kodrantēs

The lexical tradition is unanimous. BDAG, Thayer, Abbott-Smith, and Moulton and Milligan all identify κοδράντης as the Hellenized Latin quadrans, the bronze coin worth one fourth of an as and therefore 1/64 of a denarius, equated in Mark with two λεπτά; Louw and Nida place it simply in the domain of monetary units. The noun is declined as a first-declension masculine (κοδράντης, κοδράντην, κοδράντου), and the New Testament attests only the two forms at Matthew 5:26 and Mark 12:42. The word is absent from the Septuagint, whose monetary vocabulary (σίκλος, δίδραχμον, δραχμή, στατήρ, ἀργύριον) predates any significant Roman monetary presence in the East. Greek authors also used the closer transliteration κουαδράντης: Plutarch (Cicero 29.4-5) glosses τὸ λεπτότατον τοῦ χαλκοῦ νομίσματος as the κουαδράντης for Greek readers, and reports the nickname "Quadrantia" for Clodia, confirming the coin's proverbial status as the tiniest piece of money. Erasmus noted in his Annotationes that Mark's form is a corrupted transliteration.

Numismatically the picture is equally firm. The quadrans originated as a cast Republican bronze marked with three pellets; after the reduction to the semuncial standard around 90 BC it became the lowest Roman denomination in production, surviving specimens weighing roughly 1.5 to 4 grams, struck sporadically down to Antoninus Pius (138 to 161 AD). Numismatists agree it was a Western, largely Italian coin, not struck for or circulating in the East, where the smallest denomination in first-century Judea was the λεπτόν, generally identified with the Hasmonean and Herodian prutah or half-prutah. Hendin is deliberately cautious about pinning the widow's coin to a single type, and Meshorer established the identification of the star-and-anchor issues. Rabbinic literature independently preserves both the loanword, in the corrupted forms קונטרנק and קונטריק, and Mark's own two-to-one equation with the perutah, which supports the framework Mark assumes even though the printed lexica's older cent equivalents are obsolete.

The contested question is not the meaning but the inference drawn from Mark's gloss. Hengel argued that Mark reverses Plutarch's procedure, explaining an Eastern coin by a Roman one and thus presupposing readers for whom Roman bronze was familiar; Lane makes the same argument from Mark's habit of explaining Greek terms by Latin ones (λεπτά by quadrans in 12:42, αὐλή by praetorium in 15:16), Incigneri presses the Roman setting at book length, and Gundry holds that the concentration of Latin loanwords in Mark supports the traditional Roman provenance while conceding it does not prove it. Against this, Hooker judged the argument from Latin loanwords to have no substance; Collins and Marcus observe that administrative, military, and monetary Latin spread wherever Rome ruled, and that the λεπτά detail itself points East; Theissen notes that the quadrans functioned proverbially as the minimum monetary unit; and Zeichmann's documentary study concludes that Mark's transliterated Latin fits Syria and post-war Palestine better than either pre-war Palestine or the city of Rome. On the Synoptic side, the Critical Edition of Q reconstructs Q 12:59 with κοδράντην, judging Luke to have substituted λεπτόν, but prints it in double brackets at a C confidence grade; Davies and Allison, Luz, and Nolland treat the pericope as shared tradition and emphasize the Greco-Roman character of imprisonment for debt without adjudicating the coin.