>>100878810Nobody's going to be able to come up with a satisfactory answer to this because it's something people have been arguing about for two thousand years. It's a quote that has been used and misused by early Christian authors from the apologists and on.
There are a few points that are worth making, though:
Firstly, it doesn't have to be pro- or anti-Roman. A common interpretation is that this is simply Jesus stating what the concerns of his movement are to be. Jesus is concerned with the Heavenly Kingdom, not the world of Earthly rulers: his followers are to focus on a spiritual empire, not the present one. Regime change doesn't concern Jesus; his followers should pay their taxes because secular authority basically doesn't matter. In spirit there's a lot of agreement with Paul's injunction to submit to earthly authority (Romans 13:1-7), which may or may not be an interpolation. There's also an element of not coveting wealth/other's possessions: money belongs to the state because the state minted it, and money is not an object of particular interest for Jesus or his followers.
At the same time, it's also implicitly a limit on the competencies of the secular authorities. Tax is their sphere: proper spirituality is ours. Many early Christian authors draw this out explicitly when commenting on this passage, contrasting the duty of Christians to pay taxes (which is a lawful request of the emperor, and lawfully complied with by Christians) with imperial cult and emperor worship (which is not lawful).
Of course it has been also interpreted as more of a positive statement about empire, and was so used by subsequent authors to argue that Christians were good citizens and should not be persecuted.
Some modern commentators have also seen it as a specific statement of Jesus' non-violent message, distancing the Jesus movement - perhaps deliberately and self-interestedly - from contemporaneous Jewish revolutionary agitation, bearing in mind that the gospels seem to take form in the aftermath of the Jewish War.
