Ep 291: Render Unto Caesar

Preorder my new book Politics, Economics and New Testament Interpretation here: https://libertarianchristians.com/store/politics-economics-and-new-testament-interpretation/ 

In this episode I explore the infamous “render unto Caesar” passage from Mark 12:13-17 and its parallels in Matthew 22:15-22 and Luke 20:20-26. What exactly did Jesus mean when he uttered this phrase? Despite centuries of misreading the text, I argue that the ancient world knew nothing of the separation between church and state; reading this passage as if it affirms the modern secular/religious divide won’t do. I then explore the narrative context of the tradition in the Synoptic gospels, showing that this tradition is retained in all three Synoptics within a larger context of Jesus’ conflict with the Jerusalem establishment and should be read as such. We also cannot divorce this tradition from the Synoptic affirmation that Jesus is the Davidic Messiah and therefore transcends all earthly power. I then analyze the tradition from a historical standpoint, explaining that Jesus is not being asked about taxation in general but rather the kensos or head tax, a tax levied by Rome against conquered peoples. This tax was very unpopular, and the Pharisees and Herodians are trying to turn the crowds against Jesus or charge him with sedition. Jesus, playing on the popular idea that coinage belongs to the emperor since it bears his image, turns the tables and says they should give what belongs to Caesar back to him after forcing his opponents to produce the blasphemous coin in the temple. Jesus demonstrates that he, not his opponents, is the one with real authority, a political lesson the church has yet to learn. 

Media Referenced:

James Barker on Gospels: https://libertarianchristians.com/episode/ep-181-how-the-gospel-writers-copied-each-other-with-james-barker/ 

Mark Goodacre on Gospels: https://libertarianchristians.com/episode/ep-224-johns-knowledge-of-matthew-mark-and-luke-with-mark-goodacre/ 

Gospel trajectories: https://libertarianchristians.com/episode/ep-213-jesus-the-divine-messiah-and-gospel-trajectories/

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This is the Protestant Libertarian Podcast, a project of the Libertarian Christian Institute and part of the Christians for Liberty Network. I really hope that you guys enjoy today's show. All right, guys. Welcome to another episode of the Protestant Libertarian Podcast. It is good to have you with me today. A couple of items before we get into the show today. First and foremost, at the top of the episode, you heard Cody Cook talk about our Libertarian Christian Institute conference, our Christians for Liberty conference, which will be held on Saturday, October 17th, just outside of Cincinnati, Ohio. I will be speaking there. Cody will be speaking there. Jacob Wintigrad will be speaking there. Greg Baust will be speaking there. Jeremy Todd will be speaking there. So there are a lot of great people that are going to be involved in this conference. And we would love for you guys to sign up. You have to come out and meet us. We're going to have a table of book sales. We're going to be having great talks all day long. And there's going to be a lot of cool people there. So please check that out and sign up. The other thing that I want you guys to know too, I have no idea when this episode is going to come out. It's a solo episode I'm recording, but it will come out before my book is released, which is what I want to talk to you about real quick. My book, Politics, Economics, and New Testament Interpretation, will be released on Tuesday, September 15th, 2026. I'm so excited about this book. I cannot wait for you guys to read it. You can pre-order the physical copy, which I highly recommend because it's such a nice book. It looks great. The type setting's beautiful. And I prefer a physical copy of the book, but you can you can grab a copy of that over at Libertarian Christian Institute's website, click on books. We're the first tab there, or you can go ahead and pre-order a Kindle version or an ebook version on Amazon.com. I'll post the links to both of those in the show notes. Please, please go ahead and help me pre-order this. I would love for this book to be number one on the biblical studies chart in Amazon, which I think only requires that like five people buy it. So please go over there and do that. And of course, on September 15th, you will be able to order the hard copy from Amazon as well as the Libertarian Christian Institute directly. Very excited about both of those things. So please go and check them out. What I want to talk to you guys about today is surprisingly a passage we have never done an episode on in this show before. Now I've been thinking about it for years and just never really got around to it. There are a couple of interpretive issues that I really wanted to make sure I nailed down before I record an episode on it. But we are going to talk today about Jesus' infamous exchange in the Gospels, where he uses the phrase talking to the Jerusalem authorities, the establishment in the temple, render unto Caesar. So this is obviously a very hotly contested passage and a very controversial passage. And for whatever reason, the Protestant Libertarian Podcast is all about dealing with political and economic themes in biblical interpretation. We've not done a full-length episode on this passage before. It's come up in some of my episodes on the Gospels before. I've talked about on other shows, but I've never done it here and I don't know why. So uh since I have a very large section in my book on this passage, I figured that before the release of my book uh on September 15th, 2026, it would be great to actually do and record an episode on the render unto Caesar passage. Now, in reality, this could be, and you if you buy my book, which I hope you do, you'll see that I've done a lot of research on this. There's a long interpretive history of this passage, a lot of controversy that surrounds it. I could really do a long series of episodes just on this passage alone, and that would take up a lot of time. So there's a good chance, as with most of the passages that we discuss on the show, that we'll come back and revisit this in a year or two or three or whenever we get to it. So everything I'm going to say here is uh is preliminary in that, in that sense, that we can always dive into this passage in greater depth and detail. But I wanted to deal with some of the big picture interpretive questions today and try to work through exactly what Jesus meant when he said render unto Caesar, because if you read my book, I talk about this a lot in my book. Everyone, from lay reader to professional scholar alike, brings an entire worldview full of assumptions about what is going on in this passage to the text when they read it. And we want to be able to break this down and try to understand how it works historically and as Bible-believing Christians who think that the scriptures still have an impact and an authority over our lives today, how we can take a passage like this one and apply it to contemporary worlds. So we're going to be taking a look at all of that in the show today. Uh, just at the outset of this, uh, one of the books that I consulted was written by a scholar named Christopher Bryan, and the book is called Render Unto Caesar, which is basically about imperial themes, themes of empire in the New Testament. And of course, he has a quite a long section on this passage in his book. And one of the things that he says, and I'm pretty sure I quote him in my book, is that only a fool would be sure that they could perfectly interpret Jesus' statement about render unto Caesar. And I think he's absolutely right. Like this is an extremely complicated. And for anyone who takes the Bible seriously, especially the Bible as a serious historical document and who wants to try to analyze it in the within the context of antiquity and not just import it into our own modern concepts and try to overlay all of our own modern ideas upon the text, which to be totally fair, not only do like the authoritarians do this, the progressives and conservatives that want to employ this to