“And the chief priests took the silver pieces, and said, It is not lawful for to put them into the treasury, because it is the price of blood.”
But the chief priests, taking the pieces of silver, said: it is not lawful to put them into the treasury, since it is blood money. The irony of the chief priests' scruple: they cannot put the blood money into the temple treasury because it is blood money — money obtained through betrayal of innocent blood. The men who paid the blood money and whose conspiracy shed the innocent blood scruple about the legal purity of their treasury.
Church Fathers on Matthew 27:6
The Chief Priests knowing that they had purchased a murder were condemned by their own conscience; they said, 'It is the price of blood.'
Truly straining out the gnat, and swallowing the camel; for if they would not put the money into the treasury, because it was the price of blood, why did they shed the blood at all?
They thought it meet to spend upon the dead that money which was the price of blood. But as there are differences even in burial places, they used the price of Jesus' blood in the purchase of some potter’s field, where foreigners might be buried, not as they desired in the sepulchres of their fathers.
Read all 11 entries in the readerCatena Aurea · St. Thomas Aquinas, tr. J. H. Newman · public domain
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