Taxation, Economy, and Revolt in Ancient Rome, Galilee, and Egypt by Thomas R. Blanton IV;Agnes Choi;Jinyu Liu;

Author:Thomas R. Blanton IV;Agnes Choi;Jinyu Liu; [Liu;, Thomas R. Blanton IV;Agnes Choi;Jinyu]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367472207
Publisher: TaylorFrancis
Published: 2022-03-30T00:00:00+00:00

Mark is our earliest witness to the Synoptic tradition of Jesus’s famous “return to Caesar” teaching and the source of the other versions. In Mark’s account, the Herodians and Pharisees acknowledge that Jesus does not regard people with partiality before asking him, “Is it lawful to give kēnsos to Caesar, or not?” The verb exestin, meaning “it is lawful,” is often used to distinguish what is lawful for one person but not another, as in a letter in which Artemis of Karanis requests a legal representative “because it is not lawful [ouk exesti] for a woman to engage in a lawsuit without a legal representative” (P.Mich. VIII 507 [second/third cent. CE]; my trans.). As we have seen, women, minors, and certain high-status individuals were not legally required to pay poll taxes.

The Latin loanword kēnsos here must refer to taxes collected on the basis of census declarations, but specifically taxes collected in coin, since Jesus asks his interlocutors to bring him a denarius. As Zeichmann (2017b) has argued, in Mark’s post-70 CE context, this could refer not only to a poll tax but also to the Jewish tax.18 For the Markan author and earliest audiences, kēnsos may have encompassed the punitive tax levied on Jews. By validating the payment of census taxes, the Markan Jesus assented to an institution that normalized partiality. In this light, his clever response (“Return to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s”) is cast as successful because Jesus does not show partiality that conflicted with census regulations. To those being taxed as Ioudaioi in Mark’s audience, this might not have been satisfying. Perhaps, however, some would have taken solace in Jesus’s implication that Caesar is not God, which undermines the oath taken in census declarations.19

Matthew’s version of this teaching changes very little, though it is more explicit that the denarius is the “coin of the kēnsos.” Earlier in his gospel, however, Matthean “special material” (i.e., material that only appears in the Gospel of Matthew among the gospels) primes readers to think of the kēnsos in terms of the Jewish tax (Matt 17:24–27):

When they reached Capernaum, the collectors of the didrachma came to Peter and said, “Does your teacher not pay the didrachma?” 25 He said, “Yes, he does.” And when he came home, Jesus spoke of it first, asking, “What do you think, Simon? From whom do kings of the earth take tolls or kēnsos? From their children or from others?” 26 When Peter said, “From others,” Jesus said to him, “Then the children are free. 27 However, so that we do not give offense to them, go to the sea and cast a hook; take the first fish that comes up; and when you open its mouth, you will find a coin; take that and give it to them for you and me.”

Ἐλθόντων δὲ αὐτῶν εἰς Καφαρναοὺμ προσῆλθον οἱ τὰ δίδραχμα λαμβάνοντες τῷ Πέτρῳ καὶ εἶπαν· ὁ διδάσκαλος ὑμῶν οὐ τελεῖ [τὰ] δίδραχμα; 25 λέγει· ναί. καὶ ἐλθόντα

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