a money-changer: the dealer at a table who converted one currency into another and took a small fee for the service
This is the man at the table with the coins. The word is built on the name of a small coin, "kollybos," which came to mean the premium charged for swapping one currency for another. So the Greek names him by his fee: he is the one who runs the exchange business and takes his cut for doing it.
All three appearances fall in the same scene, when Jesus clears the temple courts. The trade there existed for a reason. Every adult Israelite owed a yearly temple tax, it had to be paid in one particular silver coinage, and pilgrims arrived from across the Mediterranean world carrying whatever their home cities happened to mint. Someone had to convert it. Jewish law written down a little later even preserves the dates the tables were set up, first out in the provinces and then in the temple itself.
The Gospels keep several money words carefully apart, and it helps to see them side by side:
- κερματιστής names the man who deals in small change, and it is the word John uses one verse earlier for these same men
- this word names him instead by the fee he takes for turning one currency into another
- τραπεζίτης names a banker who accepts deposits and pays a return, which is a further step up
One last thing the English hides: this was everyday commercial speech rather than polished Greek. Purists in the ancient world objected to it and preferred an older, more dignified term for the same trade. It shows up in Egyptian business documents a couple of centuries before the Gospels, so it was not coined by Jewish or Christian writers. The Gospel writers simply reached for the ordinary word an ordinary Greek speaker would have used for the men at those tables.
Disputed
Whether the temple money-changers this word names were performing a legitimate and religiously necessary service, or functioned as emblems of a priestly establishment widely perceived as corrupt. The lexical sense of the word is not at issue; the disagreement concerns the historical situation of the men it denotes, and it drives the larger question of whether Jesus' action in the temple was a reforming cleansing or an enacted portent of the temple's destruction.
- contestedThe exchange service was necessary and religiously sanctioned: sacrifice required suitable animals and the half-shekel tax required conversion into the approved coinage, and the Gospels do not elsewhere level charges of dishonesty against the priests. Jesus' act was therefore a prophetic demonstration of the temple's coming destruction and replacement, not an attack on abuse.; E. P. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985), 61-76; Jacob Neusner, "Money-Changers in the Temple: The Mishnah's Explanation," NTS 35 (1989): 287-290
- contestedThe portent reading must be grounded in a widespread first-century perception of priestly corruption, documented in a substantial dossier of Jewish evidence: the Habakkuk Pesher's Wicked Priest who defiled the sanctuary (1QpHab 12:8-9), the portrait of gluttonous ruling priests in Testament of Moses 7:6-10, the rabbinic woe against the priestly houses (t. Menahot 13.21 // b. Pesahim 57a), and Josephus on high priests seizing tithes by force (Antiquities 20.180-181, 206-207).; Craig A. Evans, "Jesus' Action in the Temple: Cleansing or Portent of Destruction?" CBQ 51 (1989): 237-270; Craig A. Evans, Jesus and His Contemporaries (Leiden: Brill, 1995), 319-344; N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996), 413-428; Richard A. Horsley, Jesus and the Spiral of Violence (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1987)
- minorityThe market in the temple precincts was a recent innovation of the high priest Caiaphas, moved there in commercial rivalry with the established markets on the Mount of Olives, so Jesus reacted to a novel and self-interested arrangement rather than to a long-standing institution.; Victor Eppstein, "The Historicity of the Gospel Account of the Cleansing of the Temple," ZNW 55 (1964): 42-58; Bruce Chilton, The Temple of Jesus (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992)
Whether κολλυβιστής and κερματιστής name the same trade or two differentiated functions. John 2:14 seats the money-changers as κερματισταί and John 2:15 then calls them κολλυβισταί, and the Gospels also preserve τραπεζίτης (Matthew 25:27) for a banker.
- majorityThe two terms overlap and John's shift is stylistic variation for the same people: κερματιστής foregrounds the dealer in small change, κολλυβιστής the one who takes the exchange premium.; BDAG, s.v. κολλυβιστής; J. H. Bernard, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Gospel according to St. John (ICC)
- minorityThe three terms map onto three distinct functions of the Jewish money-changer: κερματιστής gives small change, κολλυβιστής changes foreign currency for the premium, and τραπεζίτης is a banker.; Encyclopaedia Judaica, s.v. "Moneychangers"