"Be Ye Approved Money Changers!" Reexamining the Social Contexts of the Saying and Its Interpretation

Abstract

Missing from the canonical Gospels and out of the spotlights that have been shone on Q and the Nag Hammadi library, there exists a hardly tapped source of extracanonical sayings of Jesus (agrapha), namely, sayings (logia) attributed to Jesus quoted by church fathers, heresiologists, and others in texts originating in the ear liest Christian churches. In 1889, Alfred Resch—followed shortly thereafter by James Hardy Ropes—published a landmark review of this material in Agrapha: AuftercanonischeAuftercanonische Evangelienfragmente, which was revised in 1906 with the title Agrapha:Agrapha: Auflercationische Schriftfragmente.1 In this article, written over one hun dred years after the publication of Resch's work, I take a closer look at logion 43 of his collection. The agraphon—Be ye approved money changers (y!v£<70£ rpa 7r£CiTa1 5<fc1p01)—was not only the most frequently cited of the sayings gathered together by Resch, but it was the one that intrigued him the most. Various Chris tian sources refer to it many times in one form or another—though sometimes it