I cannot recollect when I did not exist, and there will never be a time when I shall remember that I do not exist. I am immortal.

Robert Ingersoll

Galileans 1

Galilee
Judas of Galilee
Galileans
The Confusion of Coinage

Abstract

Galileans were the supporters of Judas of Galilee, the people whom Josephus soon was calling Zealots. Jesus was also always called a Galilean and led a band of Galileans! But this simply meant they came from Galilee—Christians say. They had the same motto too—“they called no man Lord but God”. This brings us to the question of the tribute money. “Shall we give or not?” Jesus was asked. The same question had incensed the original Galileans so much they had replied, “Never!” Judas had therefore rebelled and set up his revolutionary movement—the Galileans. They were plainly the same Galileans in the gospels, and Jesus was one of them.

Galilee

John was baptizing by the mouth of the Jordan and was held in prison in the fortress of Machaerus to the east of the Dead Sea but Jesus begins his ministry in Galilee. Judaea is inaccessible. Galilee was accessible, had been more influenced by the worldly, successful Canaanites called the Phœnicians in the past, and was still more open to travellers and merchants whether from Syria, Greece or Rome. At the time of John and Jesus, Galilee was wealthy and well populated with industrious people of mixed race, though many had been turned off their land to become day labourers and resentment was high.

Galilee was ruled by a tetrarch, a Roman title for a minor king—Antipas (4 BC-39 AD), a son of Herod the Great—but, since 6 AD, when Antipas’s brother, Archelaus, ruler of Judaea, was banished to Gaul, Judaea had been ruled directly from Rome under a prefect, a Roman governor.

The Maccabees had forcibly converted the people of Galilee to Judaism over 100 years before the gospel events. So, Galileans by religion were Jewish in the first century. Josephus (Life 17) said Galilaeans “were ever fond of innovations, and by nature disposed to changes, and delighted in seditions”. Were they politically fragile and subject to rebellion? They were given the reputation of being fanatical but their ruler, Antipas, unlike his brother Archelaus, ruled 43 years without notable internal incident except for the trouble with John the Baptist.

Why should Galileans have been disliked and held in contempt by their co-religionists of Judaea and thought of as fanatics by Christian historians? Christians have been taught a romantic view of the Galileans, but these citations often meant a band of religious bandits called Galileans, rather than the people of Galilee in general. The truth is that “the Galileans” were rebels, members of the gang of Judas the Galilean, and many Jews were sick of the trouble they fomented.

In Matthew 26:73 Peter is recognized by his accent as being a follower of Jesus. The regional accent of Galileans was strong and their gutturals almost disappeared making it difficult to distinguish certain words. Lazarus (Lazar) is the Galilean dialect pronunciation of Eleazar. But since this scene is fictional, so too is the focus on Peter’s accent. It is part of the pretence that Jesus’s Galileans came from Galilee. No doubt some did, but that is not why they are Galileans! Almost every reference to Galilee in the gospels is false. They all stem from Mark’s gospel and were introduced to hide the truth that Jesus was an active opponent of the Romans. He was a Galilean because his philosophy was that of Judas the Galilean, the outlaw.

If this is not true, we have one of those strange misfortunes in the gospels that always signal a pious lie. The notable Galileans of the time were a gang of nationalist rebels and yet God, apparently unaware of this, sends His son from Galilee with a band of pacific disciples also called “Galileans”. The confusion is not God’s. It is the attempt of the gentile bishops to cover the truth that Jesus was a Galilean—a rebel!

Judas the Galilean

Judas Galilaeus, a scribe, protested against Roman rule and taxation, aiming to be a messianic king and placing the Jews at the head of the world. His followers accepted he was the messiah. He set up his base at Sepphoris, just three miles from the supposed village of Nazareth. Judas was an inspiring public speaker who attracted vast numbers to his standard because of the popularity of his doctrines.