justify their modern political programs, there are plenty of libertarian Christians that have a libertarian reading of this passage that don't actually do justice to the nature of the text itself. And so I want to dispel some of those myths. Remember that one of the major themes of this show is that we don't do libertarian readings of the Bible because libertarianism didn't exist in the first century when the New Testament was written. Therefore, libertarianism cannot be a good framework or an adequate framework for interpreting the New Testament. Instead, we have to read the New Testament on its own terms and see how it corresponds to modern political and economic concepts. And we will find that libertarianism is the most clear and consistent modern political expression of these New Testament values. But there are a lot of libertarians that get this passage wrong because they want it to mean they desperately need it to endorse our libertarian priors. And I'm going to suggest today that it is not in conflict with our libertarian priors, but it does not outright endorse them like all of the New Testament, because the New Testament is not written to be a comprehensive modern political philosophy. And so, right from the outset, we should go ahead and get that off the table. That for the majority of people that interpret this passage and try to apply it to our modern political context, they're already making the mistake of assuming that it has to perfectly correspond to our modern political ideals. And it just doesn't. And that's uh something that we as libertarians need to be open about, even though we're going to see that this passage is uh is not in conflict with libertarianism in any way at all. And in fact, is in conflict with uh different expressions of modern authoritarian socialism. So uh famous black and white, if for those of you guys listening on or watching on YouTube, I got my famous black and white slideshow here, Render Unto Caesar. Let's read the passage in Mark. Now, this is a triple tradition passage. So Jesus is going to issue this statement in all three Synoptic Gospels, which in and of itself is something that we need to take into consideration when we are reading the text. Why is it that this tradition in particular was so important for all three of the synoptic evangelists that they all included it in their gospels and they included it in a way that was very similar? In other words, given the assumption of Mark in priority, which we hold on the show here, it's the idea that Mark was the first gospel to be written. Why did Matthew and Luke incorporate this tradition in their gospels and not redact it or edit it heartily at all? There are plenty of examples throughout the Gospels where Matthew and Luke will take traditions from Mark and rework them, edit them, rearrange them, uh selectively employ them, put them in different parts of their narrative, but they don't do that with this passage. And so generally, when all three synoptic gospels are in lockstep with a passage, that means something, right? And one of the things that's frustrating about the interpretation of this passage is people don't take the synoptic context of this passage into consideration. We'll we'll get to that in more detail. But since Matthew and Luke follow Mark, and Mark is the first to be written, so Mark is the source material for this tradition for both Matthew and Luke, according to my my theory of um of the synoptic problem, the literary relationship between the synoptic gospels, where I assert that Mark is the first to be written, Matthew uses Mark, and then Luke knows both Matthew and Mark. We're going to stick with Mark as our primary base text today. So this exchange is found in Mark 12, 13 through 37, and this is what Mark says. Then they sent some the authorities in Jerusalem, sent some of the Pharisees and Herodians to him in order to trap him in a statement, trap Jesus in a statement. They came and said to him, Teacher, we know that you are truthful and defer to no one, for you are not partial to any, but teach the way of God and truth. Is it lawful to pay a poll tax to Caesar or not? Shall we pay or shall we not pay? But he, knowing their hypocrisy, said to them, Why are you testing me? Bring me a denarius to look at. They brought one, and he said to them, Whose likeness in the scription is this? And they said to him, Caesar's. And Jesus said to them, Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's. And they were amazed at him. So we can already see here that Jesus is in the middle of a conflict with the Jerusalem establishment, and they're asking him questions about taxation and um and about whether or not Jews like Jesus should pay the tax. And Jesus answers render to Caesar the things that are Caesar and to God's the things that are God's. So on the surface of this text, it would seem as if, from a modern perspective, Jesus is both saying that you got to pay your taxes always because that's just uh what you got to do. And then on the other hand, that we should have kind of a separation between the church, you know, the religious sphere in which Jesus is in charge, and then the political sphere in which maybe Caesar has a role to play as a legitimate authority figure. And we're gonna see that this way of taking a look at the text is not quite accurate historically. And there are really three questions that I want to dive into today that I think are relevant for our interpretation of this passage. So the three questions are as follows. And if you're again watching on YouTube, you can see this on my beautiful black and white slideshow. Question number one: is this, is Mark 12, 13 through 17 in parallels, a primitive argument for the separation of church and state? That's the first question we have to answer. Then, number two, because this is a podcast about how to read the Bible in its context, how does this fit into the narrative context of the synoptic gospels? As I've already said before, one of the interesting things about this passage that is often ignored in conversations about its interpretation, is that it appears in Mark, Matthew, and Luke, and it they all three of them appear in almost the same narrative context. And we're gonna see how that fits into our interpretation of this passage. What's going on in the wider narrative of the synoptic gospels that might help contextualize what Jesus says to the Herodians and the Pharisees who ask them about paying the tax to Caesar? And then number three, what is the historical background of this text? We're gonna see that there are actually a lot of historical nuances in the text itself that have to characterize and color our understanding of what is going on in this passage. So we're gonna address the first question here before we move into the other two. And I think it's really important for us to understand, as I've argued at length on this show and as I argue at length in my book, that the superficial division between the church and the state is a modern idea. It is an idea that comes primarily from the Enlightenment. And sure, the Enlightenment has its roots in the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution and the Protestant Reformation. And really, with all three of those historical movements, we can start to see this sense in which people living in Europe are beginning to divorce themselves from the authority of the Roman Catholic Church, which was the predominant theological and political power during the Middle Ages. But the idea that the separation of church and state can be like is something that is uh intrinsic to the way that human beings have always understood power dynamics in the world is a modern ideal. It is not an assumption that would have been shared by the ancients or the medieval forebears. It's not until the Enlightenment that people come to believe that there is the separation between religion and politics, and that that separation is actually a good thing. And if you take a look at the writers of the Enlightenment, many of whom were very critical of religion in general, what they're really arguing against is not biblical Christianity. What they're arguing against is the power of the establishment churches in Europe. Because