Hey, everybody. I'm Matt. This is the 10 minute Bible hour podcast. And you were in the middle of a two-part conversation.

This is your first time here. You're gonna be like, oh no. This thing sounds horrible and boring.

But hear me out. Give it a try. You're in the middle of a two-part conversation about the history of Roman coinage.

And what that coinage and that history would have meant in the minds of the people who were present in Matthew chapter 22,

when some political enemies of Jesus show up and challenge him on whether or not it's right to pay taxes to Caesar

and then pull out a Roman coin, a Daenerys. That's what we're working on is getting all of that context and background set up

for hopefully a big payoff next time around. That said, here's some music from Jeff and we're gonna get after it.

Well, a funny thing about the Daenerys is even though it started out as

a division of the true singular denomination of Roman currency, the Assyrius, at this point,

the Daenerys, because it represents a day's work, it kind of starts to take over and everything is

gauged off of this because the Roman legions, the basic Roman soldier, is paid in Daenerys.

So it becomes a very important political issue to be debated as to what we're actually going to value that.

What will a Daenerys be in relation to the rest of our currency?

And so in the late republic, what we see is a revaluing of the Daenerys through central planning.

They just change what these coins are worth. Even though there are a good Julian of them in circulation,

they're still changing it. And that creates a pretty serious crisis, a crisis that Julius Caesar and

the politicians around the same time that he died tried to address by doubling the amount of Daenerys

paid to a soldier or a day laborer employed by the Roman government per year.

So even though the percentage of silver stayed the same, roughly all through the whole era that

we're talking about, like 98% all the way through this time, the value in relationship to other

things was forcibly altered by Roman decree and Roman law. And I look, that only works to a certain

extent. Ultimately, you can just melt down currency if it's made of an actual precious metal and

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