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High-priest Caiaphas has whipped the elders of the Temple into a frenzy against Jesus. Now read on!
Talia fatus erat: furiis stimulantibus intus------------
experti, passique senes eadem ore fremebant.
Omnibus idem animus; sed qua ratione, quibusve [255]
id fieri occulte queat artibus, exquirebant.
Cùm subitò ecce suis clam se furatus Jüdas
improvisus adest cunctis mirantibus: illum
excipiunt trepidi spirantem immane, locantque
sede inter primos, farique hortantur, et ardent, [260]
quid veniat, dubiis animis audire, silentque.
Ille autem torquens huc flammea lumina et illuc,
sic fatur: “Scio vos Galilaei facta furentis
formidare, patres, patriae qui legibus affert
exitium; moliri ideo vos plurima cerno. [265]
si mihi, quae posco, promittitis; omnia solus,
quae nunc vos frustra exercent, dispendia tollam:
ille manus faciam in vestras hodie incidat ultrò.”
Dixerat: argenti laeti pepigere talenta
ter dena, egregii pretium memorabile facti; [270]
dimittuntque alacres, atque extra limina ducunt.
Ille petit montes iterum, sociosque revisit.
Such were his words. Spurred by inward bursting------------
fury the elders roared out their assent.
They were all of one mind: but what pretext [255]
could they use, what scheme to bring this about?
Suddenly here was Judas—he had, to
everyone’s amazement, slunk off from his friends,
panting hard. They received him, bade him speak
sat him in a seat of honour—eager to know [260]
why he had come. A doubtful silence fell.
It was as if flames twisted in his eyes as
he spoke: “I know you. The mad Galilean
scares you, fathers. He’ll destroy the fatherland.
You’re plotting many things to preserve our laws. [265]
Promise me what I ask, and with my own hands
I’ll lift the burden that so weighs upon you:
I will this very day deliver him up to you.”
He spoke. They gladly fixed a price—silver talents:
thirty—famous sum for an infamous deed; [270]
eagerly they sent him off, leading him out.
He returned to the mountains, and his comrades.
The image at the head of this post is ‘Judas Receiving the Thirty Pieces of Silver’ by Flemish artist Simon Bening. It dates from about 1530, so is pretty contemporaneous for Vida's poem. Lovely, no? Tempera colors, gold paint and gold leaf on parchment. It is presently in the Getty Museum.
So, the famous detail about Judas receiving thirty silver coins is from Matthew 26:15: ‘And said unto them, What will ye give me, and I will deliver him unto you? And they covenanted with him for thirty pieces of silver.’ Wikipedia tells us more:
The word used in Matthew 26:15 (ἀργύρια, argyria) simply means “silver coins” and scholars disagree on the type of coins that would have been used. Donald Wiseman suggests two possibilities. They could have been tetradrachms of Tyre, usually referred to as Tyrian shekels (14 grams of 94% silver), or staters from Antioch (15 grams of 75% silver), which bore the head of Augustus. Alternatively, they could have been Ptolemaic tetradrachms (13.5 ± 1 g of 25% silver). There are 31.1035 grams per troy ounce. At spot valuation of $17.06/oz (the closing price on Monday, December 12, 2016), 30 “pieces of silver” would be worth between $185 and $216 in present-day value (USD).These kinds of conversion from ancient value to modern approximations are always more-or-less meaningless, of course. Victorian pennies to modern pounds? One needs to factor in so many variables (tea was very expensive in Victorian England and oysters relatively cheap; now it's the other way around; and so on, through ten thousand specifics) that the modern value becomes an empty number. Likewise here: do you really think you could take $216 today and buy a field just outside town in which to hang yourself? Of course not. The sum, though, is not arbitrary: Exodus 21:32 specifies ‘thirty shekels of silver’ as the blood-price to be paid in the case of a slave accidentally killed, so the sum approximates the value of a single human life. Likewise, Zechariah receives this sum of money as his ‘worth’ or ‘price’:
And I said unto them, If ye think good, give me my price; and if not, forbear. So they weighed for my price thirty pieces of silver. And the Lord said unto me, Cast it unto the potter: a goodly price that I was prised at of them. And I took the thirty pieces of silver, and cast them to the potter in the house of the Lord. [Zechariah 11:12-13]I suppose that ‘goodly price’, there, is sarcastic (has there been a study of sarcasm in the Bible? Seems to me there's quite a lot of it); hence God telling him to chuck it away. And something similar is at work here. It's not that thirty silver pennies is an insultingly low evaluation of Christ's worth (though obviously it is); it's that a person's worth is not something that can be valued in monetary terms at all.
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