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Teachings Of Jesus About Money And Taxes : Render To Caesar What Belongs To Caesar
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The teachings of Jesus about money are always mixed up with political power. Of all the sayings of Jesus, the words, “Then render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s,” (Matthew 22:15-22; Luke 20: 19-26) demonstrate clearly that money is always more than a matter of personal morality.
This is a story about taxation and authority. It gets to the heart of the matter about the relationship of religion and government. It raises the question: Do believers obey God or the government?
This episode shows that Jesus was a watched man. Throughout the gospel narratives, Jesus had several groups of people from the ruling class who followed him around, listening and looking carefully for anything they could use to turn him over to the Roman authorities. The focus of the trap concerns paying taxes to the emperor.
From the time of the Roman conquest of Palestine in 6 C.E., Rome demanded and collected direct taxes from the people. Government officials collected land taxes, a “poll” on each person, taxes on personal property, and taxes on the transport of goods. The question to Jesus concerns the payment of the poll tax.
The occupied people of Palestine hated paying taxes to their Roman occupiers. The people considered themselves oppressed people under military occupation. From time to time, various messianic and revolutionary groups formed in opposition to the Roman occupiers and the Jewish collaborators. Occasionally, an open rebellion broke out and was quickly crushed by the ruling powers.
These revolutionary groups regarded any collaboration with the hated Roman occupiers as treason to God. Refusal to pay the Roman taxes was an act of defiance against the oppressors and an act of allegiance to God.
When these various collaborators with Rome ask Jesus about paying the temple tax, they are looking for evidence that he is one of the revolutionaries, so that they can hand him over to the authority of Pontius Pilate, the chief Roman authority.
During the time of Jesus, several types of coins were commonly used. The Romans minted their own silver coins in Rome and other imperial mints. One of these Roman coins was the denarius, which was the accepted daily wage for a common laborer. The Roman coins had an image of the emperor on the front side of the coin. The coin handed to Jesus was probably the silver denarius bearing the image of Caesar Augustus.
By asking whose image and inscription are on the coin, Jesus successfully avoids the trap. When his questioners identify Caesar, Jesus says, “Render to Caesar what belongs to Caesar.” In other words, he says, “Pay the tax.” He is not openly advocating civil disobedience against the Roman authorities on the matter of taxation-a stance which would have given the Romans immediate cause to arrest him.
Although Jesus avoided the trap in the story, Christian history has used these words to draw a line between church and state. The most notable is Martin Luther’s theology of the two kingdoms. The church would administer the spiritual realm, while worldly governments would rule the secular realm. Although Luther’s theology was more complicated than this, it led to the idea that believers owed allegiance and obedience to the worldly ruler on matters concerning government.
In a situation with many similarities to the Jewish Revolt against Rome, which began in 66 C.E., the German peasants rebelled in the Peasants’ War, 1524-26. They thought that Luther’s stance supported their cause. However, in one of the most controversial decisions of his life, Luther invoked the “Two Kingdoms theology” to condemn the revolt, based on the idea that the political leadership was ordained by God to rule on Earth. The revolt failed, and reinforced the long-standing belief that human beings owe allegiance on Earth to their human rulers.
During the Nazi era, most Christian churches in Germany maintained this separation between church and state. The church ruled on spiritual matters. The government ruled on secular matters. Only a few churches, known as the Confessing Church, defied Hitler’s claim to power, with predictable results. Many died for opposing the power of the government.
The words of Jesus managed to get him off the hook in the story. However, the legacy of these words, “Render to Caesar what belongs to Caesar,” leads to complex and difficult questions about the power of governments and the allegiance of believers. What the Bible says about money is never simply a matter of quoting the teachings of Jesus without understanding the larger political context of the story.
Kalinda Rose Stevenson, Ph.D. What if most of what you believe about the teachings of Jesus about money is not true? Don’t let Bible study lessons based on mistranslations and biblical urban legends fill you with guilt and confusion about what the Bible says about money. I have written a book about 8 sayings of Jesus, Going Broke With Jesus:How Heroic Stories Intended To Liberate The Poor Become Biblical Urban Legends About The Evils Of Money to show how often Christian teaching misunderstands the true intentions of the teachings of Jesus about money. Get your copy at www.GoingBrokeWithJesus.com.
July 24th, 2009 at 6:36 pm
I beg to differ with a portion of your interpretation as reflected in this paragraph:
“By asking whose image and inscription are on the coin, Jesus successfully avoids the trap. When his questioners identify Caesar, Jesus says, ‘Render to Caesar what belongs to Caesar.’ In other words, he says, ‘Pay the tax.’ He is not openly advocating civil disobedience against the Roman authorities on the matter of taxation-a stance which would have given the Romans immediate cause to arrest him.”
If Jesus meant to say, “Pay the tax,” rest assured that he would not have minced words on question of such grave import. He would have said just that. But he didn’t. He said, “Give Caesar that which is Caesar’s, but give God that which is God’s.” This obviously begs the question, What is Caesar’s and what is God’s? Jesus undoubtedly held as Scripture holds (Psalm 24:1, and in seveeral other places) that the world and everything in it belongs to God, which of course leaves nothing whatsoever for poor old Caesar.
So why didn’t Jesus just come out and say, “No, don’t pay it.” Because Jesus was not about to fall iinto any rhetorical trap set by his enemies. They planned to fool Jesus, but Jesus was nobody’s fool. They knew from past encounters with Jesus that he did not countenance Rome’s tax, nor any tax, because taxes violate his Father’s command, “Thou shalt not steal.” And they knew he would not back away from the truth he had previously stated. So they thought they had him, but they severely underestimated him. He gave them exactly the answer they were expecting, but in such a way that they were unable to figure out how to use it against him before Pilate, the man responsible for taxes in Judea. After they had a few day’s to cogitate the impact of his words they no doubt realized he had bamboozled them. So when they dragged him before Caesar they were not lying when they said he had been “forbidding the payment of taxes to Caesar.” (Luke 23:2)
For the most comprehensive analysis of everything Jesus said or did relative to taxes and tax collectors as reported in the canon and non-canonical gospels, see the essay, JESUS OF NAZARETH, ILLEGAL-TAX PROTESTER, which is available from my website, >http://www.jesus-on-taxes.com.<