Scholars are fond of calling Judas the Galilean, Judas of Galilee. It is an equivalent choice of translation to that they use of Jesus, Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus is not “of Nazareth” but “the Nazarene”. Judas is not “of Galilee” but “the Galilean”, in the Greek, ho Galilaios. You might think this is being picky but it is not. “The Nazarene” only means “of Nazareth” because Christians tell us it does. Paul MacCartney, the Beatle, is not Paul MacCartney of Beatle. Ron Hubbard, the Scientologist, did not come from some place called Scientology. Such qualifications are as likely, if not more likely, to have something to do with what a person has done than where they lived. Often they signify an affiliation.

In the gospels, despite Matthew’s story about the little town of Bethlehem, a pretence has been made that Jesus was born in Nazareth and he is described occasionally as apo Nazaret, “of Nazareth”, though most frequently he is called “the Nazarene”. However, we know from Josephus that Judas was actually born in Gaulonitis, yet was called “the Galilean”. The point of the pickiness is that Jesus was also called “the Galilean”, and Judas was a known rebel. What then was Jesus and his disciples? Both Jesus and Judas can have been “from Galilee” but what if they were really both “Galileans”? By pretending that “Galilean” only meant from Galilee and not a member of a gang of rebels, attention is deflected from the true nature of Jesus.

Josephus in Antiquities of the Jews describes the philosophy founded by Judas the Galilean as the fourth sect of Jewish philosophy but does not give it a name, merely saying it accepted Pharisaic notions and that its sectaries accepted the slogan:

We have no Lord but only God.

Jesus had exactly the same slogan (Mt 4:10). So, Judas was a pious man whose motives, like Jesus’s, were religious and not merely malice or greed. It seems probable that Christians have struck out of Josephus the name of the gang led by Judas. The Rev Matthew Black writing in Peake’s Commentary on the Bible concedes that Judas’s gang were called “Galileans”, perhaps because they were based specifically in Galilee, because they were in general a provincial group based outside Judaea—Galilee simply means “region”—or because Galilee was the place where they initally revolted against Herod. Judas and his Galileans called for an uprising, breaking into Herod’s arsenal in 4 BC.

Judas was also the leader of a popular revolt a few years later in the “Days of the Taxing”. When Roman rule was declared in Judaea in 6 AD after the banishment of Archelaus, Quirinius, the legate of the Roman province of Syria which included Judaea, carried out a census to assess the population for taxes. Since the followers of Judas believed the only master of the Jews was God, it was improper to pay taxes to a gentile and it was improper to acknowledge false gods—the Emperors were beginning to claim divinity. Furthermore the law of Moses forbade not only foreign rulers, it forbade numbering the people. For some this was the final straw.

Yet was there one Judas, a Gaulonite, of a city whose name was Gamala, who, taking with him Sadduc, a Pharisee, became zealous to draw them to a revolt, who both said that this taxation was no better than an introduction to slavery, and exhorted the nation to assert their liberty.
Josephus Antiquities of the Jews, Whiston 18:1:1

Judas the Galilean and a mystery man called Sadduc combined to resist the numbering of the people by the Romans and formed a religious and political movement of fanatical nationalists. They urged the Jews to rebel and not to pay taxes to Rome, and…

…men received what they said with pleasure, and the nation was infected with this doctrine to a violent degree such that one violent war came after another.
Josephus

Since the Essenes called themselves the sons of Zadok, this association of a Galilean and Sadduc (a variant spelling of Zadok) in founding of the Fourth Philosophy links “the Galileans” with the Essenes.

Judas the Galilean was born in Gamala in Gaulonitis, the present day Golan Heights. The site of the city was found in 1967 as ruins on a hill protected by steep cliffs, near the northwest shore of the Sea of Galilee. Gamala seems only to have been occupied after the return from Babylonian exile, although it had been occupied in prehistoric times. No depictions of the human form were found, all decorations being simply geometrical suggesting that the people of the city were zealous for the law. A place of assembly was also found and some sumps for ritual lustrations like those at Qumran and Masada.

Josephus makes Gamala sound like a fortress and that is how the ruins look. The side and the front are deep valleys. At the back, abutting the mountain, the drop is not precipitous but fortified by a ditch. Houses were built on top of each other and seemed to be suspended from the mountain. On one side was an unassailable height like a citadel.

