My question is simple, "what was the value of a thousand talents in Roman Palestine about AD 33?"
It is my impression that a thousand talents would have been a vast amount of wealth for that time. Is that correct?
Yes, it was an enormous amount of money. Wikipedia tells us a talent was the weight of a man (or roughly 50 kg) in gold. It also states that 6000 talents, which is the bribe paid by king Auletes of Egypt to become king of Egypt to Julius Caesar, was worth $8,400,699,422.80 today. So 1000 talents would be well over a billion dollars today.
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6000 talents would correspond to about 300 tons of gold. I don't think there even was that much gold in existence in nice gold bars in the time of the Roman empire. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_metallurgy puts the annual production of the Roman empire at 9 tons. – quarague Feb 11 at 14:46
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True, but this goes for our economy as well. I doubt very much if even 20% of our currency can be converted into real gold. Probably a lot less. – Jos Feb 11 at 23:49
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Today that amount of gold would be at least possible. For example Fort Knox holds 4500 tons of gold, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Bullion_Depository. So 300 tons of gold is a quantity that could at least in theory be paid or transferred. Only a tiny proprotion of money in circulation could be converted to gold (much smaller than 20%, I would guess more like 0.1%) but that is a different question. – quarague Feb 12 at 7:52
