The Temple Tax
THE TEMPLE TAX
MATTHEW 17:22-27
Jesus didn’t have to pay the temple tax—it wasn’t the custom for kings’ families to pay tax, and Jesus and Peter were children of the great King.
This further prediction of the passion (17:22f.) was calculated to remind the disciples of the gravity of their situation: the first prediction (16:21) might well have begun to fade from their memories, especially the memories of the three who had witnessed the transfiguration (despite their Master’s words in 17:12).
The incident of 17:24-27, recorded in this Gospel only, would have been valued by Jewish Christians in the period between AD 30 and 70, when they considered whether or not they should pay the annual tax of half a shekel, contributed by every male Jew between the ages of twenty and fifty for the maintenance of the Jerusalem temple. Their Master’s action served them as a precedent: they were no longer under a divinely imposed obligation to pay it—with the coming of the kingdom “something greater than the temple is here” (12:6) and they were “sons of the kingdom” (13:38)—but out of consideration for their fellow Jews, who would be scandalized if they withheld payment, they should continue to do so as a voluntary courtesy.
The fish, which is incidental to the main point of the story, is presumably the musht or “comb” fish of the Lake of Galilee, which is prone to have glittering objects in its gullet; the coin in its mouth was actually a stater or Tyrian tetradrachm, equivalent in value to a Jewish shekel and therefore sufficient to pay the temple tax for two.