He expelled the money changers. So was Jesus anti-capitalist?

0:00Robin: In 1898, John Nuveen had a vision to underwrite municipal bonds that would propel American infrastructure into the 20th century. More than 125 years later, that vision lives on. Today, Nuveen has grown into a leading global asset manager with expertise spanning public and private markets, still investing with a future in mind. Nuveen. Invest like the future is watching. Visit nuveen.com slash future to learn more. Investing involves risk. Principal loss is possible.

0:30Gillian: Jesus' story of money could not live alongside the stories that the people who ran the machine in his day were telling, so they killed him.

0:37Robin: The message from Jesus around money might be described today as pretty anti-capitalist.

0:42Tom Thatcher: You're trying to insult half of America at whatever we're doing now, aren't we?

0:46Gillian: One of my own favorite stories are these big urns where people would come and make donations. And this old woman comes up who's got two pennies. That's all that she puts in. And Jesus says, hey, she gave everything she had. Less than a week after he said that, he was dead.

1:06Robin: Today on the story of money, imagine being arrested and executed after you disrupt the operation of a currency market.

1:15Tom Thatcher: Well, that was the fate of possibly, arguably the most famous person in history. This was someone renowned for his wisdom, his compassion, someone whose teachings inspired one of the great religions of the world. And yet many historians believe that this act of financial defiance triggered a chain of events that culminated in his brutal death at the age of roughly 33.

1:42Robin: Now, we are, of course, talking about that first century Jewish agitator, Jesus of Nazareth. And as the Bible said, he stormed into the Temple of Jerusalem and tore into the money changers operating there. Soon after, the Romans arrested him, tortured him and crucified him.

2:02Tom Thatcher: But why did Jesus care so much about a bunch of currency traders in the first place? Was he like an anti-capitalist in the days before capitalism even had a name? and what role did money play in his life, his teachings and his death. Here to tell us that incredible story is Tom Thatcher. Tom, thanks so much for being here on the show with us.

2:26Gillian: Thank you. It is a pleasure to be here. Very exciting. I'm actually, I'm very humbled to be asked. Love your show and glad to be here.

2:32Robin: So Tom, you're a lifelong scholar of Jesus as a historical figure and you've written a couple of books about him, haven't you?

2:39Gillian: I have written 23 books. 23 books. Jesus is a historical figure, and I've been involved in many research units in the Society of Biblical Literature, so this has been a topic close to my heart for a long, long time.

2:51Tom Thatcher: Yes. Well, I mean, Gillian, 23 books, I'm starting to feel a little bit lazy over here.

2:55Robin: Exactly. You're definitely a slouch, you know.

2:57Gillian: I didn't say they were good, man. I just said there were a lot of them.

3:00Tom Thatcher: No, no, no. I mean, look, any book takes a heck of a lot of energy. And, Tom, you're actually an ordained church minister as well, So your interest in Jesus as a historical figure is not just an idle curiosity, is it?

3:14Gillian: It is definitely a deeply personal topic. For me, it is the driving vision for my own view of money and everything money does and could do. I actually like Jesus' vision for money. I don't like everything he said or did, but I like his vision for money. I wish his story of money could have come to its full conclusion. Unfortunately, Jesus' story of money could not live alongside the stories that the people who ran the machine in his day were telling. So they killed him before we could get a happy ending.

3:46Robin: Well, that's going to be a very interesting discussion. You know, we are conscious that for people of faith, some of this may be a bit sensitive. But it's going to be an interesting angle both on the story of Jesus, but also the story of money. So welcome to this episode. I'm Gillian Tett.

4:02Tom Thatcher: And I'm Robin Wigglesworth.

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4:44Tom Thatcher: So this episode is about Jesus Christ, but specifically the historical Jesus, the Jesus of Nazareth, who may be quite different from the man you imagine. But before we get to the man himself, I want to start with that incident we trailed in the introduction which comes near the end of his life because this incident this event is going to be the central focus of our episode so it happened in jerusalem at around 30 ce or 30 ad for the christians in our audience and here's how the gospel of matthew describes it jesus entered the temple courts and drove out all who were buying and selling there he overturned the tables of the money changers and the benches of those selling doves.

5:26Tom Thatcher: It is written, he said to them, my house will be called a house of prayer, but you are making it a den of thieves.

5:34Robin: So that's a particularly famous moment in the life of Jesus, known as the cleansing of the temple. He clearly created a huge ruckus and it would have huge consequences for him, tragic consequences. So Tom, explain to us what's actually happening here, starting with the venue. Because the temple in Jerusalem no longer exists, either as a building or institution. But in the first century, it was absolutely critical to the life of the Jewish people, wasn't it?

6:06Gillian: It was absolutely critical. So actually, the temple does sort of still exist today, what's left of it. If you've been to Jerusalem or just seen the pictures in the news, the Dome of the Rock, which is a Muslim holy place, now sits on the site where the ancient Jewish temple was, almost exactly on that site. But the temple that existed in Jesus' time in Jerusalem was not the one that was originally built way back in Bible times by King Solomon. That temple had been destroyed by the Babylonian Empire about 600 years before Jesus lived. And then they had built a new one around 500 years before Jesus lived.

