The Fish and the Coin in the Gospel of Matthew: A Look at the Pericope and Possible Rabbinic Origins

I was recently examining a passage that has always been a curiosity to believers and a fairytale to skeptics. Its single occurrence appears in the gospel of Matthew. In the account, Jesus is questioned regarding his civic duty to pay the Temple tax. In response, Jesus tells Peter to cast a line into the water and from the water emerges a fish with enough coin in its mouth to pay the temple for the both of them.  The passage reads as follows:

 After Jesus and his disciples arrived in Capernaum, the collectors of the two-drachma temple tax came to Peter and asked, “Doesn’t your teacher pay the temple tax?”

 “Yes, he does,” he replied.

When Peter came into the house, Jesus was the first to speak. “What do you think, Simon?” he asked. “From whom do the kings of the earth collect duty and taxes—from their own children or from others?”

 “From others,” Peter answered.

“Then the children are exempt,” Jesus said to him. “But so that we may not cause offense, go to the lake and throw out your line. Take the first fish you catch; open its mouth and you will find a four-drachma coin. Take it and give it to them for my tax and yours.” – Matthew 17:24-27

R. T. France comments on the passage: “The whole episode is designed not to record a miracle, but to tell us Jesus' attitude towards the payment of religious taxes." But the question of “whose tax” will remain important as we take a closer look.

The story is curious on a number of levels. On the one hand, commentators like Craig L. Blomberg are representative of a body of scholarly conservatives who see the story in terms of Jesus' rejection of Old Testament legalism. For those like Blomberg, the children of the kingdom and their exemption is not about taxes, rather it speaks to the deliberate attempt of Jesus’ to overturn halakha. Blomberg reports "This fits [Jesus’] consistent rejection of Jewish civil and ritual law; believers are now free from the Old Testament requirements."

The challenge here is one presenting the evangelist’s Jesus who is not internally at war with his own ideology. On more than one occasion, he declares that there is a righteousness in keeping Torah or in performing sacred ceremony or ritualism. We hear Jesus tell John that they must “fulfill all righteousness.” We see Jesus read from Torah to initiate his public ministry or tell the blind man to go give the offering of Moses once he is healed. We see Jesus go up to Jerusalem for Passover and find him at the waters on Sukkoth, an important part of the ritual celebration. There is also the Jesus who tells us he has not come to abolish the Torah and that as long as heaven and earth remain, not one jot or tittle will pass from it – those jots and tittles could have something to do with the matres lectionis, could be connected to midrashic statements about the use of vowels that help with the rendering of sounds, which were thought to be in the Oral tradition of Torah but rejected by Karaitic tradition. The Greek uses the words “iota” and “keraia.” Some scholars have suggested that iota may be representative of the Hebrew “yod,” and keraia may represent Greek diacritical marks or the hooks in Hebrew and Aramaic letters. It may even refer to the widely interpreted use of crowns that appear in some Torah scrolls and the Latin Vulgate, of which one Midrash expresses Ezra’s concern in being challenged by Elijah as to their origins. Or more broadly, it could refer to the idea, and a more popular option, that the Law given to Moses comes from God and God will not invalidate his words on any account.

The problem with the story remains the challenge of putting it in its proper context. If Matthew was written in the post-Temple period (after 70 CE), the idea that this is a Jewish temple tax logically means that Jesus’ identification of the children of the kingdom is one that puts those who follow him at odds with those who are non-believing Jews. That is to say, Jesus is making a very strong and deliberate break with his Jewish roots by indicting those Jews involved with the daily routine of the Temple as being those outside the kingdom of God.

But another interpretative possibility should also be considered. If one believes that Matthew is writing in the post-Temple period, he could have very well merged two realities. After the destruction of the Jewish temple, according to those like W. Carter, taxes (Fiscus Judaicus) were paid to Rome. Because Rome was in every sense a true kingdom, having come to dominate the world of its time, the tax was imposed on certain jurisdictions like Jerusalem that, while succumbing to an occupation force, did not itself allow Rome to exercise full power.  Taxes were often imposed on those provinces that did not allow Roman certain jurisdictions. To become a "part" of Rome was to avoid the Roman tax. To have Roman citizenship like Paul was to avoid taxation. In essence, while writing with regard to the temple of Jerusalem, Matthew may actually be thinking of the Fiscus Judaicus that was collected for the Jupiter Temple. This temple was razed in 69 BCE when Vespasian’s army entered Rome only a year before razing the Jerusalem temple. In either case, the argument does not rely upon Matthew reaching back into history and reinterpreting the events, since both events occur before Matthew’s writing, but a question of whether there was a mandatory Temple tax in Jerusalem or whether the monies being collected was actually for the rebuilding of the Jupiter Temple remain the question. More internal evidence from the scriptures finds that on two other occasions, Jesus is directly caught up in opposition to Roman taxes (Matthew 22:21), and in the latter instance (Luke 23:1-4) an accusation of his civil disobedience is used against him at his trial.

While New Testament scholars tend to focus on the affirmative dimension of Jesus’ mentions of kingdom as the spiritual and/or physical reign of Messiah, it may be here in Matthew that the more formal sense of being a part of the physical kingdom of Rome is more appropriate.  Of course, if Matthew is writing before 69 CE, then we are left with the problem of supernaturalism and must consider the charge of vaticinium ex eventu.

So with the interpretative possibilities in front of us for understanding Jesus’ place with the temple tax, what is this strange affair of the fish in the story and can it shed light on the story’s origin?

R. T. France writes, "I have not listed the incident of the coin in the fish's mouth (Mt. 17:27), as there is in fact no miracle recorded there: Jesus' proposal to Peter is not said to have been carried out, and it has been suggested that it was a playful comment, based on a popular story-motif found in both pagan and Jewish sources (Herodotus iii.42, b. Shabbath 119a), and not meant to be taken very seriously."

Shabbath 119a records the story of a Joseph who honors the Sabbath. He goes to a certain gentile who is warned by soothsayers to sell his property before Joseph comes because he apparently was a crafty businessman who was about to buy up his land. After this gentile sells all his land for a precious stone (a story reminiscent of Jesus’ parable one’s passionate desire for heaven), he drops the stone in the water. A fish swallows it up and later at a marketplace is sold to the same Joseph who opens the mouth and reveals the precious stone worth thirteen roomfuls of gold denarii. The moral, according to this tractate, is those who honor the Sabbath, are repaid by the Sabbath. It is in this context that one imagines Jesus’ honoring of the temple tax is that his honor is repaid by the gift of the drachma from the fish.

The challenge of dating Tractate Shabbat is the challenge of dating anything in the Talmud. We do not have enough reliable information. Though there are some that maintain much of the Talmudic tradition is old and passages like this in Mas. Shabbat probably recollect an ancient Jewish parable. Of course, there are many places in the Talmud that cross with the gospels and one finds the retellings of the parables include their own unique conclusions. And the story of fish goes through various incarnations from ancient Greek and Sanskrit literature. But the question of whether this goes back to Jesus or whether the evangelist was familiar with a version of the story and adapted it to Jesus’ situation is a tantalizing one. At best, it proves once again, that Jesus of Nazareth was a man of his time as much as he could be an invention of his biographers’ theological ambitions.

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p. 86 Jesus the Radical: A Portrait of the Man They Crucified"  R. T. France

W. Carter "Paying the Tax to Rome as Subversion Praxis: Matthew 17.24-27," JSNT 76 [1999].