied later by Vespasian. I'm told that it's also being used in skeptical circles to argue against Matthean authorship, since if the incident is unhistorical, a tax collector would have known this and wouldn't have repeated the story. As I pointed out to the correspondent, that a Gospel author made up a whole story and presented it as historical in order to induce Christians in his own time to cooperate smoothly with the Romans is of course the bigger claim.

Comments on Christopher B. Zeichmann, "The Date of Mark's Gospel Apart from the Temple and Rumors of War: The Taxation Episode (12:13-17) as Evidence.” The Catholic Biblical Quarterly 79:3 (2017), pp. 422-437. This article can be read online for free even if you have no institutional affiliation, using your Google profile.

The objection is based in the first instance on the fact that archaeologists found denarii in coin hoards, even finding denarii that were minted prior to the Jewish War, but found relatively few, fewer of them than at later periods, and this is used to argue that the episode in Mark (and hence Matthew and Luke) is non-historical (pp. 428-429). Talk about an argument from silence. It would be somewhat weak even if they had found none, since often things aren't found later in archaeological digs but nonetheless existed. But in this case the argument for such a strong conclusion is based merely on their finding relatively few. Zeichmann concludes that denarii were "extremely rare" in Judea and Galilee before the Jewish War, but this is itself a dubious extrapolation from coin hoards. He notes that some of those found were not in hoards but in individual findings of unknown date (of their having been dropped or buried there, presumably). He makes a big deal out of the fact that of those hoards we have found, where the hoard itself is believed to have been deposited before the war (it’s unclear how they know that), none contain denarii. In other words, denarii that were minted prior to the Jewish War were found either individually or in hoards that were (archaeologists think) deposited qua hoards in their current locations after the Jewish War. 

It's somewhat opaque as to how this supports the conclusion that they were "extremely rare" before the war. He seems to be assuming that if they were not "extremely rare" more of them would have been found in coin hoards and in particular that they would have been found in hoards where the hoards themselves can be independently confirmed to have been deposited prior to the Jewish War. This seems like an extremely shaky argument.

Zeichmann also argues (p. 431) that, since he was a Galilean, Jesus wouldn't have been interested, knowledgeable, or even asked about a tax levied in Judea (as the Gospel portrays). Jesus was being asked this question as a rabbi. (Of course in the story his questioners are trying to entrap him with the question.) Zeichmann says, merely on the basis that Jesus was asked this question by enemies in Judea, that Mark seems to be assuming that Galileans and Judeans were paying "the same taxes" to Rome. Rabbis were asked for Jewish legal rulings. There was plenty of travel between Galilee and Judea, and a rabbi who was often in Jerusalem (as Jesus was) could have been asked to make a statement in Jerusalem about a tax that Jews didn’t like, that was levied in Judea, regardless of whether he was originally raised in Galilee.

Just one page earlier (p. 430) Zeichmann assumes that Galilean taxation was relevant to the region as a whole. He refers to corn stored in Galilee to pay taxes to Caesar (per Josephus) and uses this to argue that all taxes to Rome were paid in kind prior to the Jewish War (see below for a response to this). In other words, at that point, Zeichmann is arguing inter alia that Judean taxes to Rome would only have been paid in kind in Jesus' time from Josephus' record of corn being kept to pay taxes in Galilee several decades later. But at the same time (p. 431) he argues that it was "impossible" (his word) that Galilean and Judean taxes to Caesar were the same during Jesus' lifetime, extrapolating that they couldn't even be sufficiently similar for Jesus to be asked about Judean taxes, because the administration of Judea and Galilee under Rome was not unified until A.D. 44. This is inconsistent. Either Galilean taxation is relevant to Judean taxation in Jesus’ time or it isn’t. Zeichmann treats its relevance in opposite ways depending on which position seems to further the argument against the historicity of the incident.

The payment in kind argument is very problematic. Zeichmann argues from the fact that Josephus mentions corn being kept for taxation purposes. Josephus also mentions the difficulty of paying tax to Rome if land remained unsown. Zeichmann also notes an absence (outside of the Gospels) of explicit reference to paying tax to Rome in the form of coins prior to the Jewish War (except in the Agrippa II incident, see below). He argues from this absence to the conclusion that tax to Rome was collected only in kind prior to the Jewish War “except in emergencies.” But this certainly does not follow. In an agricultural region, of course unsown lands could lead to an inability to pay taxes, even if at least some people sold their crops and paid tax in coins. Agriculture is going to be important to prosperity or poverty in the region. And the fact that corn was kept for taxation purposes shortly before the Jewish War merely shows that taxes could be rendered in kind, not that they always were.

