Click to join the conversation with over 500,000 Pentecostal believers and scholars
| PentecostalTheology.com
Then they sent to him some Pharisees and some Herodians to trap him in what he said. And they came and said to him, “Teacher, we know that you are sincere, and show deference to no one; for you do not regard people with partiality, but teach the way of God in accordance with truth. Is it lawful to pay taxes to the Ceasar, or not? Should we pay them, or should we not?” But knowing their hypocrisy, he said to them, “Why are you putting me to the test? Bring me a denarius and let me see it.” And they brought one. Then he said to them, “Whose head is this, and whose title?” They answered, “The Ceasar’s.” Jesus said to them, “Give to the Ceasar the things that are the Ceasar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” And they were utterly amazed at him.
Scholars such as Fabian Udoh and Christopher Zeichmann argue that the Taxation Episode couldn’t have happened at the time of Jesus, because allegedly, no pre-70 tax has the features Mark’s account ascribes to it. Zeichmann writes:
It is not immediately obvious which tax the Marcan Jesus discusses. The Gospel mentions three
important features: (1) it was levied via census (κήνσος); (2) it was collected by coin (specifically a δηνάριον — but set aside that particular anachronism for the moment); and (3) it was paid to the reigning emperor (Καίσαρ). Phrased directly, no evidence suggests that any tax possessed all three of these features before the temple’s destruction. Mark locates the pericope in Jerusalem of Roman Judea, a province where a certain tax in Jesus’ time was collected visà-vis information gathered in the provincial census conducted in 6 CE. .. Although this was not technically a capitation tax (tributum capitis), it is unlikely that the legal distinction entailed a salient difference for the terminology among most Greek-speaking provincial denizens. One could sensibly infer that various census-based taxes all fell under Mark’s term κήνσος. This tax, how ever — the tributum soli — was exacted in kind rather than via coinage in Judea; that is, it was paid in goods rather than money. The fact that the Judean tributum soli was paid in harvested crops renders it moot for present purposes. Mark’s tax is explicitly paid with coin, a detail already noted to be essential to the pericope. It is therefore unlikely that Mark would term them κήνσος. In fact, no monetary capitation taxes are known at all in the southern Levant before the war, much less any paid in denarii or equivalent coinage (e.g., didrachm). In short, there was no κήνσος that a resident of Judea or Galilee paid to Καίσαρ with a δηνάριον or any other coin for that matter at the time. Whatever tax Mark had in mind, it did not exist during the life of Jesus.
Zeichmann goes on to conclude that the tax which Mark is referring to is the Fiscus Judaicus, which was implemented quite long after Jesus lived (after the Destruction of the Temple).
So my question is: Is the Taxation Episode Mark’s literary creation? Moreover, does this mean that the Gospel of Mark dates to after 70 CE?
