phoros

LSJ defines φόρος as that which is brought in, tribute such as is paid by subjects to a ruling state, and the same note of subjection runs through Mounce, BDAG and EDNT 3.436, which glosses it as the direct tribute, property or head tax, of a subjected people to a foreign ruler. Formally it is a verbal noun from φέρω, with an administrative word family (φορολογία, φορολόγος, φορολογέω) attested in Hellenistic Greek and in Josephus though absent from the New Testament. Classical usage sets the baseline: the φόρος of the Delian League, first assessed by Aristides at 460 talents (Thucydides 1.96.2), Herodotus 1.6 on Croesus as the first to subject Greeks to the paying of tribute, and Thucydides on the allies as ὑποτελεῖς φόρου. In the Septuagint φόρος most often renders מַס, which BDB defines as a gang or body of forced labourers and, of conquered populations, subjection to forced labour (Genesis 49:15; Deuteronomy 20:11; Judges 1:28 to 35; 1 Kings 9:15, 21; Nehemiah 5), so the Greek Old Testament transmits a loaded sense of tribute and enforced service rather than neutral civic taxation. Under Rome the standard taxonomy aligns φόρος with the direct tributa, the tributum soli assessed by census on agricultural land and in Judea largely paid in kind, and the tributum capitis paid in cash, over against τέλος and the indirect vectigalia and portoria farmed out to the publicani; Ferguson summarises the consensus, while Günther and Brunt show that Roman fiscal terminology shifted over time and is better differentiated by mode of assessment than by a rigid binary. Udoh's To Caesar What Is Caesar's (2005) is the major recent monograph, arguing that taxation in Palestine was not exceptionally oppressive by imperial standards, that direct provincial tribute came primarily as tributum soli after the property valuation of 6 CE, and that whether Judeans paid a tributum capitis before 70 CE is genuinely contested; Horsley and others who stress the exploitation of Galilee dissent. On Luke, Fitzmyer notes that φόρος at 20:22 replaces the Latinism κῆνσος of Mark 12:14 and Matthew 22:17, and Fitzmyer, Bock, Nolland, Marshall and Green agree the tribute question is a deliberate trap, sharpened by the denarius bearing Tiberius and his imperial legend; commentators are essentially unanimous that Luke 23:2 presents the charge of forbidding tribute as a false accusation contradicting 20:25, a charge of maiestas calculated to force Pilate's hand. The background is the census of Quirinius and the revolt of Judas the Galilean, for whom paying tribute was apostasy against God's sole kingship (Josephus, Jewish War 2.117 to 118; Antiquities 18.1 to 10, 23; Acts 5:37), though Josephus's dating is itself disputed (Rhoads, JETS 54.1 [2011]: 65 to 87). On Romans 13:6 to 7, where Paul calls the tax-collecting authorities λειτουργοὶ θεοῦ and writes the famously elliptical τῷ τὸν φόρον τὸν φόρον, scholars divide on two axes. Sanday and Headlam, Cranfield and Witherington take φόρος and τέλος as a genuine direct and indirect distinction, while others read the pairing as rhetorical doubling for taxes of every kind, observing that Paul's usage is not consistently technical. Friedrich, Pöhlmann and Stuhlmacher (ZThK 73 [1976]: 131 to 166, esp. 153 to 159) proposed that the passage answers agitation over the abuses of the publicani that Tacitus reports climaxing in 58 CE (Annals 13.50 to 51); Dunn treats 13:6 to 7 as the climax and occasion of the whole discourse, Moo as an illustration of a submission already practised and written before Nero's reform, Schreiner cautiously accepts the background while stressing chronology and the Claudian expulsion of 49 CE, Jewett situates it in Roman honour and benefaction culture, and Krauter and Carter press two objections, that the 58 crisis concerned the indirect taxes while 13:6 says φόρος, and that the reform post-dates the letter. On the theological payoff Moo and Schreiner read a genuine legitimation of the authority's right to collect, Elliott, Horsley and Carter a hidden transcript that finally relativises Rome's claims, and Gaventa resists both the fully subversive reading and the theory that 13:1 to 7 is a later insertion.