Did Jesus Ask for Money? No. Who Supported His Ministry

Nowhere in the Gospels does Jesus ask for money for himself, and he never charges anyone for his teaching or his healing. Before his ministry he worked as a carpenter. Once it began, women including Mary Magdalene, Joanna and Susanna supported the group from their own means (Luke 8:1–3), and Judas Iscariot kept a shared purse.

He lived by the rule he gave the Twelve when he sent them out, “freely ye have received, freely give” (Matthew 10:8), and nobody in the Gospels pays for a healing or a sermon. What he needed came to him the same way, as gifts: from women he had healed, from hosts who opened their homes, and from a woman who poured costly ointment over him. So whatever we give to his work today begins with what we were given first.

The Gospels never record Jesus asking for money, whether for himself, for his disciples or for his work. When he sent the Twelve out to preach and heal, he told them, “freely ye have received, freely give” (Matthew 10:8).

Once he did ask to see a coin, and that was to answer a question. His opponents wanted to know whether it was lawful to pay tribute to Caesar, and he said, “Shew me the tribute money.” They brought him a penny, a Roman denarius, and he asked whose image was on it. When they said Caesar’s, he answered, “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s” (Matthew 22:17–21).

It is different in the Old Testament, where God does ask his people for money and goods. The law of Moses says that “all the tithe of the land” is “holy unto the LORD” (Leviticus 27:30), and the prophet Malachi tells Israel, “Bring ye all the tithes into the storehouse” (Malachi 3:10). The law gave “all the tenth in Israel” to the tribe of Levi for its service at the tabernacle (Numbers 18:21). Jesus lived under that law, but the Gospels never show him collecting tithes or offerings.

The Gospels never mention a fee, a wage or any other payment for his preaching or his healing. What he did expect was that his messengers would be fed and housed by the people they served. He sent the Twelve out with “no money in their purse” (Mark 6:8) and said, “the workman is worthy of his meat” (Matthew 10:10). When he sent out seventy others, he told them to stay in one house, “eating and drinking such things as they give: for the labourer is worthy of his hire” (Luke 10:7). They were to live on the hospitality of the households that took them in. At the Last Supper he changed the instruction: “But now, he that hath a purse, let him take it, and likewise his scrip” (Luke 22:36).

The apostle Paul drew a rule from these sayings: “Even so hath the Lord ordained that they which preach the gospel should live of the gospel” (1 Corinthians 9:14). Yet Paul said he had not used that right himself, so that he could “make the gospel of Christ without charge” (1 Corinthians 9:18).

Jesus earned his living with his hands, and the people of his hometown knew him for it. They asked whether he was not “the carpenter, the son of Mary” (Mark 6:3), or, as Matthew tells it, “Is not this the carpenter’s son?” (Matthew 13:55). The Greek word is tektōn, and Encyclopaedia Britannica sums up the two verses this way: Joseph was a carpenter, “a craftsman who worked with his hands,” and according to Mark, Jesus also became one. Whether he worked mainly in wood or in stone is a question of its own, and we take it up in Was Jesus really a carpenter?

His family was not wealthy, and we can see it in the offering Mary and Joseph brought when they presented the infant Jesus at the temple. They offered “A pair of turtledoves, or two young pigeons” (Luke 2:24), which is what the law allowed when a mother was “not able to bring a lamb” (Leviticus 12:8). Luke says Jesus was “about thirty years of age” when his ministry began (Luke 3:23), but Scripture never tells us how much he earned as a craftsman.

Luke tells us who they were. As Jesus traveled “throughout every city and village,” the Twelve went with him, along with “certain women, which had been healed of evil spirits and infirmities”: Mary Magdalene, “Joanna the wife of Chuza Herod’s steward, and Susanna, and many others, which ministered unto him of their substance” (Luke 8:1–3). Their “substance” was their own property or money. Joanna’s husband managed the household of Herod, the “tetrarch of Galilee” (Luke 3:1), so at least one of these women had ties to the ruler’s court.

The King James Version says the women ministered “unto him,” but the Greek text used for most modern editions reads “unto them,” meaning Jesus and the Twelve together. Modern translations follow it, and in the ESV the women “provided for them out of their means.”

Other people fed him and gave him a place to stay. Simon Peter’s mother-in-law served Jesus and the disciples in the house of Simon and Andrew (Mark 1:29–31), Martha “received him into her house” (Luke 10:38), and a Pharisee invited him to a meal (Luke 7:36). Jesus even invited himself to stay with Zacchaeus, a rich tax collector (Luke 19:5). And after his death, Joseph of Arimathea, “a rich man,” laid his body “in his own new tomb” (Matthew 27:57–60), while Nicodemus brought “a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about an hundred pound weight” for the burial (John 19:39).

He did, and it was Judas Iscariot who kept the group’s money. John’s Gospel says Judas “had the bag, and bare what was put therein” (John 12:6), and John adds that when Judas objected to a costly gift, he spoke “not that he cared for the poor; but because he was a thief” (John 12:5–6).

That purse paid for everyday needs and for gifts to the poor. At the Last Supper, when Jesus spoke to Judas, some of the disciples assumed he had told him, “Buy those things that we have need of against the feast; or, that he should give something to the poor” (John 13:29). In Samaria the disciples went into the town “to buy meat,” meaning food (John 4:8), and before the feeding of the five thousand they asked whether they should “go and buy two hundred pennyworth of bread” (Mark 6:37).