again, big picture here going all the way back to the fall of the Western Roman Empire. You had unity in Western Europe under the Roman imperial order. And in 476, when the Western Roman Empire falls, the only thing that all of the various peoples in Europe had in common at that point was their belief in Roman Catholic Christianity. So it made a lot of sense given the fact that Rome had become a Christian empire after the time of Constantine in the early fourth century. It makes sense that the predominant authority in Europe will become the Catholic Church. And so throughout much of the Middle Ages, the Roman Catholic Church served as kind of a successor in Western Europe to the Roman imperial order. And throughout the Middle Ages, the Roman, the Roman Catholic Church was the political institution that tried, tried, not successfully, but tried to unite the people in Europe and they exercised real political power. And this makes sense given its historical precedent. If you go back to the Greek and Roman and Jewish world, the world that contextualized the writings of the New Testament, no one in that world drew a distinction between what we call religion today and politics. What was religious was political, and what was political was religious. You don't have to go very much further than the Old Testament to see that with the establishment of Israel under the Mosaic Covenant, they were literally called to be a theocracy and they were engaged with other people groups that had that were political entities, yes, but whose beliefs, theological beliefs about the world were intertwined with their political belief. So there was no distinction between what we call religion and what we call politics in the ancient or the medieval world. It's not until the modern era that people begin to think in those terms. So when Jesus issues the statement that we should render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's and to God the things that are God, he is not saying implicitly, he's not um, he's not predicting or foreshadowing the European Enlightenment's conception of a separation of church and state. He has to be doing something different than that because Jesus didn't believe that there was a uh the separation between religion and politics. And we have to understand, too, that in the Greco-Roman world, uh politics, Politeia, is just it refers to any behavior that happens outside of the household. It's it's the way that people act in public life. And of course, this does refer to what we would consider to be political institutions, laws, um, governments, things of that nature today, but it's much more expansive than that in the ancient world. And they just didn't share our assumptions. And this is why, like one of the problems with modern biblical interpretation that is predicated upon this distinction, this dichotomy between the church and the state is that the fundamental, the fundamental assertion in the New Testament is that Jesus is Lord, right? Uh and that he's been raised from the dead. And both of these are explicitly political statements. For those of you guys have been longtime listeners to the show, you know I've been through, I've been through, I mean, so many passages in the New Testament where the conclusion of that passage is that Jesus is actually the son of David, who is, by virtue of his life, death, resurrection, and ascension now ruling over all creation. And the church is his family, his kingdom, his set apart people. And that that is just as much a political claim as a theological claim in the first century. We tend to relegate that to theology. And unfortunately, during the 19th century, with um the rise of critical scholarship, existentialism, romanticism, um, and then this supposed dichotomy between the church and state, a lot of these aspects, like kingdom and like Christology, they were regulated to the interior, right? There was this uh kind of push, even within Christian theology, to say that concepts of kingdom, concepts of the lordship of Christ, these are things that happen within the hearts of human beings that have no bearings on the political world. And that's just not true. That's not what the writers of the New Testament were trying to get at. And so from the very beginning, we have to acknowledge that what Jesus is saying here is not that there's a separation of church and state, and I'm reinforcing that, that Caesar gets to rule over here and uh God gets to rule over here. He's not making that claim at all. It's a lot more nuanced and complex than that. So I wanted to dispel that myth from the beginning. And this is something where if you're you're new to these ideas, I really want you to try to think about this because I the the this this supposed disjunction between religion and politics has completely infected the Western psychology. Like it is a fundamental epistemological assumption for nearly everyone living in the modern Western world. And we have to try to get beyond that. Again, I'm a seventh-grade social studies teacher, and we go through the fall of Rome and the European Middle Ages every fall. And I always try to help my kids understand that, you know, we think about religion and politics, they're two different things. You know, your church and your government, they're two different things, but the ancients and the medieval people didn't think that way. And so I try to get them in the habit of when we talk about the Catholic Church and the Middle Ages, we're talking about a political organization as much as a religious organization. We got to think about it that way. So if you're new to this, try to get that division out of your head and don't read that back into the text. That is a modern idea, not an idea that was shared by the writers of the New Testament. So that's the first point that I want to make. And it's a very, very significant point. The second point that I want to make has to do with the narrative context of this passage in the Gospels, which is really important. Now, again, we gotta, and it's been a while since I've done an episode on the Gospels on this show. But I did uh in 2024 and 2025, um, as I was beginning to plan for and then write this book, I did, oh, I don't even know how many episodes on the gospels, the synoptic problem, the gospels as biographies, all of that stuff back then. And I have a whole huge chapter in my book where I talk about how to read the gospels. But we have to remember and acknowledge a couple of things about the gospels before we can understand this passage and its narrative context. The first is that the gospels are not designed to be compendiums of moral teaching or abstract theology. And this is one of the fallacies that many Christians bring with them to the text when they are reading the Bible. We assume that the Bible is either designed to be a systematic theology or that the Bible is designed to be an existential rule book. It includes rules that are explicitly black and white legitimate in all times and in all places and in all circumstances, regardless of context. And both of those are flawed assumptions. Now, of course, the Bible does provide us with theology. Like no one's gonna deny that that is the case. And the Bible does actually provide us with moral principles. Like the Bible, the Bible, in some ways should be used to set down rules for believing Christians. But this is not primarily what the Bible is. And we have to understand that first and foremost, the Bible is a it's not one book, it's not one kind of literature. The Bible is a library of books written by different people in different historical contexts in different genres that would have made sense to the original audience, even if they don't make sense necessarily to our modern assumptions. And with the Gospels, the Gospels are forms of ancient Greek biography. And so Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John as well, they're all designed to be read as literary whole. And when I talk to Helen Bond on my episode, or when I talk to Helen Bond on my episode on the Gospels as biography, Helen Bond's a great English scholar who has done a lot of work on the genre of the Gospels. She talks about how in the ancient world, biographies are