This was the city of Judas the Gaulonite. If it was the base of the Galilean band, it might have been the city of Jesus—Nazareth. Jesus’s city, according to Luke, should have been on top of a hill by a steep cliff. Modern Nazareth is not, but Gamala is. Unusual coins were found, inscribed with: “Jerusalem the Holy” and “salvation”. Although Gamala was over 100 miles from Jerusalem, its people were apparently minting their own coins calling for the freeing of Jerusalem.

Judas’s revolt was massively successful for a time but ultimately the power of Rome prevailed and Judas perished. Not the Galilean movement however, which evolved into the Zealots who fought the Romans even more vigorously and fanatically in the Jewish War. They preferred torture and death to calling any man Lord.

Both Jesus and Judas led a movement called “Galileans”. Both Jesus and Judas were considered as “sons of David” and the whole of Christendom continues to believe it, though Jesus denied it in Mark’s gospel. Perhaps this brotherhood called themselves the sons of David just as the Qumran sectarians called themselves the Sons of Zadok. Jesus was surely a follower of Judas the Galilean and his successor.

Galileans

The word “Galilean” became for the Romans a synonym for a Jewish rebel. Galileans had an inviolable attachment to liberty, holding God to be their only ruler and Lord, and refusing to call any man Lord even though threatened with death or torture. Jesus would not be tempted by Satan, saying:

Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God and Him only shalt thou serve,
Mt 4:10

just what Galileans believed. The Galileans believed they had to formulate plans for successful exploits and tirelessly pursue them or God would not help them—in short God only helped those who were united and showed initiative, boldness and persistence. Galileans endured pain with resolution and were ready to suffer any manner of death.

The Galilaeans have never been destitute of courage.
Josephus, Wars of the Jews 3:3:2

The Talmud says of them, just like the Poor Ones, they put honour before wealth:

They were ever more anxious for honour than for gain.
Jerusalem Talmud, Kethuboth 4:12

In Life 9, Josephus describes a speech by Justus of Pistus to the people of Tiberias in which he urges them “to take arms and join with the Galilaeans as their confederates and they would assist them out of their hatred of Sepphoris”. Both Tiberias and Sepphoris were cities of Galilee. Though they had become strongly Hellenized, both were Galilean cities in the regional sense used in the gospels, and their citizens were too. Josephus seemed not to be using Galileans in a regional sense, but to mean the band of men dedicated to “innovations”—rebellion! Similarly, in Life 12, Josephus briefly mentions a Jesus, son of Sapphias, who led a rebellion of “mariners and poor people” together with “certain Galileans” to burn Herod's palaces and murder foreigners and collaborating Jews in Tiberias. In these cases, we are hearing of a sect not an ethnos—and Sapphias isn’t a name curiously like Joseph?

By proclaiming the kingdom of God, John the Baptist and Jesus were proclaiming an end to foreign rule—an uprising—just as Judas the Galilean had. Naturally, this would not have been to the Romans’ liking so Jesus had to take care about his claims. Jesus, according to Mark, consistently denied that he was himself the Messiah and indeed sought to silence those who said otherwise. The pious lie is that this is the messianic secret—Jesus, for some reason unknown to theologians wanted to keep his messiahship secret. If Jesus really was the Messiah as the clergy claim then he was lying when he denied it and covered it up. The Christian theory of the messianic secret makes God, in His aspect of the Son, into a liar.

It must be far more convincing, and more acceptable to Christians, to believe that Jesus, at this stage of his ministry, either was not yet the messiah or did not realize that he was the messiah, and would have wanted to keep his activities secret anyway because his aim was to prepare the way for a Jewish king—an enemy of the Roman state. Charismatic itinerant preachers were not unknown at the time. Under the guise of such a man Jesus could call upon people to prepare for the uprising while claiming to be no threat to Rome. There was not the contradiction here that there might seem to us. To the Jews politics and religion were at one. The Nasi was a political leader, a prince, and a religious leader, a priest or prophet. Jesus could use the guise of prophet though in reality a prince.

