In, probably, the 70's AD, a Jew who we might as well call by
his conventional name of Mark, was
writing the story of a martyred Messiah called Yeshua ben-Yosef, ben-Mariam, or, perhaps, occasionally, ben-El. In Greek he was called
Iesous, and, eventually, in English translation, Jesus. He wrote for a Romanised audience with little knowledge of
Palestine, so he told
his stories in language which would be familiar to them. Telling the story of a
poor widow who gave all she
had, he wrote
mia xhra ptwxh ebalen lepta duo o estin kodrantes; 'One
poor widow threw in two lepta, which make a
quadrans'. The
quadrans was the smallest
Roman coin, and a
prutah, the
standard Judean small copper, was probably the equivalent in value. The lepton, the smallest
Judean coin, was probably worth half a
prutah. So he gives the woman a sum of
money equivalent in value to the smallest coin which would be familiar to
his readers, and carefully translates the value in order to be certain that they would understand. She doesn't even have a
prutah, she has to put in two lepta, so she really is destitute.
During the reign of
Henry VIII, an English Protestant named William Tyndale, living in exile on the Continent, used an underground press to produce the first printed English New Testament, which came out in 1526. He translated this as '... A certayne povre widow, and she threwe in two mytes, whiche mayke a farthynge'. Most of us doubtless know what a farthing was; a quarter of a 'real', pre-decimal, British penny. A mite was a small Flemish coin of the time which circulated at three to the Flemish penny. It was never an official English coin, but was used in the Channel ports as a unit of account, at values which varied from place to place, from a twelth to a sixty-fourth of a penny. So it was familiar as the smallest possible unit of account. Tyndale smuggled
his New Testaments into the
port of
London, where the
Bishop during Mary's reign, stupid
man, busily bought up as many as he could and burnt them, thus providing a profit which enabled the printing of even more. He may have used the value in use there, but I haven't been able to verify this.
His work was used as the basis for later translations, including the Authorised, which leant very heavily on
his translation. This, of course. came out in 1611, in the reign of
James I. Tensions in the English
church exploded in the reign of
his son Charles I, making it impossible to agree on another official translation. So, unfortunately, the English Bible became set in
stone until the Revised Version was published in 1885. To this day many fundamentalist churches vociferously insist on using it, with the result that the lepton is
still frequently known by the name of a far more obscure coin.
Be honest, how many of you knew what a mite really was? It took some trouble to find out! Anyone got one? Here's a link to a page with a pic of a double mite, which is the nearest I've been able to find
http://archeologie.antwerpen.be/en/virtueel/objecten-detail.asp?id=370 .