6:43Gillian: So the one that Jesus engaged with was an old building at that time. And it was nice and it served its purpose. But that temple originally was not especially huge or impressive. It was unique because Jewish law did not allow Jews to offer sacrifices anywhere else except at this one temple in Jerusalem. It would be like saying that today every Catholic mass has to be performed at the Vatican in Rome. So over time, as the Jewish people spread out across the Greek and Roman Empire, this relatively small temple in Jerusalem became a huge global tourist destination for them. It was a place that Jewish people would go back to, to worship and experience God there and connect with their own identity as Jewish.

7:29Gillian: Same as many modern Jews will take pilgrimages to Israel today. So when the Romans took over Israel, now we're about 60 years before Jesus was born, the first Roman king of the Jews, King Herod the Great, who's the guy in the Christmas story, by the way, that the wise men come to visit and ask where the Messiah has been born. That guy. He's coming in as the Roman king or the Roman ruler of the Jewish people. And he realizes, I want to make a good impression on them. And I also would like to boost the economy. I'd like to create some jobs, fire up the economy while also doing some things that the Jewish people would appreciate.

8:04Gillian: decade, Herod decided to dramatically expand the complex around that temple building. Now, the Jewish law is not going to let you change the architecture of the temple. So Herod said, and this is about, now we're 20 or 30 years before Jesus was born. What I'm going to do is build a massive complex around that little temple building. I'm going to build an entire district around this little temple building. So Herod started doing that. He put thousands of people to work. He claimed a massive percentage of the total footprint of the city to do this so that by the time Jesus is an adult, around say 30 CE or AD, this religious pilgrimage site had turned into the largest public complex, the largest public anything in the Roman world.

8:53Gillian: So now what was this one little space is the biggest tourist attraction in the eastern Mediterranean. And you're getting so many people coming that there's times of the year when the population of Jerusalem would swell from, say, 60 ,000 in a normal week to maybe more than a million people at a time during certain weeks of the year.

9:15Tom Thatcher: But I'm curious, Tom, because I don't think I've ever seen a picture or illustration of it at all. What did the temple physically look like? Can you describe the construction of it?

9:26Gillian: The temple building itself was not really huge. It's a rectangular, colonnaded building. And its architecture reflects this idea that God is so holy that you can't see God or have immediate access to God. Or, you know, you'll experience what happened to those guys in Raiders of the Lost Ark when they opened the Ark of the Covenant and melted away.

9:46Tom Thatcher: Very good Dinanda Jones reference there. I love that.

9:50Gillian: anyway it's a classic man so in the very the very center of that building you have a very small room called the holy of holies and that is empty because the jewish people didn't believe in idols so that's where god lives and only the high priest can ever go in there one day of the year on the day of atonement yom kippur outside you have an area called the court of the priests which is where the priests who performing sacrifices like killing animals and burning them in that area and there's like a barricade around that area and then if you go out there's another barricade around an area called the court of israel only jewish men were allowed to go there because in their culture the male head of the household brings the sacrifice so the men go into there with a sheep or a dove whatever you're going to sacrifice and give it to the priest across that wall across that gate.

10:45Gillian: Outside of the court of men, you have the court of women. So if I come with my wife and my family, my daughters are there, they can go to that level of being that close to God. And then me and my sons will go into the next level to give the sacrifices to the priest. And then outside, and this is getting into Jesus' time, there's a much larger area called the court of Gentiles, which Gentiles just means anybody that's not Jewish, where anyone can come. And that area is where they would have the booth set up for the money changing and for selling sacrificial animals that, again, you could take in.

11:22Tom Thatcher: Oh, those famous dove vendors as well, then?

11:24Gillian: Yeah, the dove vendors, and they're selling sheep and all of this. And then outside of that, you have this massive commercial district of shops and restaurants and wine bars and places to talk business and hotels and warehouses and stockyards and the rich neighborhoods where the people who run this whole thing go at the end of their workday. So it's actually a whole district of the city that's like a series of concentric circles with God's little room in the bullseye in the center of that temple building. Massively. It's impossible to overstate how massive, especially if I'm a person like Jesus, who's grown up in a city, a little town with 50 people.

12:05Gillian: You've never seen anything like this in your life before, except in this one place. Yeah.

12:10Tom Thatcher: So this construction project that King Herod famously started, that was one of the biggest construction projects in the world at the time, right?

12:16Gillian: Oh, monstrous. It's certainly one of the most expensive buildings, maybe ever, in terms of relative to what the actual GDP of that province was. The Jewish historian Josephus thinks that about 16 ,000 or 17 ,000 people are employed just working on the temple and its construction and maintenance. which means in a city of 60 ,000, if one third of the people work on this one building, it means everybody else works for a collateral business around the building, a bookkeeping company or a shipping company or a restaurant or a hotel. The whole economy of that city is tied up in that place that people come in and meet God.

12:55Robin: So you've laid out a vision of why this was so unbelievably important for the Jewish people. But the question I have is, what on earth were money changers doing in the outer courtyard?

