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For forty years I worked at trying to understand the ancient world, and even now in my rustic retirement I tend to read the parables as stories set in the Mediterranean two thousand years ago rather than as theological documents. Sometimes this makes them clearer, but at other times it throws up new problems: this, I suspect, may be no bad thing. Jesus’ parables are not always straightforward (the disciples found them puzzling: Luke 8.9) and often seem to challenge conventional ways of thinking; for example the story of the unjust steward (or dishonest manager, as the modern versions put it) in Luke 16.1-13, which I’m not sure that anyone has explained away.
Or take the familiar parable of the ‘talents’ in Matthew 25.14-30. It’s easy to be misled by our modern use of the word ‘talent’ to mean some sort of accomplishment, like playing the tin whistle or growing prize-winning marrows, and so we may look down on the third slave who was only trusted with one talent. Actually, our use of ‘talent’ derives from how people have interpreted this very parable, but it’s not there in the original story. In the ancient world, a talent was a huge sum of money. At first, it meant as much gold (or sometimes silver) as a man could carry on his back; later, as the use of coinage became more widespread, it came to mean a coin representing that value, in the same way that our ‘pound’ originally meant a pound weight of silver. Today, there are a number of different ‘dollars’ – U.S., Canadian, Australian, New Zealand, Singapore, even Fiji – which vary in value, and in the ancient world there were several different standards of talent, but the one that came to be most important was the Aeginetan talent. It was equivalent to 80 lbs or 36 kilogrammes. It’s very difficult to work out modern equivalents for ancient money, because so many things have changed; but, just for fun, we might try translating the talent into modern terms by looking at the price of gold. Last week, the price of an ounce of gold reached the record level of $1000, and since then it’s risen higher; when I sat down to write this, it had reached $1008.69, but it’s probably more by now. Anyway, even that would make the value of a talent $1,167,474.93, or £578,562.84. [The editor has kindly agreed to keep readers informed of the fluctuations in the value of the talent.]            In other words, Jesus’ story is about fabulous amounts of money, which few if any of his hearers could have dreamed of handling, much less possessing. Slave no.3 may have sounded pitiful with merely one talent; but if we remember that’s over a million dollars in our terms, things start to look different. Again, we are encouraged in the story to despise him for digging a hole and hiding the money, in contrast to his entrepreneurial colleagues. But in fact what he did made sense in the ancient world. In a society where there were no secure bank vaults, and scarcely any policing, a man who was leaving home for a time would often entrust valuables to a trusted friend for safe keeping, and the friend was expected to be able to produce the goods whenever the owner showed up. In Roman law, it was actually a crime for the friend to make any use of them in the owner’s absence. And digging a hole to hide money in must have been quite common, to judge from how frequently modern archeologists come across hoards of coins squirreled away and then forgotten about. So slave no. 3 was, I’d suggest, doing exactly what someone in his position was expected to do.            How this affects the interpretation of the parable I leave to the theologians; but the recent financial news suggests another subversive thought. Suppose the slave and his master had been living in our day, and the master had left on his long trip in the autumn of 2000, and came back last week. The third slave would have been able (after an hour of two of digging) to put into his master’s hands his gleaming gold, now worth over four times as much as when he’d buried it. Would the speculations of slaves no. 1 and 2, I wonder, have shown the same order of profit?  Homo subselliarius[In the vulgar tongue, Man in the Pew.]
We expect more writings from H. Subs at some point in the future, and, I hope, fairly frequently. -Ed. This article was moved to the new website on29/5/08, and by my calculations the Talent had dropped to £527'289.1. -Ed. |
Letters from Antiquity 
