Less than 4.5 ounces of silver was enough to buy a house?
I also found that statement about the purchasing power of the coins to be quite fantastic. We’re not talking about a 6,000 s.f. McMansion with a 4-car garage, electricity, runnig water, etc., but that still seems incredible. That means that a $10 roll of pre-’65 quarters (about 7.2 oz.) would have bought a substantially larger home, something that strains belief.
So much for “hard money” currency systems.
In the NT, Christ uses the denarius (.15 oz.) as the standard daily pay of an agricultural laborer.
If 4.5 oz. was enough to buy a house, then a day laborer of the time earned enough to buy a house in less than a month.