13:04Gillian: Basically, under the Jewish law, adult male Jews 20 and up had to pay a tax every year for the temple's maintenance. And it's set at a certain number of grams of silver you have to pay for this tax. Well, by the time we get to Jesus' time, you've got different money being minted and used all across the Roman Empire with different silver weight in it, different values, same as different currencies today. and so in order to pay this tax which is equivalent to about two days wages it's not a huge tax it's a flat tax you have to convert it to a standardized currency and the currency they used was called the Tyrian Shuckle.

13:46Gillian: Tyre is a city I think it's still a big tourist destination up in Lebanon where they minted a coinage like the old Spanish pieces of eight that had a really high consistent pure silver content for trade purposes. Had actually had a picture of the pagan god Melkart on it, ironically. But it was a very, very highly respected currency because it was really pure and had very high silver content. So when you went to the temple, they used that coinage to pay this annual temple tax, which means I got to take my money from Spain or Egypt and buy, kind of like buying fairground tokens or casino chips. Actually, you go into the casino, I put down my euros or my US dollars.

14:26Gillian: I take your chips. I go give them back to the house. The house takes 90 % of them. So now the house has my money and my chips. And of course, they're going to charge a little point of sale fee for that too.

14:38Robin: So who was actually in charge of the temple?

14:40Gillian: Basically, the Romans controlled the temple. So the Romans effectively appointed a high priest from a certain very small number of families who would have said on a hereditary basis they could serve in that role. and two of the high priests that are mentioned in the story about Jesus' death, Annas and Caiaphas, those who are father and son-in-law, those two guys and their families controlled the high priesthood really for a period of would be about 80 years, 90 years. So you have a very small number of families that are very closely attached to the Romans that are the high priests and then they kind of run the administration of the whole thing down from there.

15:23Tom Thatcher: Okay, so Judea is at the time a part of the Roman Empire famously. I'm curious, I mean, how exactly did that work in practice? Like, how did the Romans govern Judea? How did they tax people? How did the relationship between Judea and Rome function in practice?

15:41Gillian: So the Romans, like modern, honestly, colonial governments and empires today, You don't want to spend a whole lot of money having a lot of people on the ground. So they will send a governor or a prefect. Here's the political angle and controls the military there and preserves law and order. Their preferred practice, though, like most colonial empires, was to work through a local leadership that the people would connect with. So when the Romans got to Israel, the people that the people looked to and connected with were the priests who ran their temple. And so we're going to work through those people, the priests, to control the masses.

16:28Gillian: And the Romans aren't there to bring new auto bonds or to up the stock market in Jerusalem. They're there to make money. And it's an agrarian society. It's an agricultural economy. So the way we're going to make money is any goods you grow, we're going to put taxes on everything. The Romans actually would privatize tax collection. So there were companies that they would contract to go out and collect the taxes. They would basically say in this area, we think this is the GDP of Judea. We want this much money coming out of there. And then you contract a company that can go do that at a certain margin that they set.

17:09Robin: That sounds quite familiar because we're seeing elements of that even today returning on the world stage.

17:14Gillian: Well, some would say that's a more efficient way to do it. But it's also opens up a ton of potential for corruption because if I'm if I'm who do I appeal to if someone is messing me over, if the tax collectors are trying to mess me over.

17:28Robin: So that's fascinating. So we basically have a situation where you have the temple that is wealthy and powerful and quite extractive. But on top of that, you've also got the colonial structures, the Roman colonial structures was even more exploitative. And that all helps explain a bit about this famous scene with the money changers and the person who was creating all that ruckus, who was Jesus. But before we come on to that, let's talk about Jesus for a moment, because on the one hand, he appears to be incredibly well known in the world today. Even non-Christian communities tend to date their calendars from his birth.

18:06Robin: And yet one of your arguments, Tom, is that the historical reality of Jesus is somewhat different from what we all think we know.

18:14Gillian: Well, when we talk about the Jesus of history, what we're looking at there very specifically is who he was as a person interacting with his own context versus later theological ideas about him being the son of God or the savior or the sacrifice for sins. Those are all important things. But what we're talking about now is who he was as a historical person interacting with his own context. Yeah, he wasn't even called Jesus, right? No, Jesus is his Greek translation of his name. His real name was Joshua. He was probably named after the famous Joshua that led the Jewish people into the promised land.

18:52Gillian: Two of the four gospels say that he was born in Bethlehem, which today it's a part of metropolitan Jerusalem. But they all say that he grew up in Galilee, up in the north. That he is a Galilean from a very small village called Nazareth. And by the way, he wasn't born, the history of how this word, he wasn't born in the year we think he was born. He was actually born like four or five BC in the last year of King Heron's reign. And there was a miscalculation of the calendar, I think, what, in the sixth or seventh century. And they dated it wrong. So he was actually born five years before he was born.

19:30Tom Thatcher: I mean, we've all made some math problems at some point, right? Nobody, none of us three have ever made a math mistake so bad that it's altered the entire human calendar, as it were.

19:41Gillian: We don't know when he was born. December 25th was an existing Roman holiday. So the Christians said, hey, if we're already off work, we're going to celebrate his birthday. On the same day, they were celebrating the birthday of this other God. But what we do know is he grew up in Galilee, miles, days away from Jerusalem and Judea. Nazareth is such a small town. It's not even really mentioned in any other ancient sources outside of the Bible. It might have been 50 different households there, maybe two or three families, you know, of all different families. Very small place. Very, very small. Very Jewish, as far as we can tell, because their archaeological remains, they have the places they would take their ritual baths and the stone pottery for purity and things like that.