Zeichmann's very strong use of the argument from silence is also evident here: 

In fact, no monetary capitation taxes are known at all in the southern Levant before the war, much less any paid in denarii or equivalent coinage (e.g. didrachm). In short, there was no κήνσος that a resident paid to Καίσαρ in δηνάριον or any other coin for that matter at the time. Whatever tax Mark had in mind, it did not exist during the life of Jesus. (p. 431)

Notice the seamless movement from "no monetary capitation taxes are known [in non-biblical sources]" before the war to the dogmatic statement that there was no such tax, a claim which Zeichmann continues to use throughout the rest of the article.

Most strikingly, Zeichmann argues that before the Jewish War, taxes were collected in coin only "in emergencies" from an incident Josephus tells about in A.D. 66, during the time of Agrippa II, when the taxes to Rome had remained unpaid for a while as a form of protest against the rule of Florus. Agrippa II hastily collected the taxes in coin in order to ward off war with Rome. In this incident Josephus (Jewish War II.17) says that they "soon got together forty talents" (!!) This shows not only that the taxes could be collected in coin but also that coins were widely enough available to collect a large amount in back taxes hastily in coin. That this was "only" done due to an "emergency" is not indicated at all in the Josephus passage. It is just Zeichmann's ad hoc construct to explain away the passage, which is otherwise a counterexample to his sweeping generalization that taxes to Rome were paid only in kind, not in coins. 

The rapid collection of forty talents in money for back taxes is especially notable in view of Zeichmann's insinuation on p. 431 that there were few coins in general used in the region prior to the war. 

Indeed, the economy of the southern Levant was not fully monetized during Jesus' time; the widespread use and circulation of coins in rural Judea was facilitated decades later by the postwar military occupation. This fact alone would have rendered any monetary collection an inefficient means of taxation. 

One wonders why "fully monetized," however that is measured, is the relevant standard. I suspect Zeichmann is assuming that any tax must be collected in only one way. In any event, the Agrippa incident shows that it is not true that collecting taxes in coinage was necessarily inefficient, due to the rarity of coins, since coinage must have been sufficiently available for that collection to take place in a short time.

The general idea that coinage was little used (and by the way, why are we suddenly focusing on rural Judea only?) is also contrary to other evidence about both denarii and drachmas, an approximate monetary equivalent of the denarius. Tobit 5:15 indicates that a drachma for a day's wage was reasonable, as does a parable of Jesus in Matthew 20:2, where the word "denarius" is used for a daily wage for agricultural workers. This parable occurs only in Matthew. And Mishna Bekharat 8.7 indicates that, as in the incident of the fish and the stater in Matthew 17, the Temple tax was two drachmas—i.e., ½ of a shekel. Jesus' parable of the talents in Matthew 25 also makes use of coinage. There is also a story in Mark 12 of people dropping money into the Temple treasury, clearly in coins.

There are in fact numerous references specifically to denarii throughout the Gospels, including in texts apparently independent of Mark. Not only does the parable of the vineyard workers refer to a single denarius as a daily wage; other references refer to denarii as if they are a natural way for people to think about how much something costs, how much something is worth, or how much is owed. Matthew 18:28, in the parable of the unforgiving servant (found only in Matthew), measures the amount owed in denarii. Luke 7:41-42 also uses denarii in the brief parable that Jesus tells to the Pharisee who judges the sinful woman. Jesus asks whether a man who is forgiven a debt of five hundred denarii will not love the one who forgives more than a man who is forgiven a debt of fifty. This story is unique to Luke. Mark 6:37 and John 6:7 both use denarii to describe the disciples' appalled statement about how hard it would be to buy bread for the crowd at the feeding of the five thousand. Mark 14:5 attributes a reference to denarii to those who criticize the woman who anoints Jesus' feet, referring to how much could have been given to the poor if the ointment were sold. Are we to believe that these varied apolitical biblical references to denarii were all made up for some obscure reasons? The motive Zeichmann attributes to Mark cannot apply to the parables, nor would it apply in these other contexts, including other contexts in Mark. Is it not more reasonable to think that Jesus (even on a skeptical view a master teacher) made use of coinage in his parables which his audience would be able to relate to? And should we not consider seriously the possibility that people in Jesus' time and place thought of denarii more often than Zeichmann's thesis would indicate?

