Tuesday Morning in the Temple

174:2.1On Mon­day evening there had been held a coun­cil be­tween the San­hedrin and some fifty ad­di­tional lead­ers se­lected from among the scribes, Phar­isees, and the Sad­ducees. It was the con­sen­sus of this meet­ing that it would be dan­ger­ous to ar­rest Je­sus in pub­lic be­cause of his hold upon the af­fec­tions of the com­mon peo­ple. It was also the opin­ion of the ma­jor­ity that a de­ter­mined ef­fort should be made to dis­credit him in the eyes of the mul­ti­tude be­fore he should be ar­rested and brought to trial. Ac­cord­ingly, sev­eral groups of learned men were des­ig­nated to be on hand the next morn­ing in the tem­ple to un­der­take to en­trap him with dif­fi­cult ques­tions and oth­er­wise to seek to em­bar­rass him be­fore the peo­ple. At last, the Phar­isees, Sad­ducees, and even the Hero­di­ans were all united in this ef­fort to dis­credit Je­sus in the eyes of the Pass­over mul­ti­tudes.

174:2.2Tues­day morn­ing, when Je­sus ar­rived in the tem­ple court and be­gan to teach, he had ut­tered but few words when a group of the younger stu­dents from the academies, who had been re­hearsed for this pur­pose, came for­ward and by their spokesman ad­dressed Je­sus: “Mas­ter, we know you are a righ­teous teacher, and we know that you pro­claim the ways of truth, and that you serve only God, for you fear no man, and that you are no re­specter of per­sons. We are only stu­dents, and we would know the truth about a mat­ter which trou­bles us; our dif­fi­culty is this: Is it law­ful for us to give trib­ute to Cae­sar? Shall we give or shall we not give?” Je­sus, per­ceiv­ing their hypocrisy and crafti­ness, said to them: “Why do you thus come to tempt me? Show me the trib­ute money, and I will an­swer you.” And when they handed him a denar­ius, he looked at it and said, “Whose im­age and super­scrip­tion does this coin bear?” And when they an­swered him, “Cae­sar’s,” Je­sus said, “Ren­der to Cae­sar the things that are Cae­sar’s and ren­der to God the things that are God’s.”

174:2.3When he had thus an­swered these young scribes and their Hero­dian ac­com­plices, they with­drew from his pres­ence, and the peo­ple, even the Sad­ducees, en­joyed their dis­com­fi­ture. Even the youths who had en­deav­ored to en­trap him mar­veled greatly at the un­ex­pected sagac­ity of the Mas­ter’s an­swer.

174:2.4The pre­vi­ous day the rulers had sought to trip him be­fore the mul­ti­tude on mat­ters of ec­cle­si­as­ti­cal au­thor­ity, and hav­ing failed, they now sought to in­volve him in a dam­ag­ing dis­cus­sion of civil au­thor­ity. Both Pi­late and Herod were in Je­ru­sa­lem at this time, and Je­sus’ en­e­mies con­jec­tured that, if he would dare to ad­vise against the pay­ment of trib­ute to Cae­sar, they could go at once be­fore the Ro­man au­thor­i­ties and charge him with sedi­tion. On the other hand, if he should ad­vise the pay­ment of trib­ute in so many words, they rightly cal­cu­lated that such a pro­nounce­ment would greatly wound the na­tional pride of his Jew­ish hear­ers, thereby alien­at­ing the good will and af­fec­tion of the mul­ti­tude.

174:2.5In all this the en­e­mies of Je­sus were de­feated since it was a well-known rul­ing of the San­hedrin, made for the guid­ance of the Jews dis­persed among the gen­tile na­tions, that the “right of coinage car­ried with it the right to levy taxes.” In this man­ner Je­sus avoided their trap. To have an­swered “No” to their ques­tion would have been equiv­a­lent to in­cit­ing re­bel­lion; to have an­swered “Yes” would have shocked the deep-rooted na­tion­al­ist sen­ti­ments of that day. The Mas­ter did not evade the ques­tion; he merely em­ployed the wis­dom of mak­ing a dou­ble re­ply. Je­sus was never eva­sive, but he was al­ways wise in his deal­ings with those who sought to ha­rass and de­stroy him.