20:27Gillian: But very tiny. He's probably, and I don't mean this in any offensive way, back in Jesus' time, maybe 3 % of the population was literate. and he was not one of those people because he was not trained so he's definitely nothing like a modern priest or pastor who had like nine years of education and probably comes out of a middle or upper middle class background he definitely is coming from the from the bottom side of the

20:54Tom Thatcher: cultural economic spectrum back then well in the bible he's obviously also brought up by his mother mary and her husband joseph and jesus and joseph are usually described as woodworkers carpenters but they came from a farming background, right?

21:10Gillian: An interesting aspect of Jewish law is that if a man has four sons and he owns a farm or a vineyard, the oldest son gets a double inheritance because the older son is supposed to take care of me in my old age. Well, that's a great idea and it makes sense as a form of social security for the elderly. But you take that down 10 generations and the younger sons are splitting what used to be 100 acres down into 50 acres and 30. And now I got one and then I got none because I had to sell it because I had terrible debt. So you have a lot of people in the time of Herod the Great especially turning to what we would call trades.

21:48Gillian: Like they become day laborers. And what looks like happened is they were basically construction workers who would have gone around and worked on these different public works projects that Herod was paying for all over the place to put people back to work. Actually, if any of your listeners or viewers are interested in ever taking a trip to Israel, you can visit a town called Sephiroth, which was a Roman colony up in Galilee. That's about six miles, maybe an hour and a half walk from Nazareth. And I've been there. I personally think that that's where Jesus probably grew up working on that, you know, So cutting tile, pulling stone, framing up buildings.

22:29Gillian: He spent the first 25 years of his life growing up in a construction family and breaking rocks.

22:36Robin: So like a lot of people in America and elsewhere in the world today. And since this is a podcast about money, tell us what his experience would have been of money. Would he have been paid for his work at Zephyrus or elsewhere with cash?

22:52Gillian: You would be paid, but this is more like a pre-monetary society where the average person doesn't have money. You know, famously in the Lord's Prayer, Jesus says to pray, give us today our daily bread. Because if I'm a guy like Jesus, I go out to work in the morning with nothing and I work, you know, 10 or 12 hours until the sun goes down, basically. And I might get paid a few coins or some kind of food ration or salt, like they used to be, we call salaries because the Roman already paid soldiers in salt to take home. And on the way home, if I need to buy some food or I need to buy some new pottery for the house, I buy that.

23:37Gillian: And then I go home and I don't have any money. And then the next day I start that over. And also too, it's vitally important for modern people to remember that whatever their currency is actually has silver or gold are in it. It's not like a piece of paper that represents something else. So they just don't have a lot of money that they are in control of. And even the little bit that you have, honestly, it's nothing like a modern Western society where, you know, hard work, union work, I can make a decent wage. If you make more, they're going to take more and you're going going to stay increasingly impoverished because you got to pay the taxes to the temple.

24:19Gillian: You got to pay your offerings. You're also going to have to pay your taxes back to Rome. Everything you buy has a toll tax in it. You're going to fish on the lake. You got to attack. Matthew, who we think wrote the gospel of Matthew traditionally, was a tax collector who sat out on the road and taxed all the farm wagons coming back into town. So I have heard, and I think it's reasonable, that if I'm a person like Jesus, I'm paying 60 to 70 % of what I make in taxes. Especially when you consider, again, they don't have an income tax economy. They have a sales tax, a tariff tax economy where everything is built into the price of everything you buy.

24:57Gillian: So the prices are elevated. And if you don't pay your taxes back then, there is zero bankruptcy protection. If you couldn't pay your taxes, you sold yourself or your kids into slavery. And then on the other hand, you've got this small small class of people who are becoming very conspicuously wealthy as more and more money is going into the roman system into the new economic world that is emerging uh so it would be it's not when we complain about our taxes today we have no idea yeah i mean i'm norwegian and even

25:28Tom Thatcher: i think 70 sounds pretty high and we get pretty good public services for it which i don't think

25:33Gillian: was probably true back then the public service is the police so that keep you aligned so it's really that kind of a situation for him.

25:41Robin: So all in all, it's really a world of tremendous stress in the sense we have high economic uncertainty, high inequality, high debt, high taxes, all of which are the complex that sounds familiar to some degree. And yet at the age of 30, Jesus breaks out. He embarks on the part of his life that we all know about and start spreading the word of the gospel and he starts preaching. Why? What happens, Tom, that actually starts that?

26:13Gillian: Well, so what happens to him, and this is straight out of the biblical account, which is all we have on this, he went down to the Jordan River on some occasion to see a very famous religious celebrity named John the Baptist. He was famously very ascetic. He lives out in the desert by himself, eating bugs and wearing camel hair and taking cold showers and all that. So Jesus goes down there. And if you know the Bible story, while Jesus is being baptized by John, he and John have a visionary experience where God tells him, hey, I'm setting you apart to go proclaim my kingdom around the area. The difference between Jesus and John the Baptist, and what's going to become in my mind, the difference between Jesus and the temple is this, If you wanted to see a guy like John the Baptist, he's doing a residency at the Sphere.