designed to do two things. They're designed to recount the life of a great man and call either great in a good way or great in a bad way, and designed to encourage the audience to either emulate the behavior of the main character or run away from the behavior of the main character. And so the Gospels fit within the like the Gospels that we have, the canonical gospels, fit within the framework of ancient biography. That's what they're designed to do. And as biography, they're designed to be read from start to finish as a complete narrative. So we can't pick out a passage here and a passage there from a gospel, read it in isolation, and assume that we know what is going on. A good example of this phenomenon is that, you know, there are there are seven Harry Potter books. I think the Harry Potter books are very well written, uh, children's fiction, and they are, you know, they're just very, very well done. But it wouldn't make any sense to pick up like the fourth Harry Potter book, open it up to a random page, quote one paragraph out of that book, and think you understand the entire series. Of course not, because the entire series is designed to be read as one continuous narrative. And so is Mark, Matthew, and Luke and John. They're designed to be read as historical narratives. And so when we it comes to a passage like the render unto Caesar passage in the Synoptic Gospels, it doesn't do us any good to take those passages out of their narrative context and try to analyze them on their own without trying to fit them into their wider narrative context. So, in other words, Mark is telling a story that begins in Mark one and ends in Mark 16. And all the pieces of the story hold together and what happens in the Earlier chapters are all leading up to what happens in the later chapter. So if we want to understand Mark 12, 13 through 17, we cannot do so without trying to fit it into that larger narrative. Now, we will see that both Matthew and Luke use Mark as a base text. Again, I'm with the uh I'm with the Goodacre theory that Mark was the first gospel to be written, followed by Matthew, and then Luke used both Matthew and Mark as a source, and then that John knew all three. This is something that's been developed in detail by James Barker and Mark Goodacre. I've had both of them on my show. You can go back and listen to the episodes if you want the arguments for that. But that argument makes sense. But one of the things that we see is that like Mark is the base text, but Mark is a pretty sparse gospel. There's not a ton of details in Mark. And so we see Matthew taking Mark, adding a lot of material to it, expanding it, making it a little bit more of a rich narrative. Um, he does this thing, Matthew does this thing where he like alternates between long sections of Jesus' teaching and then long sections where they tell stories about what Jesus does during his ministry. And then Luke comes and he kind of reworks a little bit of Matthew, reworks a little bit of Mark, and creates his own narrative. They're all trying to give their own narrative presentation of Jesus. And they're not in, they're they're they're they're not uh contradicting each other. It's not like Luke thinks Matthew and Mark sucks and wants to do his own thing. They're building on the work of the previous evangelist, trying to present a coherent narrative about Jesus to a new audience. Like we have to, and this is something it's very difficult to determine who the audience of the original Gospels were. But Mark was writing, writing to one group of people, Matthew's writing to another, Luke is writing to a third, and John will be writing to a fourth. And so they're reworking these traditions. But one of the things that we need to be aware of, and again, you can get us a synopsis of the Gospels where it lays these passages out side by side, is that Matthew and Luke will often reorder material in Mark. So material that appears in a particular sequence in Mark will be reordered or rearranged in Matthew and Luke and reappropriated for different parts of their narrative. One of the interesting things that we have to be aware of, though, when we look and we call this redaction, right? Editing how does Matthew redact his source, Mark, and how does Luke redact his sources, Matthew and Mark? One of the interesting things we always need to be aware of is when the gospel writers are in complete narrative agreement. So in other words, whenever we see Mark, Matthew, and Luke having long series of traditions that are all in the same order, we know that those traditions were designed to be held together. And we're going to see in the case of Mark 12, 13 through 17, that Matthew and Luke both retain almost completely its narratival context. So in other words, we know from the outset that Mark 12, 13 through 17 isn't just about taxation itself. It's about whatever's going on in the wider narrative of Mark that Matthew and Luke both felt compelled to retain. So I wanted to I want you guys, if you're watching on YouTube, and again, if you're not watching on YouTube, it's it's really helpful to see this. So I would highly recommend subscribing to my YouTube channel that's at Pro Liberty Pod, and then getting on here and taking a look at the material that I have. And if you want a copy of this, I'd be more than happy to send you a copy of this because I do have some PDFs that will help you. But I have Mark, Matthew, and Luke lined up in a synopsis that talks or in not talks about, but what this what this does, what this synoptist is what this synopsis does is it shows us what's going on in all three synoptic gospels after Jesus enters Jerusalem. And this will help us to better understand the larger narrative context in which this passage was occurring. Now, one of the things that has happened up to this point in all three synoptic gospels is that the authorities, the Jerusalem establishment, the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the Sanhedrin, the Herodians, all the people that are in charge in Jerusalem and Galilee are in opposition to Jesus, right? Jesus has made them nervous for whatever reason, this proclamation of the kingdom of God, his drawing of the crowds. This is something that has made Jesus that is that has made the authorities very uncomfortable. And Jesus is traveling to Jerusalem for his final week in Jerusalem for the Passover, knowing that he's going to have to have one final showdown with a Jerusalem establishment. And so this shows you, this slide that I have here shows you that Matthew, Mark, and Luke are all very consistent and all have several of the same traditions in order, in the same order that they appear once Jesus enters Jerusalem for the final week. So if you're taking a look at this on YouTube, you can see that Jesus uh procures a donkey, uh, he has the triumphal entry, he goes into Jerusalem, there's a cleansing of the temple, and these all occur in basically the same sequence in Mark, Matthew, and Luke. So again, what we have here is triple tradition. This is tradition that's found in all three Synoptic Gospels. And while Mark is going to have some material that Matthew and Luke rearrange to different parts of their gospel, and Luke is going to add some material in at this point, and Matthew will later on down the road, too. The basic narrative structure of this section of all three Synoptic Gospels is more or less the same. Matthew and Luke liked what Mark was doing, uh, and they retained his order because it's important. And again, the order shows that Jesus is traveling into Jerusalem and he's doing so in a triumphant and authoritative manner under the threat of his impending death, because he's already made the authorities very mad earlier in the Gospels, right? So he's going to Jerusalem, and all three synoptic evangelists have set us up for this conflict between Jesus and the authorities in Jerusalem. And then this is kind of hard to see, I know, because the um because the text is really small. But Jesus is going to go into the temple and he's going to find himself in a series of controversies with the temple authorities. And I've broken down each of the traditions that are within this larger temple narrative. This uh is again, this