The Temple Tax

 
Coins of at least three different nations were used in everyday life in Judea during the NT era. The NT text uses the names of Greek coins, Roman coins, and Jewish coins. The original readers of the NT were presumably very familiar with all of these terms and also knew their relative values.
 
The challenge for the translator is to use English terms for the various coins that will convey for modern readers the same intuitive sense of meaning. A case in point is the incident in Matt 17:24-27, in which Jesus sent Peter to find a coin (in a fish’s mouth!) to pay the Temple tax.
 
Matthew–the former tax collector–is the only Gospel writer to tell about this incident. And in the space of four verses, he uses the names of two Greek coins. In 17:24 he twice uses the term didrachma, which means simply a two-drachma coin. (The drachma was the Greek coin more or less equivalent to the Roman denarius, and both coins represent the daily wage for a laborer.) This is the only use of didrachma in the NT, and it is used to refer to the annual tax required for the upkeep of the Temple.  In Exodus 30:13-16, its predecessor–the tax for the care of the Tabernacle–is presented (in ancient Hebrew terminology) as a tax of “half a shekel.”
 
Matthew’s readers would intuitively have understood what was meant when the tax collectors came to ask Peter, “Doesn’t your teacher pay the didrachma?” But how should this term be translated into English?
 
A few verses later (Matt 17:27), Jesus tells Peter to go catch a fish, open its mouth, and pull out a stater. This Greek coin–mentioned only here in the NT–is equal to two didrachmas, or four drachmas. And if a didrachma pays the temple tax for one man, a stater is sufficient to pay the tax for both of them.
 
Here’s a list of how some English translations have handled the translation :
 
The NLT, the NKVJ and the NRSV all communicate clearly that the temple tax is in view. The RSV and the ESV, both borrow from Hebrew terminology (half-shekel) to help make the connection with the tax first mentioned in Exodus.   The most literal (word-to-word) renderings are found in the Darby Translation, the DRA and the Disciples’s Literal NT.

English Bible Translations	Matthew 17:24	Matthew 17:27
Darby, 1867	didrachmas	stater
DRA, 1899	didrachmas	stater
Disciples’ Literal NT, 2011	Double-drachmas	stater
NLT, 1996	the Temple tax	a large silver coin
KJV, 1611	tribute money	a piece of money
NKJV, 1982	the temple tax	a piece of money
NASB, 1971	the two-drachma tax	a shekel
RSV, 1952	the half-shekel tax	a shekel
NRSV, 1989	the temple tax	a coin
ESV, 2001	the half-shekel tax	a shekel
NIV, 1978	the two-drachma tax	a four-drachma coin
HCSB, 2004	the double-drachma tax	a coin

The NLT, the NKVJ and the NRSV all communicate clearly that the temple tax is in view. The RSV and the ESV, both borrow from Hebrew terminology (half-shekel) to help make the connection with the tax first mentioned in Exodus.   The most literal (word-to-word) renderings are found in the Darby Translation, the DRA and the Disciples’