27:10Gillian: So you want to see John the Baptist, you fly to Vegas, you watch the show, you go back home. Jesus comes up out of that movement and says, listen, we're going to go on tour 365 days a year. So we're not going to be at a temple. We're not going to be at the Jordan River. I'm going to come to you. And so his movement is completely decentralized, super low overhead. In his mind, God is everywhere, so God can be experienced everywhere. So again, why would you need to go down to the Jordan River or down to the temple in Jerusalem to experience that? Because we're going to do it right here in front of you.

27:46Tom Thatcher: Well, I mean, Jesus obviously in his wanderings had a lot to say about forgiveness, repentance, loving thy neighbor, the odds on a rich man getting into heaven, for example. and that last part obviously the part we really care about because you know the podcast is focused on money not matters of faith uh uh but i was wondering what was his message about money

28:08Gillian: in his wanderings in his teachings to people well real quick money is his biggest topic actually we just never want to talk about it because uh it doesn't sell as well to talk about what jesus said about money so i'll tell you i'll throw a couple examples at you that illustrate why his story of money was never going to work with the story of money that the people at the temple in Jerusalem were telling. So one of his real famous ones is called the parable of the talents. And the short version on that one is you have a guy who's really rich, who owns a big estate. He's going to go on a, like a year long business trip.

28:41Gillian: He gives three of his servants a certain amount of money to invest. One gets like one talent, which is a massive amount of money, say a million bucks. He gives another 5 million, gives another 2 million. He's like, Hey, do what you can with this while i'm gone he goes away the one guy turns the five million into 10 million the other guy turns the two million into four million the third guy is like uh i'm just gonna put this in the safe because i don't want to get trouble when the master comes back yeah he buried the money he buried the ground yeah because they don't even have the safes back then yeah exactly yeah you're out sneaking out man burying the money in the backyard or putting it under the bed you them.

29:20Gillian: So in that story, the master, who obviously is God, who has given these people all of their resources, shows up and says, where's my money? And the first guy's like, here, I got, you gave me five, I got 10. He's like, oh, that's great. Here's your reward. The second guy's like, you gave me two, I gave, I gave you back four, a hundred percent return. He's like, wonderful, here's your reward. Third guy says, listen, here's your, here's your million bucks. Just take it back. and he's like, wait a minute, what's this? Why didn't I get a return? And the guy says, well, I knew you're pretty hard on people when they fail.

29:54Gillian: And I also know you take what's not yours. You live off of other people's work and you want me to do the work and then you take back the money. And the master says, well, it's funny you say that because it was my money in the first place. So how do you think I'm taking back your money? I'm just taking my own back, which the basic premise is that any material wealth you have belongs to God, as far as Jesus is concerned. It all belongs to God anyway. We are just, as some native traditional cultures would say, we're stewards of the land. We don't ever own it. We're stewards of it. Then you get the parable about the, quote, rich man Lazarus, which is a great, I mean, it's just a great story out.

30:33Gillian: So, but rich guy has a big house. There's some homeless guy that lives outside of his gate begging. every day the guy goes out in his limo and the homeless guy is laying there begging and he's like somebody get that guy out of here he smells so he never does anything to help the guy and again the guy's got God's money God made him rich he can't help this homeless guy and they both die and I'm laughing about it because it's not me the it ends up the rich guy that everybody thinks has been blessed by God is in hell and the poor guy is over with Abraham in heaven and that would be reflective of Jesus' idea that it's not just that it's God's money.

31:12Gillian: He wants you to use it for the common good.

31:16Tom Thatcher: So Tom, what did Jesus have to say about the temple and what kind of interactions did he have with this giant institution before that final incident with the money changers?

31:26Gillian: Well, obviously Jesus is a Galilean and he spends the vast majority of his time by any count up in the northern area around Galilee and the lake. But according to the Gospel of John as one source. He does go down there quite a bit the way any other person would. He goes down when there's a festival going on. The recurring theme though is whenever he goes to the temple to do anything, he engages in some form of protest there. He'll heal people on the Sabbath just to raise the ire of the temple authorities about why would you break the Sabbath. Or he'll do things that would violate their purity codes.

32:07Gillian: He makes statements, the famous statement in the Gospel of John's version of this temple incident we're talking about, where he says to them, destroy this temple and I'll raise it up in three days, which, you know, the Gospel of John and then later Christians say, well, that's talking about Jesus rising from the dead in three days. If I was sitting there listening to that at that time, I'd hear him saying, let's just tear the whole thing down because I can do all of this out in the street or out in the wine bar. I don't need this to do this. One of my own favorite stories actually about the temple, and it's called the Widow's Mites.

32:40Gillian: And in that story, Jesus is sitting in the temple courts with his disciples, and there are these big urns where people would come and make donations. And of course, this is not like Apple Pay. You're going to have physical coins, so you're going to throw it in there, and it makes this big crash come in as the coins are falling into the urn. So they're watching this, and this old woman comes up who's got two mites, it says, isn't the old King James? Like two pennies. And she just drops them in and you hear like, plink, plink. And that's all that she puts in. And Jesus says, hey, that lady just gave more money than all those other people combined.