In John 7:41 the Jerusalem crowd whisper among themselves:

Surely the messiah is not to come from Galilee?

If the tradition here is genuine it must have been:

Surely the messiah is not a Galilean?

When Nicodemus, a Pharisee, defends Jesus to the Chief Priests and Pharisees, they say:

Are you a Galilean too? Prophets do not come from Galilee.
Jn 7:52

The meaning of the question was:

Are you an opponent of the Romans?

An editor added the assertion about the prophets not coming from Galilee to pretend that “Galilean” in the question meant, “from Galilee”, rather than a rebel. The gospels pretend throughout that Jesus is from Galilee when he was really a Galilean—an outlaw like Judas the Galilean.

Scholars regard the Galileans as Zealots. In the Jewish War, when Josephus tells us that Judas the Galilean was a teacher of a peculiar sect of his own, he proceeds to describe at length the Essenes, implying that the Galileans were a branch of the Essenes. Elsewhere he maintains they held the notions of the Pharisees, but it seems unlikely because Pharisees had traditionally preferred to accomomodate the foreigner rather than fight them. Hyppolytus confirms the Zealots as Essenes.

The word from which we get Pharisee means, “separated”, a description which would apply perfectly to the Essenes. So it is conceivable that Josephus wrote in Aramaic, “the notions of the separated ones”, meaning the Essenes but his amanuensis mistook him to mean the Pharisees. His description of Judas’s ally, Sadduc, as a Pharisee in the same chapter seems to repeat the error. Ellis Rivkin has shown that the word for Pharisee in the Tannaitic literature can also mean “ascetics” in a pejorative sense and also “heretics.” Either could have meant Essenes and not the sect called the Perushim (Pharisees). An alternative is that Christians changed the original to implicate the Pharisees so that Jesus could not possibly have been thought of as being one of these rebelious Galileans, a variety of his mortal enemies. Josephus seems far from consistent in his approach to the Pharisees in his various works, suggesting either transcription errors or deliberate Christian editing. In Antiquities 17:2:4, the plotting Pharisees sound more like Essenes.

Despite the decline of the Zealots into banditry, Judas the Galilean continued to be respected, for later we find his sons also leading rebellions against Roman rule. Tiberius Julius Alexander, a Romanized Jew, procurator of Judaea from 46-48 AD and the nephew of Philo of Alexandria, crucified two of them, James and Simon, for subversive activities. Some “brothers” of Jesus, also curiously James and Simon, were arrested for subversion. Was Jesus related to Judas? Following the Semitic custom of speech, “sons” in Josephus will have meant followers not literally sons. It is more likely that these people were sons in this sense than that they were actual blood sons of Judas of Gamala. Those who are sons of some founder are also, of course, brothers of each other, so here was a brotherhood, just like the Essenes and the Christians.

A third “son”, Menehem, who in 60 AD must have been an old man if he was literally a son of Judas, declared himself Messiah in Jerusalem during the Jewish War and captured the stronghold of Masada from the Romans. But in faction fighting among the rebels, the High Priest’s men murdered him. Eleazar, a nephew of Menehem, with only a few hundred Zealots, held Masada against the Romans for three years after the fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD.

That Essene texts were found among the Zealot debris in the ruins of the fortress of Masada is evidence that Zealots were Essenes even if all Essenes were not Zealots. The classical authors have misled us into believing that Essenes were pacifists because they would not serve as soldiers—they would not fight in any war. But once they had decided a war was a just war called by God against the men of darkness—a holy war—they would fight with unrestrained ferocity and the bravery possessed of all those who believe that dying for God means eternal life. Their whole purpose in life seems to have been to prepare for God’s holy war against the gentiles and unrepentant sinners.

Letters written by Bar Kosiba in 135 AD found at Murabba’at, about 12 miles from Qumran, complain about the lack of support he is getting from the Galileans and yet he warns one of his generals:

Not to wrong any of the Galileans who are with you.

