When asked whether or not Jews should pay taxes to Rome, Christ pithily responded: ‘Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s’. Modern exegetes have often turned to this story from the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew 22:15–22; Mark 12:13–17; Luke 20:19–25) as a means of confronting the relationship between Church and State and questioning where Christians’ allegiance should lie. By contrast, artistic representations of the narrative seem to follow the pre-modern exegetical tradition by focusing attention on the second half of Christ’s response: ‘Render to God the things that are God’s’ (Matthew 22:21).

Christ’s teachings on taxes must be considered holistically. Elsewhere in the Gospels (Matthew 17:23–26), Christ submitted to the so-called ‘Temple Tax’ (Greek didrachma, a Jewish tax) by miraculously providing a coin from the mouth of a fish. The tax at issue in Matthew 22 is of a different nature. Two groups of Jewish authorities, the Pharisees and the Herodians, disagreed about whether Jews should submit to Roman tax policies and confronted Jesus with the question hoping that his answer would violate their reading of the Hebrew Bible. Jesus caught both sides unaware when he asked to see the coin with which the tax was paid and then redirected their inquisition with a simple question of his own: ‘Whose likeness and inscription is this?’. This simple question realigned the entire encounter.

For early Christian exegetes, the literal details of Roman fiscal policy were of limited interest; they seem to have accepted that Christians must pay tax (see Romans 13:7). So, they searched for a 'deeper' (often allegorical) significance in this text. Origen's (c.185–c.255 CE) comments to this effect can be taken as representative: ‘Who among us disagrees about paying taxes to Caesar? So, the passage has a mystical and secret meaning’ (Homilies on Luke 39).

He used the Pauline Epistles to reveal that the ‘coin’ at the centre of the ‘Render’ pericope stands in as a metaphor for the human soul:

As we bear the image of the earthly man, we should also bear the image of the heavenly man’ (1 Corinthians 15:49). When Christ says, ‘Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s’, he means this: ‘Put off the person of the earthly man, cast off the earthly image, so that you can put on yourselves the person of the heavenly man and give to God what is God’s. (Homilies on Luke 39)

That ‘secret meaning’ was revealed by another patristic commentator: Tertullian (c.160–c.220 CE).

What will be ‘the things that are God’s?’ Such things as are like Caesar’s denarius—that is to say, His image and similitude. That, therefore, which he commands to be ‘rendered unto God’, the Creator, is man, who has been stamped with His image, likeness, name, and substance. (Against Marcion 4.38)

Tertullian’s reading implies a connection between the Gospel and Genesis 1:26–27. In that foundational passage of Christian image theory, humankind was described as having been made in the image and likeness of God. With this intertext in mind, Tertullian interprets the episode metaphorically: just as the coin bears the mark of its proprietor, Caesar, so too does the human soul bear the indelible imprint of its creator, God the Father. Humankind must render that unto God.

A few centuries later, Augustine made the connection between the tax debates of the Synoptic Gospels and the impression of the prelapsarian soul even more explicit when he noted that:

We are God’s money: we have wandered away as coin from the treasury. The impression that was stamped upon us has been rubbed out by our wandering…. He is himself asking for His money, as Caesar for his. Therefore, He says, ‘Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s’: to Caesar his money, to God yourselves. (Tractates on John 40.9)

In modern times, it has become popular to suggest that Christ’s dictum marks a stark division between the competing authorities of Church and State. The pre-modern exegetical tradition, by contrast, makes two points clear: first, Matthew 22:21 was not understood as a straightforward or didactic story regarding tax policy, but rather was taken as a personal invitation to spiritual reformation; second, Christ’s invitation to reform establishes a metaphorical equation between Caesar’s coin and the human soul. Examining the coin-soul is to be understood as a form of spiritual exercise that entails scrutinizing the coin-soul with the scope of restoring it to its original condition.

Visualizations of this Gospel scene often hew closer to the early interpretations of the text than to modern exegesis. Even as the paintings by Titian and Rubens spin out the narrative in different ways, each redirects the beholder to things of greater importance than the coin, just as the original biblical text had done.

References

Holmes, Peter (trans.). 1868. Tertullian: Against Marcion, Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 7, (Edinburgh: T&T Clark), p.339

Innes, James (trans.). 1874. Augustine: Lectures or Tractates on the Gospel According to St John, vol. 2, (Edinburgh: T&T Clark), p.27

Lienhard, Joseph T. (trans.). 1996. Origin: Homilies on Luke and Fragments on Luke, Fathers of the Church, vol. 94 (Washington: Catholic University of America Press), pp.161–62

Luz, Ulrich. 2005. Matthew 21–28: A Commentary, Hermeneia, trans. by James E. Crouch (Minneapolis: Fortress Press), pp.61–67