ttps:////»https://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd»>
– Who wrote the Bible?
– How was Jesus crucified?
It is almost impossible to establish a definitive value – the most that can be done is to compare, at that time and today, the purchasing power of the money that Judas earned. First, let’s go to what the Bible says. In 1st century Judea, Judas, one of the 12 apostles of Jesus, would have earned 30 pieces of silver to hand over his master’s identity to the Jewish priests, religious leaders in Jerusalem who wanted to kill him. By all appearances, the bribe money was a very reasonable nest egg. “In the Roman Empire, of which Judea was a part, silver coins were common in elite trade, such as exchanging land, for example. With the 30 coins that Judas earned, he could buy a small farm”, says historian and coin specialist Cláudio Umpierre Carlan, from the National Historical Museum. With current site prices, we can try to approximate values – always remembering that we are doing an imagination exercise and not an exact calculation. Just to give you an idea, a 1,000 m2 farm, with improvements, close to Manaus, in the Amazon, costs around 20,000 reais. In a more valued area, such as the rural area of São José dos Campos, in the interior of São Paulo, a similar farm is worth close to 40 thousand reais. Before we hammer the hammer though, let’s look at another clue from the Bible. In his writings, the evangelist Matthew states that Judas repented, returned the money to the priests and hanged himself after having betrayed Jesus. With the money back, the religious would have bought a cemetery. In our parallel with today, a not very large cemetery, with space for 2,000 graves, occupies an area of 15,000 m2. But what was the value of such an area in the 1st century Middle East? “As Jerusalem was a very populated city, there were few empty lots and they must not have been very cheap”, says another historian, André Chevitarese, from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). Comparing Jerusalem in the 1st century with an expanding metropolis today, such as Ribeirão Preto (SP), we arrive at another hypothetical value: in this city, a plot of land measuring 15,000 m2, without improvements, costs around 50,000 reais. It’s the most you can speculate about the «price» of Jesus, since the Bible doesn’t offer many details about the episode.