Judas Silver

The Judas Silver was a cursed collection of thirty Roman coins.

History
Thirty pieces of Roman silver worth 120 denarii was the price the chief priests of the Temple in Jerusalem paid the Apostle Judas to betray Jesus Christ of Nazareth.

According to the Gospel of Matthew, after Jesus was arrested and condemned, a remorseful Judas tried to return the silver to the temple claiming that he had sinned and betrayed an innocent. When the priests rebuffed him, Judas threw the coins into the temple then fled to hang himself. Unwilling to keep it in their treasury, the priests used this blood money to purchase a potter's field as a place to bury foreigners and the Judas Silver fell into legend.

Though kept together in an unremarkable small brown sack, the cursed coins could not be separated from each other for long: the individual pieces of silver could find their way back to their owner within a week through sheer coincidence. Each month the Judas Silver would adversely affect their owner with varying degrees of severity but it was possible to be free of the coins if they were willingly accepted by someone else. It was said by some church mystics that to be free of the curse, the coins had to be spent in seven days through charitable acts. However, a conflicting story stated that the curse could be lifted if buried in the original potter's field.

Rumor had it that the Judas Silver had fallen into the possession of several historical figures of disrepute including Nero, Genghis Khan, Vlad the Impaler, Torquemada, the Borgias, Machiavelli and Baron Munchausen. The silver was last placed in the collection of a wealthy Hungarian supporter of Adolf Hitler known as Baron Joseph Dygar.

The Judas Silver was one of many artifacts catalogued by an unknown archaeologist for the Smithsonian Institution in the early 1930s who valued their worth at $30,000. The silver pieces were of interest to many coin collectors including Russian General Maximillian Narechenov.