English 
Chinese 
Dutch 
Arabic 
Spanish 
Portuguese 
Russian 
French 
Italian 
German 
Japanese Judas was paid thirty pieces of silver for handing Jesus over to the chief priests. The coins were most likely silver shekels of Tyre, and the sum came to about 120 days’ wages for a labourer of the time, four to five months of work.
It was also the price of a slave. The Law of Moses set thirty shekels as the payment when an ox killed a slave, and that is what the chief priests thought Jesus was worth. Matthew heard in it the bitter words of Zechariah: “a goodly price that I was prised at of them.”
Only Matthew gives the figure. Judas asks the priests, “What will ye give me, and I will deliver him unto you? And they covenanted with him for thirty pieces of silver” (Matthew 26:15). Mark and Luke say only that the priests were glad and promised money: they “promised to give him money” (Mark 14:11) and “covenanted to give him money” (Luke 22:5).
What coins were the thirty pieces of silver?
Matthew does not name the coin, but the likeliest answer is the shekel of Tyre, a large silver coin struck in the Phoenician city of Tyre. One in the Harvard Art Museums, struck in 96–95 BC, weighs 14.22 grams.
Jewish law tied sacred payments to that coin. The Mishnah, the collection of Jewish law written down about AD 200, says that the thirty shekels owed for a slave, like other payments set in the Law, were paid “in the holy shekel, in the standard of Tyrian maneh” (Bekhorot 8:7). The men who paid Judas were the chief priests, and when the money came back they spoke of the temple treasury (Matthew 27:6). So the coins were most likely Tyrian shekels. It is an inference, though a strong one.
How much were 30 pieces of silver worth in Jesus’ day?
About 120 days’ pay for a labourer. You get there in three steps. First, a shekel was worth four drachmas: “Two double drachmas were equal to the Jewish shekel,” as the notes of the New American Bible, the translation of the Catholic bishops of the United States, put it (on Matthew 17:24–27). Next, the drachma was “commonly taken as equivalent to the Roman denarius, though not strictly so”, in the words of the International Standard Bible Encyclopedia. Last, a denarius, the coin the King James Version calls a penny, was a day’s pay. In Jesus’ parable the owner of a vineyard “agreed with the labourers for a penny a day” (Matthew 20:2), and the same encyclopedia calls the denarius “the ordinary wage of a soldier and a day laborer”.
Thirty shekels, then, were about 120 denarii, or 120 days’ wages. A man who worked every day would earn that in four months; one who rested each Sabbath would need about five.
What would 30 pieces of silver be worth today?
It depends on the yardstick, and the two obvious ones give very different answers. Measured by the work it paid for, the sum is several thousand dollars. Measured by the silver in the coins, it is several hundred.
| Yardstick | Calculation | About |
|---|---|---|
| Wages in Jesus’ day | 30 shekels × 4 = 120 denarii, a denarius a day | 120 days’ pay |
| US minimum wage, 2026 | 120 days × 8 hours × $7.25 | $6,960 |
| Silver price, 20 October 2026 | 30 × 14.22 g = 426.6 g, about 13.7 troy ounces, at $56.88 an ounce | $780 |
The wage figure uses the United States federal minimum of $7.25 an hour, in force since 24 July 2009; if you earn a higher local wage, the sum comes out higher. The silver figure uses the price of silver on the morning of 20 October 2026, and it moves every day. It also counts each coin as pure silver. Tyrian shekels were high-grade silver but not pure, so $780 is an upper figure. The gap between the two shows how much cheaper silver is now, compared with a day’s work, than it was in the first century. For what the money meant to Judas and to the men who paid him, the wage is the better guide: a third of a year of a working man’s life.
Why thirty pieces of silver?
Thirty shekels was the sum the Law of Moses set as compensation when an ox killed a slave. The ox’s owner “shall give unto their master thirty shekels of silver, and the ox shall be stoned” (Exodus 21:32). The Son of God was sold for what the Law paid out for a slave.
Matthew also hears the prophet Zechariah in the sum. Zechariah asks for his wages and is given thirty pieces of silver: “So they weighed for my price thirty pieces of silver. And the LORD said unto me, Cast it unto the potter: a goodly price that I was prised at of them. And I took the thirty pieces of silver, and cast them to the potter in the house of the LORD” (Zechariah 11:12–13). Matthew sees those words fulfilled when the money is thrown down in the temple and spent on a potter’s field (Matthew 27:9–10).
Yet Matthew credits the words to “Jeremy the prophet”, that is, Jeremiah. The New American Bible’s notes call this “puzzling, for there is no such text in that book”. The usual explanation is that Matthew joined Zechariah’s words with passages from Jeremiah that speak of a potter (Jeremiah 18:2–3), the buying of a field for silver (Jeremiah 32:6–9), and a potter’s flask broken in a valley that would become a burial place (Jeremiah 19:1–13), and so named Jeremiah.
What happened to the thirty pieces of silver?
Judas gave it back, and the priests bought a field with it. Matthew tells it step by step. When Judas “saw that he was condemned, repented himself, and brought again the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and elders, Saying, I have sinned in that I have betrayed the innocent blood.” The priests answered, “What is that to us? see thou to that.” It is one of the coldest lines in the Gospels. “And he cast down the pieces of silver in the temple, and departed, and went and hanged himself.” The priests could not return the money to the treasury, “because it is the price of blood”, so “they took counsel, and bought with them the potter’s field, to bury strangers in. Wherefore that field was called, The field of blood, unto this day” (Matthew 27:3–8).
The Acts of the Apostles tells it differently. There Judas “purchased a field with the reward of iniquity”, died there after a fall, and the field was known in Jerusalem as “Aceldama, that is to say, The field of blood” (Acts 1:18–19). The New American Bible’s notes treat the two accounts as two traditions that “agree only” on the field bought with the money and on its name; they differ on who bought the field and how Judas died. A common way of harmonising them, offered in the Catholic Encyclopedia of 1910, is that since the field was bought with the money Judas returned, it “might well be described as indirectly bought or possessed by Judas, albeit he did not buy it himself.” How Judas died, and what Christians have said about his end, is the subject of whether Judas went to heaven or hell.
Did Judas betray Jesus for the money?
Money is one of the reasons the Gospels give. John calls Judas “a thief” who “had the bag” (John 12:6), and in Matthew it is Judas who raises the question of payment. But Luke and John also say that Satan entered into him (Luke 22:3; John 13:27), and the Gospels present the betrayal as foretold in Scripture. Those reasons, and the theories later readers added, are set out in why Judas betrayed Jesus.
How many times did Judas betray Jesus?
Once. He agreed the price before the Passover and handed Jesus over in the garden the same week. The apostle who failed Jesus three times that night was Peter, who was told, “before the cock crow, thou shalt deny me thrice” (Matthew 26:34). His story is told in why Peter denied Jesus.
Both men failed him in the same few days, and both were sorry. Judas took his sorrow and his silver back to the priests, who had nothing to give him. Peter took his out into the dark, and “went out, and wept bitterly” (Matthew 26:75). His story did not end there.
Leave a Reply