Talk:Thirty pieces of silver

Christianity GA‑class Low‑importance

	Christianity portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Christianity, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Christianity on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.ChristianityWikipedia:WikiProject ChristianityTemplate:WikiProject ChristianityChristianity articles
GA	This article has been rated as GA-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale.
Low	This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale.

Popular Culture GA‑class (inactive)

	This article is within the scope of WikiProject Popular Culture, a project which is currently considered to be inactive.Popular CultureWikipedia:WikiProject Popular CultureTemplate:WikiProject Popular CulturePopular Culture articles
GA	This article has been rated as GA-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale.

Thirty pieces of silver has been listed as one of the Philosophy and religion good articles under the good article criteria. If you can improve it further, please do so. If it no longer meets these criteria, you can reassess it.

Article milestones
Date	Process	Result
September 12, 2010	Good article nominee	Listed
October 10, 2010	Featured article candidate	Not promoted

A fact from this article appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the "Did you know?" column on March 21, 2010.

The text of the entry was: Did you know ... that the thirty pieces of silver which Judas Iscariot received for betraying Jesus are echoed in Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment by the thirty roubles which Sonia earns for selling herself?

Current status: Good article

Value

How much value had in that time 30 silver coins? I know that deppends on the kind of coin used, but there must be a range. How much money made a worker for a day? Comu_nacho (spanish speaker) (talk) 18:31, 23 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The two coins mentioned as candidates are the Tyrian tetradrachm and the Antiochan stater. Currency debasement and imprecise terms ("stater" could have a few meanings) make it difficult to be precise, but my understanding is that in this period both are roughly equivalent to a Roman denarius. According to Biblical references, a denarius was about one day's wage for a manual laborer. This may or may not be intended to be taken literally. At this time, a Roman soldier made about 5/8 of a denarius per day, but they were also living rent-free.

It's nearly impossible to assign exchange rates to ancient currency due to extreme market differences, but to give a general sense, the most common Roman coin in actual commerce was the copper as, which was 1/16 of a denarius. In the rural provinces in the first century, an as could probably buy a loaf of bread or a cup of decent wine (about a British pint). So you can think of thirty pieces of silver as enough money to buy 480 loaves of bread, or 260 liters of wine. :) Elmo iscariot (talk) 19:36, 6 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]