We see in Mathew 17:24-27 a question arise about whether Yeshua should be paying the temple tax or not. They asked Peter, doesn’t your master pay tribute. Peter’s reply was yes, he does. Then it says as Peter was coming into the house Yeshua stopped him and asked, of whom do the kings of the earth take custom or tribute, their own children, or strangers? Peter’s reply was, of strangers. So Yeshua says, then the children are free. He then commands him to go and get the money from the fish’s mouth and pay them so they won’t be offended. Let’s take a closer look at this portion of scripture. We know that all males twenty years old and older were required to pay this temple tax.

You can see that in Ex. 30:13. Yet here is Yeshua implying that He doesn’t owe this money, nor do his disciples. Is Yeshua breaking the commands of Torah? It couldn’t be that He’s skipping it because He’s the Messiah, because it seems to imply that his diciples didn’t owe it either. So what’s going on here? The answer is that the Pharisees and Sadducees had the tax being paid annually during the month of Adar. Yet the Qumran community taught that it was to be paid only once in a person’s life. After all, it is a picture of redemption and how many times do you need redeemed in life? It started at age twenty and isn’t it a coincidence that the number twenty in Hebrew stands for redemption? So if Yeshua held to this Essene train of thought here, then it would stand to reason that he would believe that neither Him nor His diciples owed this temple tax. They all would have long passed the age of twenty and would have already paid it many times. The other two groups were just being greedy by extracting the tax every year from people. You might say they were the I.R.S. of Biblical times.