runs from Mark 11, 27 to 1244, Matthew 21, 23 to 22, 46, and then Luke 21 to 21, 38. And if you're taking a look, you can see that there is a long series of triple tradition material that is in the exact same order in all three synoptic gospels, including this question about paying taxes to Caesar, which is right in the middle of this long string of triple tradition. So, in other words, the narrative context of this tradition about Jesus responding to the Pharisees and the Herodians about the question of taxation is contextualized by all of the material that surrounds it. And Matthew and Luke understood that this particular tradition could not be reinterpreted outside of its larger narrative context. And what exactly is that larger narrative context? It is Jesus's authority, it's Jesus' showdown with the authorities in the Jerusalem temple. So Jesus is going toe-to-toe in the temple with the watching crowds or with the with the crowds watching against the Jerusalem establishment, the people that don't like him and want to see him silenced. And that, in that alone, is the narrative context of this passage. You can see right here, if you're looking um on uh if you're looking at um, if you're looking on YouTube, you can see right here in the middle of this this chart how the questions about paying taxes to Caesar, it's it's smack dab right in the middle of all of these traditions. And what is the main point of all of these traditions to show that Jesus is the real authority and the temple and the Jerusalem establishment and the temple authorities are not, right? That's the point. That's what's going on here. And so this tradition about paying taxes to Caesar cannot be taken in isolation. Again, this is not supposed to be some sort of isolated or abstract question about whether or not taxation is theologically or morally legitimate. It is a question regarding the authority of Jesus vis-a-vis the Jerusalem establishment. And unless we understand its narratival context, we will never, ever, ever be able to give this text the respect that it deserves. And so again, I want to make this point forcefully one more time, because this is a triple tradition passage embedded in a long string of triple tradition passages in all three of the synoptic gospels. The narrative setting is exactly the same, which is not true with a lot of the Jesus tradition. And the surrounding material is exactly the same and transmitted in the exact same sequence, which tells us that this passage cannot be isolated from its narratival context. It cannot be divorced from its larger narrative context. And what is the one main point that Mark and then Matthew and Luke following him were trying to make? It is that Jesus and not the Jerusalem establishment is the liter the legitimate source of authority. That's the point that the gospel writers are trying to make. And any interpretation of this passage that does not take that in consideration is doomed to failure from the start. So that is the narratival context of the render unto Caesar passage. It is a question about Jesus' authority. And so, whatever we make of this passage, it has to contribute to that narrative agenda, the agenda of showing that Jesus is the real God-ordained authority and not the Jerusalem establishment. And there is no interpretation of this passage that is legitimate that does not take that into consideration. That is fundamental, foundational for this passage. All right, everybody. I want to take a quick break from the show to let you all know that my brand new book, Politics, Economics, and New Testament Interpretation, where I argue definitively that the New Testament does not endorse modern authoritarian socialism, is now available for pre-order. The release date is going to be Tuesday, September 15th, 2026. And you can go to libertarianchristians.com, click on the book tab at the top of the page, and then select my book. You can pre-order the physical copy through LibertarianChristians.com and you can go to Amazon and pre-order the ebook version, the Kindle version of that book over there. And of course, on September 15th, you'll be able to find the physical copy on Amazon and in many other places where books are sold. I'm extremely excited about this book. This is a culmination of my life's work. I know that many of you guys have asked me about it over the last several months, and I'm so ready to get into your hands. Let's go ahead and make this a big hit, get these ideas out there. Again, go and pre-order the book at libertarianchristians.com or at Amazon.com. You can search my name or the title of the book. Thank you guys very much. So, with that historical or with that narratival context in mind, it's very important for us to point to the historical questions that are going on in this text. And this is going to take us pretty much to the end of this episode. There are a couple of features of the text that I really want to cover as we begin to think about what this text means. So I do want to go back, uh, we'll go ahead and pull this down real quick. I want to go back to the passage itself and read it one more time. Okay. So we know that Mark 12, 13 through, oh, I'm sorry, that should say 13 through 17, not 13 through 37. That's a typo on my part. So I apologize for that. But Mark 12, 13 through 17, uh, this is what it says. Then, and again, remembering that Matthew and Luke follow Mark almost exactly here, and that this is included in a long string of triple tradition material, which demonstrates that Jesus is the authority against the Jerusalem establishment who believed incorrectly that they were the authority. So here's what actually occurs. All right, I'm gonna read it one more time. This is Mark 12, 13 through 17, not 37, as it erroneously says on YouTube. Then they sent some of the Far the temple uh authorities, the Jerusalem establishment, sent some of the Pharisees and Herodians to him in order to trap him in a statement. They came and said to him, Teacher, we know that you are truthful and defer to no one, for you are not partial to any, but teach the way of God and truth. Is it lawful to pay a poll tax to Caesar or not? Shall we pay or shall we not pay? But he, knowing their hypocrisy, said to them, Why are you testing me? Bring me a denarius to look at. They brought brought one. And he said to them, Whose likeness and inscription is this? And they said to him, Caesar's. And Jesus said to them, Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's and to God the things that are God. And they were amazed at him. So what is going on here that we need to understand? First of all, I'm I'm sure the episode will come out before I release this. Well, maybe not, but probably. But I'm interviewing Scott McKnight in a week or two on his new book, Jesus People Pharisees, where he talks about the way that the Pharisees have been portrayed in popular Christian tradition. And one of the points that he makes is that the Pharisees are not nearly as poorly regarded by Jews of their time as the synoptic evangelists would make them out to be. And one of the points that I want to make about that is that given the fact that the gospels are narratives, all of these different groups are basically characters in that narrative. And so the Pharisees have a particular narrative function, as do the Herodians. So Jesus' confrontation with the Pharisees and then calling the Pharisees hypocrites in this passage does not mean that is true of all Pharisees that existed in the first century. In fact, we have Gamaliel, who is very tolerant towards the early church. Paul himself was a reformed Pharisee. There are plenty of Pharisees that wind up becoming believers in Jesus. This is kind of a narrative function of the evangelist to pit a group called the Pharisees against Jesus, right? They're designed to be the antagonist, but this is not something that is true about all Pharisees. And the historical, the actual historical witness about the Pharisees is a lot more complicated. So I want to put that up there as an important historical point going forward. But that is not what I want to get at primarily. So what I want to primarily get at is that there are five historical considerations that we need to