Why should Galileans be specifically mentioned among the rebels by the Dead Sea unless they were freedom fighters, a type of Zealot—a type that evidently did not wholeheartedly support Bar Kosiba? These Galileans—like the Galileans of the gospels—were not necessarily from Galilee but people who supported the aims of Judas the Galilean. They supported Bar Kosiba’s stand against the Romans but could not accept Bar Kosiba as the messiah because they recognized Judas or Jesus as their messiah.

Father de Vaux who excavated the ruins at Qumran accepts that the reference here to “Galileans” is to a sect, not a group of Galilean nationals. But de Vaux considers them early Christians still known by their gospel name, “Galileans”, and pacific and therefore refusing to fight. Why should peace loving Galileans—meaning Christians—be expected to support Jewish rebels? Indeed, if they were peace loving why should they be with the Bar Kosiba rebels? Because “Galileans” still supported the aims of Judas the Galilean and were still freedom fighters, a type of Zealot, a hundred years after their former leader Jesus had been crucified.

Another letter from the same source speaks of the purchase of a heifer. It seems bizarre that a rebel group, sought by twelve legions of Roman soldiers, should be entering into commercial contracts and sending letters to seal them when, as the letter says, the gentiles were so close. These were desperate men hiding in the wilderness from the conquering legions. The letters are obviously not what they seem but are coded messages. Moreover, the letter was written in Hebrew, a language which was already dead in everyday use and only preserved for religious purposes. In short, the letter was doubly coded—disguised as a bill of sale and written in a dead language that the gentiles would not know. A heifer, from Numbers, represented the covenant, and the sense is perhaps that of an apology for failing to render needed assistance to those of the covenant. The point however is that these anti-Roman rebels used ways of encrypting their messages. The Nazarenes did the same.

Jesus’s ministry was to all Jews, so he could have been operative in any of the Jewish countries of Palestine, Judaea, Galilee and Iturea. In Acts 10:37, Peter tells us that Jesus preached throughout Judaea not only in Galilee:

That word, I say, ye know, which was published throughout all Judaea, and began from Galilee, after the baptism which John preached.

At the start of his ministry, Jesus escaped to the north because Herod was busy rounding up troublemakers in the south—Matthew says so:

Now when Jesus had heard that John was cast into prison, he departed into Galilee,

but he would have been safer still in Judaea, a separate country outside of Herod’s jurisdiction, intimating that the escape to Galilee might be an interpolation or alteration. In John, Jesus recruits disciples immediately after his baptism, and therefore in the region of the Arabah, by the mouth of the Jordan near the Dead Sea not in Galilee. Here he goes to Galilee after a few days. Again, we are told that the disciples come from towns in Galilee to cover the fact that they are “Galileans”.

If later Christians could be known by the name “Galileans”, then why should we assume with certainty that the original Galileans of the gospels were Galileans by birth and not by some sort of affiliation? Yet, over 300 years after Christ, Roman writers like the Pagan emperor Julian the Apostate described Christians as Galileans and called Christ “The Galilean”.

Christians want us to think that Jesus came from Galilee and to that end Mark spends a large part of his gospel describing a long ministry in Galilee before Jesus decides to go to Jerusalem, apparently as a pilgrim, and meet his destiny. The whole Galilean ministry was invented because, when Jesus was charged before Pilate, the word “Galilean” told everyone that he was a revolutionary. Mark hopes to counter this by suggesting that Jesus and his friends were simple peasants from Galilee. The other gospels follow suit.

The Confusion of Coinage

Both Jesus and Judas were accused of refusing to pay tribute to the Romans. Because Judas opposed Roman rule and taxation, he denounced the payment of tribute to the Romans, a marked difference from Jesus, say Christians. But the Christian interpretation of Jesus’s attitude to the tribute money is a blatant falsehood as any modern Jew who reads the gospels must know.

The Prefects of Judaea had the right to issue low denomination coins in copper, Vincent Cook of the Epicurus website explains to us, and vast numbers of them were stamped. They can now be bought from dealers for only a few dollars each. This denomination was called the prutah (plural, prutoth), and almost anyone even today can own one if they want a souvenir that might have been handled by Jesus and the disciples themselves. They were not stamped with images of the emperor, we are told because the Jews were sensitive about images on their coinage. So these mites or farthings were stamped with neutral images such as cornucopia, wreaths, palms or ears of barley.

