Give unto the Caesar that which is Caesar's

I'm coming to the end of my reading of the Gospel of S. Mark in the closest we have to the original Greek, and I thought I'd put a tiny bit of it into a blog-post. So, here it is, chapter twelve, verses thirteen to seventeen.

καὶ ἀποστέλλουσιν πρὸς aὐτόν τινας τῶν Φαρισαίων καὶ τῶν Ἡρῳδιανῶν ἵνα αὐτὸν ἀγρεύσωσιν λόγῳ. καὶ ἐλθόντες λέγουσιν αὐτῳ· "Διδάσκαλε, οἴδαμεν ὅτι ἀληθὴς εἶ και οὐ μέλει σοι περὶ οὐδενός· οὐ γὰρ βλέπεις εἰς πρόσωπον ἀνθρώπων, ἀλλ' ἐπ' ἀληθείας τὴν ὁδὸν τοῦ θεοῦ διδάσκεις· ἔξεστιν δοῦναια κῆνσον Καίσαρι ἤ οὔ; δῶμεν ἤ μὴ δῶμεν;" ὁ δὲ εἰδὼς αὐτῶν τὴν ὑπόκρισιν εἶπεν αὑτοῖς· "Τί με πειράζετε; φέρετέ μοι δηνάριον ἵνα ἴδω." οἱ δε ἤνεγκαν. καὶ λέγει αὐτοῖς· "τίνος ἡ εἰκὼν αὕτη καὶ ἡ ἐπιγραφή;" οἱ δὲ εἷπαν αὐτῷ· "Καίσαρος." ὅ δὲ Ἰησοῦς εἶπεν αὐτοῖς· "τὰ Καίσαρος ἀπόδοτε Καίσαρι καὶ τὰ τοῦ θεοῦ τῷ θεῷ." καὶ ἐξεθαύμαζον ἐπ' αὐτῷ.

Nowthen... the question mark in Greek always looks like a semi-colon (;), so you would know to find that at the end of a question. And we all know this story: Christ has entered Jerusalem on Palm Sunday as the Messiah, dressed royally, riding a donkey, being acclaimed by the people. This is S. Mark's Gospel, and Christ goes right up to the Temple, probably with the air of one of the old kings of Juda (say, King Josias), and immediately tips the merchants, currency-changers, et al. out of the Temple, declaring angrily that His Father's house is to be a house of prayer, not a marketplace. He thus challenged to their very faces the Sadducees, who were the Sadokite priests and levites who had charge of the Holy Place, and began now to critique the Jewish practice of religion openly for its hypocrisy and superficiality. Several of the most famous of his parables about the passing of the divine promise from the nation of Israel to a church that included non-Jews, and the basis therefore of the mission to the Gentiles, are told here, after the challenge to the Sadokites. These men, naturally incensed, demanded to know where Christ got the authority from to challenge the divine religion, even though He had just entered as Messiah, and would obviously then have divine authority; only a divine Person, after all, can alter the divine religion. Knowing that they would not accept anything He said anyway, Christ replied by asking them where Saint John the Baptist's authority to teach and baptise came from. When they refused to answer, He refused to explain His own claim to be God. 

The authorities were determined to respond somehow to Christ's challenge, and we know from the Gospel of S. John that there had been a plot to have Him killed long before this. They just had to find a way to trip Him up somehow, to set him up to appear as a rebel against either the Law or against the secular power of the Romans, in order to have him executed. We know that this eventually succeeded, but the Gospel writers want us to know that it only happened when Christ decided it should; He was too wise to be caught by little tricks and He finally allowed Himself to be condemned at the right time. He was, after all, the Lamb of God, and He wanted to time His sacrifice perfectly to coincide with the sacrifice of the thousands of lambs for the annual festival. The story for this post is one of the attempts to get Christ to oppose the Roman tax law and so put Him on the wrong side of the Romans. Let's run through it slowly:

• first, the challenge comes from the Pharisees and the Herodians (τῶν Φαρισαίων καὶ τῶν Ἡρῳδιανῶν), so from both the religious and from the political sphere. They want to 'catch him out,' but the verb agreuó (ἀγρεύσωσιν) has the effect of setting a trap, or hunting down an animal.
• there follows a long and oily piece of text, that calls Christ Teacher (Διδάσκαλε), calls him good and true (ἀληθὴς εἶ) and one who is not disturbed by anybody, treats everybody fairly (οὐ βλέπεις εἰς πρόσωπον ἀνθρώπων) and one who teaches the true way of God. And then asks him whether or not the tax should be paid to Caesar. Not that the family name Caesar is pronounced in Greek as it was in ancient Latin, and still is in German and Russian, for example: Kaisar. Do we give Caesar the money or do we not give it (δῶμεν ἤ μὴ δῶμεν;)?
• The word hypocrisy is Greek and you can see it in the following sentence (ὑπόκρισιν), for Christ at once sees through them, and replies: 'Why are you tempting me?' The word peiradzo (πειράζετε) has the effect of teasing, leading by trickery, etc. He calls for one of the coins used for the Roman tax and asks them: 'Whose likeness (εἰκὼν) is this and whose inscription (ἐπιγραφή)?' Of course, the word for likeness, icon, is what we use for portraits of people today, and the word is heavily misused in popular culture today, where almost everything is called iconic. The answer Christ receives is, of course, Caesar's. The coin is Roman, perhaps coined at the capital of the Empire in Syria, Antioch.
• The reply of Christ is immediate. We have a duty to God, of course. But we also have a duty to the secular authority. God forbid that these duties should be contrary to each other, for the Christian soul should always then march with God, and that has led many a Christian martyr to heavenly glory over our two-thousand-year history. So, Christ replies that we must give the things that are due to Caesar (τὰ Καίσαρος) to Caesar, and the things that are due to God (τὰ τοῦ θεοῦ) to God. And they were amazed by Him.