understand as we are reading through this passage. So the very first is that, and this is something that I think a lot of people have really missed. The Pharisees and the Herodians are not asking Jesus about taxation in general. This is really important because people will say that this tradition is about taxation. It's obviously not about taxation. The triple tradition narrative context of this shows that it's actually about Jesus' authority. That's really what this is about. And the Pharisees and Herodians are not asking Jesus if all taxes are illegitimate. Should you pay taxes in general or should you not pay taxes in general? So this is not a general debate about the legitimacy or the nature of taxation. In fact, it is a conversation about a very specific form of taxation, which is called a kinsas. And this is this is a head tax or a census tax that was imposed by the Romans. And this is one of these areas where I think that the um, I think that the uh the NASB doesn't quite get this right uh in the way that they translate this because they translate it as poll tax, but it's actually a form of taxation called the tribunum capitus or the Kinsos to head tax. And essentially, what this tax was is it was a tax that was levied by the Romans on subjected people based on the amount of people living in the population of those who were conquered. So this is a more or less a form of a tribute that was paid by subjected people to the Romans. A poll tax would be a tax that you would uh that you would have to pay if you were it's there there are some slight differences in the way that these taxes were paid. So the point is I don't really like the translation poll tax. And what we have to remember about this passage here is that they are asking Jesus, the Herodes and the Pharisees are asking Jesus very specifically about the Kinsis, which is this this head tax, this tributum capitus, which is a tax that signified that the Jewish people had been conquered and dominated by the Romans. And there is a lot of historical evidence from Josephus and other figures that this kinsos was extremely unpopular among Jews. And of course, why would it not be extremely unpopular? Jews were longing for the day of God's liberation of his people and having to pay this head tax, this kinsas, was an example of the fact that God had not yet liberated his people. It was a payment that had to be made to the Roman imperial overlords who were politically dominating Judea and Galilee. So this is an extremely unpopular tax that resulted in rebellions in Judea and Galilee against the Roman imperial order. So this is once again not a qu the the Pharisees and the Herodians are not asking Jesus about taxation in general. They're asking them about this very specific imperial head tax that was unpopular among Jews. Now you can see here if in the Gospel of Mark how Mark says that they were trying to trap Jesus in a statement. They know that the watching crowds in the temple do not like the Ken Sos, and they believe that it is a symbol of Roman imperial authority. And so they're putting Jesus in this position where he has to make a statement about this extremely politically unpopular tax. And you can see what they're trying to do here, right? The the way that this works is that if Jesus says, don't pay the tax, then they can go to Pontius Pilate and say, look, Jesus is advocating rebellion against Rome, which means that he should legitimately be persecuted as an insurrectionist and crucified. Or if he says that they should pay this very unpopular Kinsos tax, well, then the crowds turn against Jesus and they fall in favor of the Pharisees and the Herodians, which is what they want. They either want to be able to bring charges about Jesus to the Roman authorities, or they want the crowds to turn against Jesus. So they're trying to trap him by asking him about this very particular unpopular head tax, which was a symbol of Roman authority. So that's one of the primary historical contexts that we need to take into consideration. This passage is not about taxation in general. It's about a very specific and unpopular tax. And the question itself is not a philosophical reflection on taxation. It's not a question about political philosophy. It is an attempt by the Pharisees and the Herodians to put Jesus in an impossible situation, either making a statement where the crowds will turn against him, or making a statement where they can bring charges against him to the Roman governor. And they think that they have him trapped. The other thing we have to take into consideration, too, and Christopher Bryan brings this out in his book, in the ancient world, and this is kind of like fiat currency in the United States today, if you take a look at a dollar bill, it says uh this is like the property of the U.S. treasury. Uh, in the ancient mind, the coins which bore the image of the emperor rightly belong to him. Since the Roman coinage was stamped with the image of the emperor, those coins directly belong to him. And Jesus, in his response, is going to be playing on that idea that coinage belongs to the emperor because the emperor's face is on the coin. This is something that people in the ancient world would have just accepted as an ideal in the same way that we accept that our fake fiat currency system is the property of the U.S. Treasury. It's got property of the treasury stamped on there. You're not legally allowed to destroy money. Uh, having an image of the emperor on coinage in the Roman world meant that that coinage belongs to him. And everyone would have understood this. Also, it's important, uh, it's important to uh to remember that Jesus' response is designed, again, to show that he is the authoritative figure and his opponents are not. So he has to find a way to get out of this trap that they've placed him in by answering a very specific question about an extremely unpopular uh task, or about an extremely unpopular tax, rather. Um, the other historical consideration that we need to make is that the Pharisees and Herodians three times ask Jesus if they should, if they should pay the tax. And the Greek word that they use is de domi. It's used three times by the Pharisees and Herodians with respect to payment. And so they're saying, well, do you have to you have to kind of pay this tax to Caesar? Do you have to give over to Caesar this tax or not? And when Jesus responds and says, Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's and render unto God the things that are God, he responds, it's with a related but different Greek word, apodidomi. And the meaning of that word, render unto Caesar, the render, the give, is a term that means give to somebody what is owed to them. So in other words, Jesus takes the Greek words that the Pharisees and the Herodians are using, the more general Greek term forgiving that the Pharisees and the Herodians are using to try to trap him. And he makes that word more specific. So they're asking about paying the tax in general. And then Jesus, when he says render unto Caesar, is saying very specifically, give to Caesar what is it what is owed him. Now, how can Jesus make that claim? Well, whose image was on the coin that was produced by the Pharisees and the Herodians? It was Caesar's image. And so, since Caesar's image on the coin would suggest that the coin belonged to him, you're giving him what is owed. Jesus is saying, all right, well, this is based on our worldview, the rightful property of the emperor. So give back to the emperor what belongs to him. So Jesus isn't saying, yes, you have to pay the head tax uh or the uh the census tax necessarily. What he's saying is, we all kind of agree that this coin belongs to the emperor because it has his face on him. So give him back what's owed to him, right? Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar. It's got his face on it, so give it back to him because it it belongs to him. And this is a very, very sly way of getting around the direct question that the Herodians and the uh Pharisees are trying to trap him in. The other problem here, too, and this is where Jesus is able to turn this on the crowds. And again, given the bigger narratival goal of both Mark, Matthew, and Luke and what this tradition contributes to the larger narrative goal of the gospel, given the larger narrative goal of trying to show that Jesus is the true authority, as opposed to the Pharisees and the Herodians, he's going to turn this back around on them and in fact make them look very unpopular in the eye of the Christian. And here's what he says. He says, Bring me a denarius. Jesus does in verse 15. And the Pharisees and the Herodians bring one to him. And Jesus says, Whose likeness and inscription is this? And they say to him, Caesar's. Well, again, in the historical context, there were there were coins that were minted for use in the Jerusalem temple that did not bear the image of Caesar, because the image of Caesar was considered by many Jews to be blasphemous. And why would you bring and it's one thing, you know, if you use coinage in day-to-day transactions with the Caesar's face on it. It's another thing if you bring a coin into the temple, God's house, like the holy place for Jews. It's another thing if you bring a coin into the temple that bears the Caesar's image. That is a form of blasphemy. And so the Pharisees and the Herodians have one of these coins that have the emperor's face on it in the temple, and they produce it and hand it over to Jesus with the crowds watching, when the crowds know full well that they could have had coins on their possession that were minted without the image of the emperor, and therefore acceptable to bring into the temple. And so they publicly produce this coin on their person that has the image of the emperor, which is blasphemy, and they do so in the context of the temple. So we can see how Jesus has already turned this around on the Herodians and on the Pharisees. Now, instead of making Jesus out to either be a Roman supporting person whom the Jewish crowds turn against or a seditious individual who refuses to pay the poll tax, Jesus has found a way within his historical context to show that in fact it's his opponents who are being hypocritical and who are not acting as the authoritative figures of the people of God should act. So he's taken this trap that they set for him and turned it back on him. So again, we can see that this is not a question about taxation in general. And just taking this passage out of his out of its historical and narratival context and trying to place it into the modern world and make it answer our modern questions will not do. Jesus is evading a trap set for him by the authorities. He's playing on this idea that coinage belongs to the emperor. He has to navigate this question about a very specific and unpopular tax. And he uses a very specific word, rendering, giving what is owed back to the Caesar. And then also shows that the quote unquote Jerusalem establishment, the authorities, have a blasphemous coin in their temple. And all of this is designed to show, and this is number five of the historical background, that Jesus has superiority over the Jerusalem establishment. This is about a power struggle, an authority struggle, and Jesus, not his opponents, is the true authority figure. And of course, the crowds are amazed by what Jesus says. They're amazed by the fact that Jesus is able to take what is a very obvious and difficult trap that was set for him and turn it around on his opponents, revealing that Jesus himself is the true authority. Now, one of the things that came up in my research that I thought was very interesting, and I think Christopher Bryan and others among or others that are working in that tradition have made the same claim that there may be in the synoptic gospels a slight allusion to the creation narratives in Genesis 1 and 2, because the question has to do with likeness and image, right? About whose likeness and whose image is on the coin. And so this concept of image goes back to Genesis 1, 26 to 28, where human beings are made in the image and likeness of God. And some people think that the way that Mark is telling the story is designed to evoke creation. We know that Mark does that at several points in his narrative, right? Genesis is a fundamental kind of narrative presupposition for Mark, Matthew, and Luke. We really can't understand what's going on in the synoptic gospels unless we understand their worldview, which included this kind of robust understanding of creation, and that by referring to the likeness of Caesar on this coin, they may be playing with these ideals of creation. And I think this is further strengthened in the second half of the statement, the second clause of the statement that Jesus made. So I'll read again Mark 12, 17. And Jesus said to them, his opponents, render to Caesar the things that are Caesar, and to God the things that are God. And they were amazed at him. So render the things unto God that are God's. Well, what belongs to God in the Jewish worldview? If you are a Jew and you believe in creation and you believe that there's one God and you believe that he's going to come back one day and reestablish his rule over all creation, exactly as Jesus says that he's doing in and through Jesus' own ministry, well, then what belongs to God? Everything, right? So you have to give your entire life over to God. When the Pharisees and the Herodians ask Jesus about the Kinshaws, this unpopular imperial tax, he says in a very wise way, well, the coins have Caesar's face on them, so they technically belong to him, so go ahead and give them back. But we actually owe everything to our God. And I think when we're trying to discuss and apply this passage in the modern world, much of the conversation has been placed on the first clause, render unto Caesar. And in fact, that's what I'm going to name the title of this episode. So I guess I'm playing into that stereotype myself, but not enough attention has been paid to the second part of the clause, which is render unto God what is God's. And so Jesus is saying here that God is owed everything, but in the meantime, give back to Caesar the coins that belong to him by virtue of the coins having his face on them. So all of this is designed to show that Jesus is the ultimate authority figure in this long string of triple tradition, and to show that Jesus is able to retain the popularity of the crowds and turn the tables on the Pharisees and Herodians that were trying to trap him in this statement. And that, my friends, is what this tradition was originally designed to do. It is not a tradition which gives us a timeless political or economic theory of taxation. It is not a tradition that can be read in isolation from its larger narrative context in the triple tradition. And it is not a tradition that can be easily transposed and transported into our modern world with all of our modern assumptions. And I think that what we have to do is just allow this text to be this text. And ultimately, what Jesus is getting at is what he's been getting out all throughout the synoptic gospel. He says at the very beginning of the Gospel of Mark, verses 16 and 17 or 15 and 16, uh, somewhere in that the kingdom of God is at hand. Therefore, repent and believe in the gospel, right? So all throughout the Gospel of Mark, there has been, and this is true in Matthew and Luke as well, this need for this imminent decision. The reign of God is finally coming. Everything that the prophets had predicted was beginning to come to fruition in and through Jesus. God was reasserting his rule over all creation, installing the true king on his throne. And everyone, including the Jerusalem establishment, has to submit to the proclamation of the kingdom of God. And guess what? The Jerusalem establishment doesn't do that. And in fact, they reject Jesus and ultimately have him killed by handing him over to the Romans on bogus charges of blasphemy and sedition, right? This is the whole, the whole game that they were trying to play. And so this passage doesn't take anything away from the wider narrative context of the Gospels, which universally envision Jesus as God's king, as Yahweh's king ruling over all creation. The kingdom of God has come, and there can be, whether it's the Sanhedrin or the Jerusalem establishment or the Roman imperial authorities, there are no competitors to Jesus' messianic rule. And this