Thirty pieces of silver are a very small sum, especially for an avaricious man. In modern coinage it would amount to about twenty dollars, and, granting that its effective value or as the economists say its buying power were in those days ten times greater, two hundred dollars seem hardly a sufficient price to induce a man whom his companions describe as grasping to commit the basest perfidy recorded by history. It has been said the thirty pieces of silver was the price of a slave. But the text of Exodus states on the contrary that thirty shekels was the compensation to be paid by the owner of an ox which had injured a slave. The cases are too far apart for the doctors of the Sanhedrin to have had this early precedent in mind. The most significant indication is the office which Judas held among the Twelve. Among them was Matthew, a former tax-collector, and it would have seemed almost his right to handle the small amount of money necessary for the expenses of the brotherhood. In place of Matthew, we see the man of Iscariot as the depository of the offerings. Money is insidious and saturated with danger. The mere handling of money, even if it belongs to others, is poisonous. It is not surprising that John said of Judas the thief, that he, “having the bag, took away what was put therein.” And yet it is not probable that a man greedy for money would have stayed a long time with a group of such poor men. If he had wished to steal, he would have sought out a more promising position. And if he had needed those miserable thirty pieces of silver, could he not have procured them in another way, by running away with the purse, without needing to propose the betrayal of Jesus to the High Priests? These common-sense reflections about a crime so extraordinary have induced many to seek other motives for the infamous transaction. A sect of heretics, the Cainites, had a legend that Judas sorrowfully accepted eternal infamy, knowing that Jesus through His will and the will of the Father was to be betrayed to His death, that no suffering might be lacking in the great expiation. A necessary and voluntary instrument of the Redemption, Judas was according to them a hero and a martyr to be revered and not reviled.