Matthew depicts Pharisees negatively. In chapter 3, John the baptizer scolds Pharisees for prioritizing ancestral privilege over repentance. In chapter 22, Matthew changes Mark’s admiring scribe who asks Jesus about the greatest commandment into a malicious Pharisee who seeks to trap Jesus with a difficult question. Matthew 23 is a diatribe against Pharisees, designated as white-washed tombs and murderers. And in Matthew 22:15-21, Pharisees seek to undermine Jesus’s credibility by asking him about Roman policy.
While many Christians, influenced by Matthew, think of Pharisees as legalistic hypocrites, Jews regard Pharisees as respected teachers who made the egalitarian move of extending priestly sanctity to all Jews, and as innovators who helped Jews more fully embrace their tradition. Addressing the Pontifical Biblical Institute in May 2019, Pope Francis said, “Love of neighbor… represents a significant indicator for recognizing affinities between Jesus and his Pharisee interlocutors… Indeed, to love our neighbors better, we need to know them, and to know who they are we often have to find ways to overcome ancient prejudices.”
Behind Matthew’s negative portrait, sparked by rivalries with Jewish teachers toward the end of the first century, we can imagine a different conversation.
The Pharisees’ apparently political question, “Is it lawful to pay the census tax to Caesar?" is also a very good theological question. Given how Israel’s Scriptures present counting people, we can understand why Jews would question the legality of the census tax.
1. Exodus 30:12 states, “When you take a census of the Israelites to register them, at registration all of them shall give a ransom for their lives to the LORD, so that no plague may come upon them for being registered.” Numbers 31:48-50 makes a similar point.
2. According to 2 Samuel 24:10, “David was stricken to the heart because he had numbered the people. David said to the LORD, “I have sinned greatly in what I have done….” The census results in a plague that killed 70,000 people.
3. Retelling this story, 1 Chronicles 21:1 explains that Satan prompted David to take the census.
Jewish tradition continues this prohibition against counting the people. One explanation is that taking a census is forbidden since God promised Abraham that his descendants would be as numerous as the stars in the heavens. Therefore, counting is impossible.
This concern for counting has pastoral implications. A census reduces people to numbers, to commodities, to faceless bodies. Such counting marked the Shoah; it marks death counts in wars, disasters, and pandemics.
Moreover, the census determined both taxation rates and how many people could be conscripted for the military; it thus threatened the people both economically and physically.
Jesus asks for the coin used to pay the census, a request suggesting he is not carrying one. The silver denarius was inscribed “Tiberius Caesar, August Son of the Divine Augustus” on one side and “Pontifex Maximus” (high priest) on the other. Do we see the divine by looking at coins, or do we see the divine by looking at each other, since we all bear the image and likeness of God?
In stating, “repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God,” Jesus asks us to determine what, and who, belongs to Caesar: the coin with his image? The land his troops occupy? The lives of the people in his empire? Conversely, perhaps we are to think of Psalm 24:1, “The earth is the LORD’s and all that is in it, the world, and those who live in it,” and so we realize that everything belongs to God.
About the author:
Amy-Jill Levine is University Professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies Emerita and Mary Jane Werthan Professor of Jewish Studies Emerita at Vanderbilt University. She is also Rabbi Stanley M. Kessler Distinguished Professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies, Hartford International University for Religion and Peace. In the spring of 2019, she became the first Jew to teach a course on the New Testament at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome; in 2021, she was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.