Coins from years 2, 3, 4, 5, and 11 of Tiberius’s reign fall, on the conventional understanding of the tours of duty of the prefects, into the category of Gratus issues. Gratus coins had the images mentioned, as did some pre-Roman Herodian coins and a coins issued during the later Jewish uprisings. The coin faces were completed usually with an inscription referring to the emperor and Julia, his mother, and a date stamp that indicated the number of years the emperor had reigned. So, prutahs were minted annually in the first four years when we can suppose Gratus was undoubtedly prefect, and dated appropriately LB, LG, LD and LE, L simply denoting a year and the letter standing for the number in the sequence of the Greek alphabet. Another seems to be year LIA, unless it is made from a faulty LD die.

Coins from years 16, 17, and 18 (LIS, LIZ, LIH) of Tiberius’s reign (29-31 AD) are considered Pilate types. The point about these is that they carried on them stylised images of implements that were used in the Roman Pagan rituals of the time—a “simpulum” in 29 AD, and a “lituus” in 30 and 31 AD. These were respectively a ritual ladle and a priest’s symbol of office, the very one still carried by Christian bishops, a fancy shepherd’s crook. Engraving coinage dies with pagan implements is always considered to have been a deliberate insult by Pilate, and it looks as if it was. Yet the coins seem to have been accepted without any resistance, if we are to accept the Christian reading of history.

Christians say the coins stopped being issued after 31 AD because Sejanus fell out of favour as Tiberius’s Viceroy in that year, and Pilate did not have a free hand from then on to do as he liked. Even though his protector had lost favour, however, and Pilate was supposedly a monster, he was not actually sacked! Nor were the coins he issued withdrawn from circulation, which is why they are still so common that we all can afford one. In subsequent years, different Procurators, like Felix, did overstamp some of them but they neverthless remained in circulation, offensive as they were, for decades.

Prutahs are only low denomination coins, doubtless necessary for ordinary dealing in a small poor country but hardly inflationary. Why is the minting history of them so sporadic? Coponius and Ambibulus apparently also minted coins but Rufus did not. One would have thought that proper coinage needed a regular mint with properly trained engravers and diesmiths. Coins made only in occasional spates will tend to have a lot of mistakes in their dies, as the Pilate varieties do.

Was Gratus a competent administrator and Pilate was not? Or is there a scam here? By minting copper coins could the Prefect pocket silver? Or were these coins used for the daily pay of soldiers? Did coining them imply that there were more soldiers to be paid and therefore that rioting or rebellion was going on? After Pilate the minting of these coins was moved to Antioch, perhaps because of a scam or because the workmanship was so abysmal. Perhaps the one implied the other. Anyway, was it to prevent abuse of it by prefects of Judaea? Kenneth Lönnqvist says in the context of Agrippa II coins minted about forty years later at the time of the Jewish war:

The enormous series of small bronze is probably to be considered as Agrippa II´s contribution to the cost of participating in the First Jewish Revolt. The coins were likely the primary pay-money to the Agrippan troops. This may also explain the high frequency of the coin types in certain contexts (Jerusalem and Masada), which are known to have been sacked by the Roman army and its allied troops. That King Agrippa II started minting in AD 66/67 with one of these large series of small bronze (the denomination was small, but the bulk value enormous) is very logical…

So, the questions are whether Pilate was printing copper money to replace silver money that he pocketed, or was he printing copper money to pay soldiers because he had a rebellion on his hands. In conventional chronology, the rebellion looks likely to have been that led by Jesus. Professor Stauffer, who generally likes to Christianize the truth in his historical essays, admits that:

In the eyes of his opponents, Jesus is a new Judas of Galilee.

