Precious Metals at the Beginning and End of Jesus’ Life III: Judas’ Thirty Pieces of Silver
- ptcrawford
- May 25
- 6 min read
After looking at ‘magi gold’ and the ‘tribute penny’, perhaps the most famous numismatic episode in Jesus’ life comes during his final days. Before the Last Supper, Matthew 26:15 records Judas Iscariot going to the chief priests and agreeing to betray Jesus to them in return for ‘thirty pieces of silver.’
“And he said unto them, what will ye give me, and I will deliver him unto you? And they covenanted with him for thirty pieces of silver” (Matthew 26:15)
In Luke 22:3-6, the earliest Gospel, the details are slightly different, with the amount agreed between Judas, the chief priests and the temple guard officers not being recorded and seemingly not being paid up front.
“3 Then Satan entered Judas, called Iscariot, one of the Twelve. 4 And Judas went to the chief priests and the officers of the temple guard and discussed with them how he might betray Jesus. 5 They were delighted and agreed to give him money. 6 He consented, and watched for an opportunity to hand Jesus over to them when no crowd was present.”
It should also be noted that much like with the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas 100 recording the ‘tribute penny’ given to Jesus in Matthew 22:19 as being made gold rather than silver, the (possibly fifth or sixth century) Narrative of Joseph of Arimathea records Judas being paid 30 pieces of gold instead of silver.
There is little doubt that these ‘30 pieces of silver’ were coins – Matthew 26:15 uses the word ἀργύρια, argyria, simply meaning ‘silver coins’ – but there is nothing to suggest that they were all the same coin. Indeed, as mentioned in the previous pieces, there were several different types of silver coin in circulation in the Roman Near East of the first century AD.
As mentioned in our previous entry on the ‘tribute penny’, the most pervasive silver coinage at the time of Christ were Tyrian ‘shekels’ (really to be considered tetradrachms), which bore the Greco-Phoenician demigod, Heracles/Melqart (RPC I.4632-66).
Other alternatives include Antiochene staters, which bore the head of Augustus, Ptolemaic tetradrachms of much less silver content and Tiberian denarii, which were much less widely circulated in the Roman east at this time.
Of all these potential options, Judas would certainly have wanted the majority (if not the entirety) of the ‘30 pieces of silver’ to be Tyrian ‘shekels’ as they had the highest silver content of them all – 94+% against 80% of the denarius, 75% of the Antiochene stater or a measly 25% of the Ptolemaic tetradrachm.
‘30 pieces of silver’ was something of a repeated idea of payment in books of the Bible. Exodus 21:32 has ‘30 shekels of silver’ as the recompense for an accidentally killed slave, while Zechariah 11:12 has Zechariah himself being paid ‘30 pieces of silver’ for his labour.
Could these combine to provide something of an indictment of Zechariah’s payment? Was his labour to be valued as no more than slave recompense? Then again Zechariah 11:13 considered his ‘30 shekels of silver’ to be a “handsome price”. Could there be some sarcasm here? Zechariah did immediately give the payment away, but as he did so by listening to the advice of the Lord and gave it “to the potter at the house of the lord,” it is unlikely that the prophet considered this payment to be miserly.
Indeed, there are some calculations (albeit using measurements from different times and places for similar, although not necessarily the same, coinage) that can be made to suggest what kind of value ’30 pieces of silver’ might have had, particularly around the time of Zechariah, considered to be the last quarter of the sixth century BC.
A century later, Thucydides III.17.4 recorded a drachma being a day’s pay for a skilled labourer, with the Athenian drachma – the most common standard of drachma at the time – weighing about 4g. If the ‘30 shekels of silver’ are to be taken as being the equivalent of tetradrachms, they would also be the equivalent of a payment of 120 drachmae or possibly four months’ wages. How much of this applies to the time of Jesus and Judas? The standard of the tetradrachm seems to have remained high, particularly the Tyrian ‘shekel’, which was in the mid/high 90% for silver content. But was a drachma considered a decent day’s pay for a skilled labourer in the mid-first century AD?
The full story of Judas’ ‘30 pieces of silver’ does give some idea of its value in the time of Jesus. Matthews 27:9 has Judas, filled with remorse, returning the ‘30 pieces of silver’ to the chief priests, before then hanging himself. The chief priests decided that they could not put the repaid ‘bounty’ into the temple treasury as it was now tainted with the blood of Jesus. They therefore used the money to buy a field which had originally been used by potters to collect high-quality clay for their ceramics. The chief priests turned this field into a burial plot for strangers, criminals and the poor, which became known as the Akeldama – Aramaic for ‘field of blood’ – and the ‘Potter’s Field’ for its original usage. This potters’ connection may be a link to the aforementioned donation by Zechariah, while Matthew also states that it was a fulfilment of a prophecy by Jeremiah, who is recorded buying a field in return for a payment of silver (Jeremiah 32:9 has the payment be 17 shekels of silver).
There could well be an idea in the purchasing of the potters’ field with the money used to buy the death of Jesus and its reuse as a ‘foreigners’ burial ground, that “Jesus’ death makes salvation possible for all the peoples of the world, including the Gentiles” (Blomberg in Beale and Carson (2007), 97).
The book of Acts 1:17-20 records a slightly different fate for not only Judas but also his ‘thirty pieces of silver.’ The Apostle Peter relates that Judas used his payment to buy a field, again linking to Jeremiah’s suggestion of silver being used to buy fields. Peter in Acts also states that in his newly bought field, Judas “fell headlong, his body burst open and all his intestines spilled out.” It is this field that Peter has becoming known as the Akeldama, in a fulfilling of Psalm 69:25 – “May their place be deserted; let there be no one to dwell in their tents.”
By the later Middle Ages, items associated with Jesus’ life had become big business in the world of relics and Christian iconography – the Spear of Longinus, nails from the crucifixion, the holy sponge, crown of thorns, Holy Grail – and a number of so-called ‘Judas pennies’ were presented as relics and were believed to help difficult cases of childbirth. The stone on which the coins were said to have been counted out for Judas was reportedly moved to the Lateran Palace in Rome.
To show the desire to find the so-called ‘Judas pennies’, a Syracusan decadrachm – much bigger than a Tyrian shekel/tetradrachm – which was held in the Hunt Museum in Limerick, Ireland was claimed to be one of the coins given to Judas. It is mounted in a gold frame, which is inscribed Quia precium sanguinis est – ‘This is the price of blood’. Other coins became associated with ‘Judas pennies’, such as those of Rhodes that depicted the sun god Helios with the rays of light being projected from his head interpreted as the Crown of Thorns.
Two places that ‘30 pieces of silver’ definitely went were into the modern parlance as a phrase to describe the price for which a person might sell out or betray another, while the subject of Biblical perfidy on the promise of financial gain provided many artists of the Renaissance and beyond with inspiration for their works.
Bibliography
Blomberg, C.L. ‘Matthew’, in Beale, G.K. Beale and Carson, D.A. Carson (eds.), Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament. Grand Rapids (2007) 1-110
Cherry, J. and Johnston, A. ‘The Hunt Dekadrachm’, AJ 95 (2015) 151-156
Marotta, M.E. ‘So-called 'Coins of the Bible’ (2001) https://web.archive.org/web/20020618223339/http://coin-newbies.com/articles/bible.html
Yeoman, R.S. Moneys of the Bible. New York (1982)
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