33:17And the disciples are like, no, she didn't.

33:20Gillian: And he's like, listen, they gave out of their surplus. She gave everything she had. Well, that's a great inspiring message even today for even a small person's philanthropy makes a difference. But man, if I'm trying to pay the overhead expenses on a billion dollar temple, it is not true that that old woman's two cents are worth that guy's half million dollars, okay? It just points to, when you start saying to people that, think about this, what makes a currency valuable is not the silver that's in it, but the intention in the heart of the person who's spending it. you cannot run a temple on that kind of an economy.

34:01Gillian: And I don't think that was a secret to anybody. And it ended up less than a week after he said that he was dead.

34:08Robin: So what does that mean in terms of what he thought about taxation? Because of course, this was an era of very high taxation.

34:14Tom Thatcher: Yeah, it was a big topic, right?

34:16Gillian: So always with Jesus, there's what he might have thought about it and what he actually was willing to say about it. So right after the story we're going to talk about where he goes in the temple and throws down the money changers tables. There's another story that a couple days later, some of his enemies, the religious opponents that want to discredit him, bring him a coin that has a portrait of the emperor on it. And they say, so listen, should we pay the taxes or not? And this is in a public place. So they're inviting him to make a seditious statement or they're inviting him to like take a side on that.

34:49Gillian: And he famously says, he looks at the coin and says, well, give Caesar what is Caesar's and God what's God's. which on one hand, and there's been all kinds of sermons about that over the years, what that means. But if I'm sitting there, it sounds like you're saying we ought to pay the tax so that we don't create problems with these people. Some people could say, well, maybe he's saying it doesn't matter that he's saying coinage is not the future for us because I live in a place where we never had these anyway. So it doesn't matter. And we're going to go back to that. It could be he didn't want to make an overtly seditious statement.

35:26Gillian: In my mind, it's probably him saying, I don't care about the money that much anyway. If these people want to take that and play that game, give it to them because I've got a higher agenda to pursue here.

35:39Robin: So as we know, Jesus would eventually push things too far by attacking the temple money changers, which cost him his life. And yet it wasn't actually the temple priest who orders execution. Instead, it was the Romans. So why? Why did Jesus even attack the money changers in the first place? We're going to find out after the break. So listen on.

36:15Tom Thatcher: So we are back in the year 30 CE or 30 AD. I think we're going to stick to 30 AD given the subject matter of this episode. quote, tens of thousands of pilgrims have gathered in Jerusalem for Passover, and many of them have heard the news of a holy man, a miracle worker, maybe even a possible Messiah that has come to free them from tyranny. And then the man himself arrives, riding on the back of a donkey of all things. The crowd cheers, crying, Hosanna, Hosanna, save us, save us. And shortly afterwards, according to three of the Gospels, Jesus enters the temple's outer courtyard, the court of the Gentiles, and knocks over the tables of the money changers and creates a huge hullabaloo.

37:02Tom Thatcher: And that, as we will soon discover, would come back to bite him.

37:07Robin: So before we get to that, Tom, there's a really interesting question here, which is why did Jesus even target the money changers? Because they were operating in the outer courtyard of the temple where even non-believers were allowed and the money changers were providing an important service. Jewish law said that the tax had to be played in pure silver. So what was Jesus's issue with the money changers? Why did he call them a den of thieves?

37:35Gillian: I personally don't see that he had a problem with them as individuals, the people running the currency exchange, but they just work there. And I don't personally see that Jesus would say, well, there's a problem with you trying to express your devotion to God by paying for the maintenance of a temple. The issue is when you're standing in the most expensive public space in the world and knowing the being one of the kind of people that are carrying this on their back and watching as some construction worker coming in and throwing down his two coins or getting his money to go pay his tax. If I'm coming from like Alexandria in Egypt, where we think there were a million Jews living, well, they're not all going to come to the temple to pay their tax.

38:19Gillian: They're going to collect it all up and a delegation of them is going to hire a security service. So you're going to have some people walking in there in that system that are literally bringing millions and millions of dollars to support an approach to religion and approach to God that Jesus doesn't think is necessary anyway so i don't know that he thought those people were thieves or exploitative he doesn't mean the currency guy he means the priests he means the people that are running the system the romans that have allowed this to turn into what it is because i mean we don't really

38:51Tom Thatcher: know exactly what happened uh back then in the first century but i have uh read a fascinating theory that that comes back to this idea of the tyrian shekel so even if that was a fixed rate you had to pay the temple uh it was the only coin they could accept and obviously the temple becomes vastly wealthy in these very pure silver tyrian shekels and it must be very tempting for the money changes because there's a shortage of this to keep jacking up the price so even though technically the tax remains the same the actual real burden of that tax keeps increasing all the time because you know there's a shortage of this coin and the money changes just ask for more and more wine cotton whatever i mean i was wondering tom do you think that could be another sort of locus of of jesus's anger towards the the system as it were wow i'll tell you what now that you said that i

39:43Gillian: want to write an article on that because it's fascinating i hadn't thought about that before you were saying that the um the fact is that again this is a an economy where there's an actual it's a finite currency it's not like what the u.s does today where we want more dollars we'll just print a whole bunch more. It's an economy where there's a limited amount of silver coinage. And so the more of it I hoard up in this one place, obviously, the less is staying in circulation. You also have the fact it's not just there's money there. There's people selling doves. They're selling sheep for sacrifice.