Later Judas agreed to betray Jesus to the chief priests, who “covenanted with him for thirty pieces of silver” (Matthew 26:15). After Jesus was condemned, Judas brought the silver back and threw it down in the temple, and the priests, who would not put “the price of blood” into the treasury, bought “the potter’s field” with it instead (Matthew 27:3–7). There is more on that sum in the price of Judas’s betrayal.

He did, days before his death, at a supper in Bethany, when a woman poured “ointment of spikenard very precious” over him (Mark 14:3). John tells us she was Mary, the sister of Martha and Lazarus, and that she anointed his feet (John 12:1–3). Some of those present complained that the ointment “might have been sold for more than three hundred pence, and have been given to the poor” (Mark 14:5). In Jesus’ parable of the vineyard a laborer is hired “for a penny a day” (Matthew 20:2), so the ointment was worth about 300 days’ wages.

Jesus took her side: “Let her alone; why trouble ye her? she hath wrought a good work on me. For ye have the poor with you always, and whensoever ye will ye may do them good: but me ye have not always.” She had come, he said, “aforehand to anoint my body to the burying” (Mark 14:6–8). Luke tells of a separate anointing earlier in the ministry, in a Pharisee’s house, by a woman described as “a sinner” (Luke 7:36–50).

By his own account he had no home: “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head” (Luke 9:58; Matthew 8:20). Matthew says that after leaving Nazareth he “dwelt in Capernaum” (Matthew 4:13), but the Gospels never mention a house, land or savings that he owned during his ministry, and the money for daily needs came from the shared purse.

Even so, he paid his tax when the collectors came to Peter in Capernaum and asked, “Doth not your master pay tribute?” (Matthew 17:24). This was the two-drachma tax, the half shekel that the law of Moses required of every Israelite counted in the census, “from twenty years old and above,” for “the service of the tabernacle” (Exodus 30:13–16). Modern translations such as the ESV head the passage “The Temple Tax.” Jesus pointed out that kings tax strangers, not their own children: “Then are the children free.” Still, “lest we should offend them,” he told Peter to catch a fish, and “thou shalt find a piece of money: that take, and give unto them for me and thee” (Matthew 17:26–27).

Scripture does not say whether Jesus paid a tithe, though he lived under the law of Moses, which required one.

His clearest words on tithing were spoken to the scribes and Pharisees: “ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith: these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone” (Matthew 23:23; compare Luke 11:42). So he approved of the tithe, while telling them that justice, mercy and faith matter more.

He also watched people give. Sitting opposite the temple treasury, he saw rich people put in “much” and a poor widow put in “two mites,” and he told his disciples that she “hath cast more in, than all they which have cast into the treasury,” because they gave “of their abundance” and she gave “all that she had, even all her living” (Mark 12:41–44).

The New Testament never sets a percentage for Christian giving. Paul asks each believer to set money aside “as God hath prospered him” (1 Corinthians 16:2), and the churches apply that teaching in different ways. Catholics are taught that the faithful “have the duty of providing for the material needs of the Church, each according to his abilities” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 2043). Southern Baptists confess that Christians “should contribute of their means cheerfully, regularly, systematically, proportionately, and liberally” (Baptist Faith and Message 2000, article XIII). Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are asked to pay “one-tenth of all their interest annually” (Doctrine and Covenants 119:4).

All four Gospels tell how Jesus drove traders out of the temple, and Matthew, Mark and John say he overturned the money changers’ tables. In John’s telling he found people selling oxen, sheep and doves, “and the changers of money sitting,” and he drove them out, “poured out the changers’ money, and overthrew the tables,” and said, “make not my Father’s house an house of merchandise” (John 2:13–16). In Mark he joins words from Isaiah 56:7 and Jeremiah 7:11: “Is it not written, My house shall be called of all nations the house of prayer? but ye have made it a den of thieves” (Mark 11:15–17).

What he would not allow was trading in the temple. He had nothing against the offerings made there, and in that same temple he praised the widow’s gift (Mark 12:41–44).

Jesus often warned about the pull of money. “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth,” he said, “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also” (Matthew 6:19–21). He said, “Ye cannot serve God and mammon,” mammon meaning wealth (Matthew 6:24), and “Take heed, and beware of covetousness: for a man’s life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth” (Luke 12:15).

A rich man once asked him about eternal life, and Jesus told him, “go thy way, sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, take up the cross, and follow me.” The man “went away grieved: for he had great possessions,” and Jesus said, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God” (Mark 10:21–25). Yet he did not ask the same of everyone. When Zacchaeus promised to give half his goods to the poor and to repay fourfold anyone he had cheated, Jesus said, “This day is salvation come to this house” (Luke 19:8–9).

Many of his parables turn on coins, wages and debts: the talents entrusted to three servants (Matthew 25:14–30), the woman who searches for one lost piece of silver (Luke 15:8–9), the two debtors who owed “five hundred pence, and the other fifty” (Luke 7:41–42), and the rich man who built bigger barns and was “not rich toward God” (Luke 12:16–21).

In Acts, Paul quotes a saying of Jesus that the Gospels do not record: “remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how he said, It is more blessed to give than to receive” (Acts 20:35). It is the same rule he gave the Twelve, said another way, and it still holds for us: what we have freely received, we freely give.

---

• Jesus, wealth and money in the Bible
• The parable of the talents
• Bible verses about tithes and offerings