tradition in Mark 12, 13 through 17 in parallels, does nothing to compromise that basic concept. So here's my challenge to those of you that are listening today. And I think this is a very important challenge for us to take into consideration here. When this passage comes up in popular Christian discourse, we need to dispense with the notion that this is somehow legitimizing our modern separation of church and state, because it's not. And the writers in the New Testament don't believe that that separation is possible. And I don't believe that Christians should maintain or uh uphold the idea that that separation is possible. To be a Christian is a is to be political in the sense that we believe that Jesus is the real, true, objective Messiah who's currently ruling over all creation by virtue of his death, resurrection, and ascension, and that the people of God, the family of Abraham, redeem redefined around faith and the spirit, are the one chosen people. We are the true people of God, God's holy people, God's nation. We are the only people that matter, and we are here to evangelize, to gospel the entire world, to proclaim the fact that Jesus is Lord over all creation and live in a manner consistent with that. That is that is Christian politics to the full. That is what we believe. And that means that our allegiance to all of these modern political systems should be at most a matter of kind of arm's length, sort of um, it's just something that we have to do because these systems still exist, unfortunately. Uh, but these are not anything that, but these systems don't have any sort of, they don't have any sort of timeless legitimacy. These are not systems that are valuable in and of themselves. And this passage is not saying that until the end of history, Caesar's gonna rule and we should give Caesar space to rule, and then Jesus can rule in our hearts or whatever. It's it's not designed to do that at all. And in fact, in a lot of ways, the real historical and political implication for the modern church for this passage is that Jesus is our ultimate authority and that that authority cannot be shared with other people. I think that there is a certain strain of Jewish pragmatism that we can see in this passage. This is the whole Jeremiah 29, 7 paradigm where Jeremiah says, seek the welfare of the city. In other words, the Babylonians are in power during Jeremiah's time. We might as well try to make peace with them, knowing, and as the final prophecies of Jeremiah very vividly outline, that God is using the Babylonian Empire for a specific purpose and will ultimately destroy them in the end. Sometimes the way that we get along with political authorities in our world, or I would say pretty much all the time, that we have to get along with the political authorities in our world, it's under that Jeremiah 29-7 rubric. Paul just kind of takes that and updates that to an eschatological, ecclesiological, and Christological context, right? That's really what's going on in the New Testament. And this passage in the gospels don't do anything to compromise that idea. We also need to make sure that we're honest about what, like what this passage is actually doing. This passage isn't about taxation. It's not about political structures or authorities at all. It's about the authority of Jesus, and it's about him trying to evade a very specific question about a very specific kind of taxation. He's not making the point, Mark is not making the point that taxes are always necessary or good. Jesus is not saying that taxes should always be paid. Like, that's not what's going on here. What's going on here is that Jesus is turning the tables on his adversaries who are trying to pin him to a wall, putting him in a between a rock and a hard place, the crowds on the one hand and the Roman authorities on the other. And Jesus finds a way to navigate that, to thread the needle and turn it back on them and show that in fact they're the ones who are being hypocritical, and he is the one who is consistent. So that's what's going on with this passage. And I think in order to really fully appreciate what is happening here, we have to be honest about the historical and narratival context of this passage. And for whether you're a progressive or a conservative, which, you know, I know some conservatives listen to the show. We love to con the conservatives, you're progressives listening to the show. Happy to have you on here. But even libertarians, we need to be very careful about how we handle this passage. And we need to make sure that we don't wind up bringing a passage like this into our modern political and economic debates when this passage was never really intended to contribute to that. We have to be very honest about the limits and the intention of this passage, as well as its historical and narratival context, to make sure that we don't do it injustice. And again, this is the Protestant Libertarian Podcast. We believe that the Bible is the ultimate source of authority on this show. And one of the things that we have to be very careful of is making sure that our own traditions, our own worldviews, and our own biases are not the primary means by which we read the text. Now, we're all going to bring our philosophical and intellectual baggage with us when we read the Bible. We're always going to be reading our own experience and our own worldview into the text. But the problem is if we're not aware of that condition, if we're not aware of that reading habit, then what winds up happening is that we just use the Bible to legitimate all of our modern political and theological and economic ideas instead of doing what the Bible is supposed to do, allowing the Bible to critique our worldview, to challenge our worldview, to change us, to help us to conform more to Christ and better understand the nature of reality. And even though I don't necessarily agree with all of the theological conclusions that the reformers drew, they all made this one point. And this is really, in my mind, what it means to be a Protestant is that all of our ideas, all of our ideas, our theological ideas, all of the ideas that we have, our entire worldviews need to be subjected to the authority of Scripture. And if our worldviews are measured up against the authority of Scripture and found one, then we change our worldview. We don't try to change scripture to fit our worldview. And I think that's exactly what we need to do with this render unto Caesar tradition. We need to make sure that we are not allowing this tradition to bear more weight or to answer questions that it was never designed to answer. So there we go. I hope that that helps today. Uh, again, I think that what Jesus is saying here about um giving to God everything is extremely compatible with our libertarian philosophy and our libertarian worldview. Of course, he's not teaching libertarianism. The passage is a lot more complicated than that. But I do think that we need to be um that we need to be um very aware of what's happening here and try our best to faithfully interpret that. Okay, that was a huge episode. Again, go to libertarian Christians.com slash conference, I believe. Sign up for the conference October 17th, 2026. It's gonna be awesome. Go pre-order my new my new book on libertarianchristians.com uh or on Amazon, the Kindle edition. Um and yeah, please do that. Get the word out, help share this show. Uh Pro Liberty Pod on YouTube, Pro Liberty Pod on Twitter, follow me on all those places. I love you guys. I appreciate everything you do, and uh, I'm looking forward to talking to you again next week. Have a great day, guys. Bye. Thank you for listening to another episode of the Protestant Libertarian Podcast. If you have any questions or comments, please reach out to me at theprotestantlibertarian at gmail.com. You can also find me on Twitter. You can follow me at the handle at Pro Liberty Pod. Again, that is at Pro Liberty Pod. And you can also visit me at the Protestant Libertarian Podcast.com. At the Protestant Libertarian Podcast.com, you can also support the Christians for Liberty Network and the Libertarian Christian Institute. Thank you guys so much for listening to this episode, and we will see you next Tuesday.