The opponents of the Christian God were, of course, mistaken, as they were in every particular of the Christian myth, though no honest examination could accept it. Galileans were the supporters of Judas of Galilee, the people whom Josephus soon was calling Zealots. Jesus was also always called a Galilean and led a band of Galileans! But this simply meant they came from Galilee—Christians say. They had the same motto too. They were plainly the same movement. This brings us to the question of the tribute money. “Shall we give or not?” Jesus was asked. The same question had incensed the original Galileans so much they had replied, “Never!” Judas had therefore rebelled and set up his revolutionary movement—the Galileans.

Jesus in the bible story tells his inquisitors to bring him a penny—a Roman denarius. Now, in the light of the discussion above, here is an immediate problem that some historians have highlighted. The denarius had upon it the image of the Roman Caesar, the image that was supposedly so grossly offensive to Jews that they would not have the image printed on to their farthings. If the copper prutoth could bear no image of the emperor, then the higher denomination, the denarius cannot have either, surely? Er, no! Denarii “were circulating in Palestine at that time in great quantities!” None other than Ethelbert Stauffer, who was a numismatist as well as a professor at the University of Erlanger, assures us of this even though he has earlier assured us (Jesus and the Caesars) with lengthy arguments that the Jews would just not tolerate faces of Roman kings on their coins. Large numbers of these denarii have been found in confirmation, but the New Testament itself confirms it, explicitly mentioning them in several places (Mk 6:37, 14:5; Mt 18:28, 20:2; Lk 7:1, 10:35; Jn 6:7, 12:5; Acts 6:6), and so does the Jewish Talmud. Stauffer categorically states:

In no country did so many kinds of money circulate as in Palestine.

The besotted Christian cannot seem to notice that these new words contradict his previous arguments about Jewish sensitivity to images on coins. The denarius was effectively the standard coinage of the empire, rather like the US dollar or the UK pound. So, taxation was paid in it, and evidently Jesus did not have one himself, obviously as a matter of principle.

The emperor Augustus had issued hundreds of types of denarius in his long reign, but Tiberius, conservative and tidy as he was, struck only three, and only one of those in large numbers. He could see no point in change for its own sake, and stuck to the design he liked, minted at Lyons in Gaul with only minor stylistic changes for twenty years. It was forged within the empire and was copied as local coinage beyond its boundaries in Persia and India. The strong balance of probability is that, if the story of the tribute money is historical, then this was the denarius that Jesus spoke about.

The obverse has a bust of Tiberius wearing a laurel wreath and the Latin inscription: “Tiberius Caesar, august son of the august God”. The august God meant Augustus, his father by adoption. The reverse has the image of the joint ruler, Julia Augusta (Livia), the wife of Augustus and mother of Tiberius, holding a spear and an olive branch representing the Pax Romana. On this side the superscription was “Pontifex Maximus”, meaning High Priest, a function and title of the emperor. These coins were of obvious cultic significance, Tiberius openly recognising both Augustus and Livia as gods, Augustus in words, and Livia in imagery. It is hard to see how this could not have been offensive to Jews, if we are to suppose that a crook and a ladle, stylised at that, and common enough objects in themselves, should have been found so offensive.

There is no doubt that coinage symbolised power and new rulers usually marked their reigns with an issue of new coins. In 1 Maccabees 15:6, Antiochus writes to Simon, the Jewish High Priest giving him authority to coin money with his own stamp. Bar Kosiba had the Roman denarii collected, the Roman images beaten out, and stamped afresh with acceptable images of temple ware. Yet the Talmud says that Jewish money changers, whose place of work was the temple, wore a denarius as an ear ring to denote their business. Millions of denarii must have passed through the court of the temple. The overthrowing of the tables that Jesus undertook in the temple court was obviously to throw down this Roman money.

The point is that despite the false Jewish and Christian arguments, most Jews were tolerant of the Roman coinage despite their Pagan images. Those who were not were the “Galileans”, the gang of fanatics, probably Essenes, who later broadened into the Zealots. Jesus overhtrew the tables of the money lenders in the temple courts showing he was among the fanatics, and the Christian interpretation of his answer about the tribute money blatantly ignores its true and only conceivable interpretation.

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