40:19Gillian: Well, of course, if I'm going to make a sacrifice for my sins or an offering to God, I'm going to want to buy the ones that the temple is selling because they've got the, you

40:29Tom Thatcher: know uh the temple approved brand it's like it's the approved brand it's like to the household of

40:34Gillian: the king so of course i'm going to want to do that well necessarily that's going to be much more expensive if it's in that kind of a context because there's so much more overhead uh around it so we have to be careful here because you can easily go bleed over into an anti-semitic posture candidly if you're like well there's this conspiracy of greed amongst the jewish authority You're talking about a very, very small number of people who probably thought that they were fulfilling a necessary religious function.

41:05Tom Thatcher: Yeah, and let's face it, greed is pretty much universal. I mean, we've seen a few examples of this throughout history. I mean, we've all read a lot of books about this, and I think it comes again and again and again and again, not least in our own time as well.

41:20Robin: But in practical terms, what we actually also have, leaving aside the question about greed, is something akin to a silver squeeze. I mean, anyone who knows about the Hunt brothers in the 20th century will recognize this, because essentially, even if the temple wasn't actually restricting the supply of silver shekels, there probably was a general shortage of silver in the Roman Empire. And at the same time, you had the Emperor Tiberius, who was running fiscal surpluses throughout his reign, which meant that silver was being collected from the provinces as tribute. That would have been piling up in the imperial treasury, but it also had a huge trade deficit with places like India importing luxury goods and paying for them via a steady outflow of silver.

42:02Robin: So it's a classic problem of market squeezes, if you like, hoarding, coupled with trade flows and capital flows being very imbalanced. Once again, sounds familiar. So, Tom, do you think a shortage of silver was at the heart of the financial hardship that was really dogging the Jewish presence?

42:22Gillian: I think that could certainly be a part of it, combined with, like you said, where the money is coming from for the Roman Empire is off the backs of these people who actually have very, like you said before, very limited access to coinage. And we mentioned that parable of talents before just thinking about what you just said the bad character in that story is the one who actually hoarded the money who kept it out of circulation and buried it in the ground because again when you have a limited amount of currency to to put into circulation that doesn't make things better for the people on the bottom it makes it harder and harder to to get what they

43:01Tom Thatcher: need to live day to day well i mean whether it was a silver shortage hoarding at the temple sharp business practices by the money changers whatever the real reason Jesus was you know unhappy with them the whole system really and this obviously wasn't the end of the story because you know he presumably disappeared back in the anonymity of the crowds of pilgrims gathered for Passover after this this ruckus he calls by throwing over the temple tables but this action set in motion a chain of events that would lead to his death. And Tom, you know, not everybody maybe remembers this or has heard these stories.

43:42Tom Thatcher: I'd love for you to tell us a little bit what happened to Jesus after this famous hullabaloo with money changers.

43:49Gillian: What very quickly happens is within a week, he's been betrayed to the authorities by one of his closest disciples, Judas Iscariot. They find a time when he's going to be away from the crowds because he's a very populous figure at this point. So they go find him at night while he's praying, and they take him back. And the Jewish religious authorities, the high priest... Annas, right? Annas is the, I hate to say this, the godfather character, and then Caiaphas is the current high priest, his son-in-law. They basically arrange for him to be brought before the Romans because they decide he's guilty of blasphemy.

44:27Gillian: But I don't want to kill him because I don't want to be responsible for that. This is happening at Passover. You've got hundreds of thousands of rabble coming into the city. They don't actually know how many followers Jesus has at this point. Might have had thousands or tens of thousands of his own. So why would I want to take responsibility for that? So they bring him to their Roman contact, which is Pontius Pilate, who is the prefect.

44:49Tom Thatcher: Yeah, Pontius Pilate kind of becomes the tool of them cracking down and something has gone from an anoints to a major issue. But in the Bible, I remember Pilate is portrayed as an indecisive man who famously literally washes his hands of responsibility for Jesus' death.

45:07Gillian: Is that the real historical Pontius Pilate? What he was was a person who had a great deal of difficulty understanding, I would say, distinctives of the Jewish context. If I'm ruling a province in North Africa or somewhere in Italy, I don't have to deal with people who are radicalized monotheists who absolutely refuse to be ruled by a foreign power. And one of his famous stories is they needed to bring a new aqueduct in Jerusalem to bring more water into the city because the city was growing. So he's like, hey, you priests that are running this temple, you got billions of dollars. Can you put some money up toward this?

45:47Gillian: And he seized it. that started a massive riot that almost led through a rebellion. And the Roman way is, again, similar to some modern empires, you don't want to keep a huge, expensive standing army way out on the edge of the empire like this. So what you do is whenever there's any hint of resistance, you suppress it brutally, very quickly and very violently. And he had a number of instances where he responded to public protests with extreme violence. In fact, the reason he was eventually recalled was because he massacred a bunch of Samaritans that were protesting around some prophetic figure that had risen up.