The references both inside and outside the Gospels present a picture of a more "monetized" world in Jesus' place and time than Zeichmann portrays.

Returning to the story of the denarius and taxes, it seems that Zeichmann is imposing on the story in Mark (which others are then extending to Matthew) the idea that, according to the story, denarii must have been a very common coin in Judea and that the tax in question was always paid in denarii. Although the numerous references elsewhere in the Gospels do call into question the efficacy of the coin hoard method of estimating how common denarii were, in fact the story does not say either of these. It relies on the idea that Jesus was sufficiently familiar with a denarius to know what it would look like (hence his request to bring him one), that he could expect one to be available at the time of the conversation, and that the tax was at least sometimes paid in the form of this coin. It also assumes that Jesus’ audience knew this, though of course they could simply look at the denarius once it was brought to him and describe it. Nothing about the relative rarity of denarii in coin hoards prior to the Jewish War makes any of this impossible or even particularly improbable, especially since this same archaeological work confirms that such coins were in existence in the region prior to the Jewish War.

The exact wording of the story in Matthew 22:19 is slightly different: Jesus says, “Show me the coin for the tax.” But since this is the exact same incident as what is found in Mark 12:15, where Jesus says, “Bring me a denarius,” there is no reason to place weight on the exact Matthean wording. We need not think that the story (in either Gospel) Jesus is saying that the tax was per se paid using this coin, only that it could be. (Zeichmann says nothing about the Matthean wording. I'm bringing it up here to ward off a possible criticism.)

Zeichmann rightly warns (p. 431) against circularity between NT scholars and classicists, in which classicists cite Mark as a source concerning Roman taxation in the region and NT scholars then cite classicists as though the specific practices of taxation mentioned in the story were confirmed independently of Mark, though this is not the case. Of course we should make every attempt to avoid this sort of distributed circularity.

On the other hand, any classicists who cite the passage in Mark as historically relevant are entirely right to treat Mark as a 1st-century source on the subject in his own right. Why not? The sort of a priori history on display in this article is the dubious historical practice; the use of Mark as a source on coinage and taxation in the time of Christ is not.

In the final section (pp. 432-436), Zeichmann argues that the incident arises from the later fiscus Iudaicus imposed by Vespasian and is anachronistically inserted here. His suggestion is that some members of Mark's audience were Jews and/or were regarded as Jews by Rome and hence were being made to pay the tax, and that they were wondering if they should do so. The suggestion is that Mark projected a very similar tax back into Jesus' own time and placed words into the mouth of Jesus in order to reassure such readers that it was permissible to pay the fiscus Iudaicus. But in this section he repeats the arguments from earlier sections of the article, assuming their conclusions to be correct (e.g., that no earlier tax to Rome was collected in coins) and then using this to boost the claim that the incident arises from the sitz im Leben of Mark's audience. 

The only new argument in this section (p. 434) is the forceless point that "census" and "denarius" are transliterated into Greek from Latin. Zeichmann vaguely relates this to "perceived Romanness" in Mark and its relationship to Roman occupation of Judea. But as already pointed out, "denarius" is also used in widely varied stories in both Mark and other Gospels where the contexts have nothing to do with taxation or anything else particularly Roman. These widespread references actually put pressure on the whole argument of the paper that denarii were very rare before the Jewish War. In this last section Zeichmann seems to be arguing that the Latin transliterations of "census" and "denarius" would be likely to be picked up from places where a "Roman garrison was stationed" and where "Roman law was practiced" (p. 435) and that such situations would be more common in postwar Israel. This is part of his attempt to argue that Mark was written after the Jewish War. He even goes so far as to use the transliterated word "centurion" as part of this same argument (footnote 31, p. 435), which is truly bizarre, since as a matter of independent history we know that there were centurions in Israel at the time of Jesus.

Zeichmann points out that the fiscus Iudaicus had similar features to the tax that seems to be envisaged in the story in Mark--levied by census (a poll tax), collected in coin, and paid to the emperor. But that the fiscus Iudaicus had these three features does not make such a Markan invention a better explanation of the passage than the truth of Mark’s story. More than one tax could easily have these three broad features. So the observation that the fiscus Iudaicus had these features and the spinning out of a political motive on Mark's part doesn't constitute an independent argument that the story is unhistorical. It seems forceful only if we assume or at least take it as quite probable, based on the earlier arguments, that no tax to Rome was paid in denarii in the time of Jesus.