A betrayal most infamous: Judas, as told in Matthew 26:14–15, agrees to deliver Christ to the high priests in exchange for thirty silver coins. Lucia Travaini's informative study of Judas's Thirty Pieces traces this relic tradition from its twelfth-century origins through its early modern critique, winding it through concurrent histories of Holy Land pilgrimage, late medieval devotion to the arma Christi, medieval and early modern anti-Semitism, and peer practices of coin relics. Simultaneously, Travaini carefully crafts a parallel narrative of early modern antiquarianism, especially numismatics, and its engagement with such relic cults. The Thirty Pieces of Silver, translated here from its Italian edition by Andrew D. R. Colvin, details the trajectories of this relic tradition across centuries of historical change and rupture, bridging the medieval and early modern into a transdisciplinary history of religion, ritual, and numismatics.
The story of the Thirty Pieces dates, in the West, to the ca. 1190 Pantheon of Godfrey of Viterbo and, in the East, to the Book of the Bee, written ca. 1222 in Syriac by Solomon of Akhlat, bishop of Basra; both presumably stem from an earlier, now lost work. Godfrey's Latin version became popularized in the vernacular beginning in the fourteenth century, especially via John of Hildesheim's History of the Three Kings, compiled in the 1350s and 1360s. As these authors relate, Judas's Thirty Pieces had a storied and illustrious existence, having been first minted by Terach, father of Abraham, and then circulating through a fantastic series of biblical events: Joseph was sold by his brothers for the Thirty Pieces; the Queen of Saba gifted them to Solomon; Nebuchadnezzar stole them from Jerusalem and spirited them to the East; the Magi gave them to Mary as their gift of gold; Mary then lost them on the Flight into Egypt; and so on. (Godfrey and John explain the discrepancy between the gold of the Magi with the silver coins of Judas by stating that many ancients simply used the word “silver” to designate all coinage, and that the Thirty Pieces were indeed gold.)
The first documentation of a Thirty Pieces coin relic comes from a 1395 Italian pilgrimage account of the church of John the Baptist on Rhodes, a major pilgrimage stop then controlled by the Knights Hospitaller. This coin, similar to many Thirty Pieces coins in the fifteenth century, was a silver coin minted in Rhodes between the fourth and second centuries BCE, with a bust of Helios-Sol on the obverse and a rose on the reverse (a cache of ancient coinage had perhaps been discovered at some point). Unlike the text legend, the actual specimens of Thirty Pieces coins were silver, not gold. Their veneration built upon the preexisting custom of venerating imperial coinage from Byzantium as coins minted by Helena and Constantine in honor of the invention of the True Cross; one such coin was also kept at Rhodes, where, on Good Friday, the Knights would make and distribute wax impressions of it, a practice later applied to their Thirty Pieces coin. A 1496 record of the statutes of the Knights notes their custom of making (presumably plaster) casts from their Thirty Pieces relic, to be used to cure ailments, ensure safe childbirths, and protect sailors at sea.
From this starting position Travaini, building upon and greatly expanding the early-twentieth-century scholarship of George Francis Hill, traces dozens of Thirty Pieces coin relics from the fifteenth into the twentieth century. Travaini trains her focus on Thirty Pieces relics in Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean; those documented in Latin America are acknowledged but not otherwise included. Discussions of the arma Christi, of which the Thirty Pieces are a prominent member, and anti-Jewish rhetoric provide key arenas for their cultural significance. Travaini compiles two appendices of impressive utility, the first a list and description of the fifty-four documented examples of Thirty Pieces coin relics, the second a compilation, edited by Francesco D'Angelo, of nine textual sources of the Thirty Pieces legend in translation, including Godfrey of Viterbo, Solomon of Akhlat, and John of Hildesheim.
Especially rich is the history Travaini builds of a nascent early-modern antiquarianism probing and examining, step by step, different facets of the Thirty Pieces tradition. A rigorous and increasingly precise numismatics would inevitably foster such critique. Should not Jewish shekels, for example, have been the coins used by Judas and the priests? The humanist interest in Hebrew, and the deciphering of Jewish coinage thus enabled, could, ironically, serve to sharpen the anti-Semitic rhetoric of the sixteenth century and later. Kaspar Waser's 1605 publication on Jewish coinage, for example—“the first systematic contribution to knowledge on Jewish coins” (142)—argues that the Thirty Pieces would have been shekels, not Rhodian coinage, and also that Jewish financiers were ever duplicitous.
Skepticism and defense pushed back and forth. Giacomo Bosio, a historian of the Knights Hospitaller, observes in 1610 that a mixture of coins would have been used by Judas, including Rhodian coins; such logic helped justify the authenticity of those Rhodian coins already venerated as Thirty Pieces relics, including high-profile examples in Rome and Malta. On the skeptical front, the German antiquarian Johann Georg Keyssler, writing in 1740–1741, simply asks if the potter who eventually received the Thirty Pieces (Judas returns them to the high priests, who, due to their tainted status, cannot deposit them back into the temple treasury and therefore use them to purchase a potter's field) would have held onto them as a set or, far more likely, simply have mixed them in with other coins?
The tremendous virtue of Travaini's work lies in the abundance of detailed information and analysis provided, including the two appendices. The argumentation of the text occasionally meanders and repeats; the visual material introduced, mostly fifteenth- and sixteenth-century frescos and panel paintings, occasionally seems arbitrary; and some of the objects and artworks discussed would have benefited from firmer bibliography. Such observations, however, are quite minor in the face of this valuable, generative, and stimulating scholarly achievement and the fascinating histories it recovers.