46:28Gillian: So he's not the wavering figure we see in the Bible. On the other hand, I don't think he cried any tears over Jesus' death either. I think a lot of what What you see in the Bible is him trying to get back at the high priest and be like, well, you want me to, I'm not going to do this. Why should I do this? And finally he's like, listen, they tell him, you know, we could write this up to Caesar cause we're friends with Caesar. We don't know what you're doing here. We're telling you this guy's going to start a rebellion. He's like, okay, take it.

46:55Tom Thatcher: Yeah, no, exactly. I remember somebody, someone was joking that, you know, the spectrum of punishments back then range from execution to execution. Yeah. Breaking your legs. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But of course this is not the end of the story. religious people believe that Jesus was resurrected from the dead before ascending to heaven 40 days later and of course what is fascinating for the sake of our story is that after Jesus is passing the subject of his ire in his last days the temple itself also came to an untimely end.

47:25Gillian: So if we zoom out from this one story about Jesus what he was doing in the temple was on the front end of what became a growing movement of discontent. So later on, you see a full-blown rebellion emerging, where the first people who are assassinated by the Zealot Party, is where that term comes from even today, are the high priests for complicity with the Roman Empire. And 35 years after Jesus' death, there is a full-blown revolt all across Roman Palestine that took the Romans years to put down. The zealot forces actually used the temple as their base of operations. So when the Romans captured them, they actually destroyed that temple because they realized this is so much a centralizing force for these people that they'll do anything to save it.

48:16Gillian: So by the time a lot of the books in the New Testament were written, that temple was actually already gone.

48:21Robin: So I'm really curious. I mean, if you fast forward to today and look at this story, there are a lot of echoes in terms of the fact we live again in an era of high economic insecurity, inequality, high taxes, high debt. And much of the message from Jesus around money might be described today as pretty anti-capitalist. And of course, we have an era when many young people feel pretty angry with the system and pretty anti-capitalist too. So I'm curious, if Jesus was alive today, where would he sit on the modern political spectrum, do you think? Would he be there with the likes of AOC and others?

49:02Tom Thatcher: You're really going to, like, you're trying to insult half of America now, whatever we're doing now, aren't we?

49:07Robin: Well, I'm just curious because it's kind of anti-capitalist, anti-establishment, anti-exploitation message and vibe.

49:14Gillian: I actually think he wouldn't fit anywhere on the spectrum. So he can go in one day into the temple and make this protest and throw all this stuff down. and all of his people, like you said, they're sending Messiah to Messiah. And two days later, tell them, pay your taxes. And you could look at that and say he's being obtuse. Personally, I think his approach to that whole question is the way you beat the system is by not playing the game, if that makes sense. So I personally believe if he were alive today, and man, in the U.S., Jesus is co-opted on every end of the spectrum on economics to give justification for anything people you want to do.

49:52Gillian: I believe what he would have done is any place you try to put him, he's going to say something. As soon as you call him an anti-capitalist, he's going to say something capitalist. And as soon as you say he's a socialist or a Marxist, he's going to do something to upset those people because it's the system that's a problem for him, not any particular person on any part of a spectrum.

50:14Tom Thatcher: I'm curious, if Jesus had not been killed, how do you think he would have realized, What kind of a system would he have tried to build up, you think?

50:24Gillian: What you see him trying to do in the short time he had with the little communities of people that he had around and within his own movement, I think you would see him moving toward a system that is not based on anything above the choices that individuals make. And I know some people say that's importing like a modern Western individualism into a traditional culture. I actually think that Jesus' teaching or where that came from in modern Western culture. I don't believe when Jesus kicked over the money changers tables, he thought that was going to change the system. I think his idea was the way we change the system is on a one-on-one level.

51:01Gillian: So if I'm that rich guy that has Lazarus laying out the thing, I'm not going to go start a foundation and I'm not going to create a really high overhead model to deal with that. I'm going to deal with that by helping that person in that person's humanity at that moment. What it would look like is a movement and not a system and not a new NGO and not a bureau of some government agency with a budget. And I think he would be pushing to keep it on the grassroots level and make it a very human exchange.

51:31Robin: So I guess one way to frame what you're saying is that Jesus believed that money was there to be used for a purpose, a good purpose, but not simply as an end in itself and not in an exploitative or extractive way. That's the way I like to think of it anyway. Would you agree with that, Tom?

51:47Gillian: Well said. Yep. Amen.

51:48Robin: Amen is very appropriate. Exactly.

51:51Gillian: Amen.

51:51Robin: Sadly, that's it for this week's episode of the story of money. Tom Thatcher, thank you so much for educating about this aspect of history we didn't know much about. Thank you for joining us.

52:02Gillian: Thank you. I learned more than you did for sure. So thank you for the opportunity very much.

52:07Tom Thatcher: That is completely untrue, Tom, but we'll take it. It's been great to have you on the show. So thanks for that. Thank you. I'm Robin Wigglesworth.

52:16Robin: And I'm Julian Tett. And we'll see you back here next week.

52:53Robin: Thank you.

53:00Robin: to learn more. Investing involves risk. Principal loss is possible.