Mite (A Lepta)

The mite is the small copper coin called in Greek a lepton. It enters the umbrella through a single scene — a poor widow at the temple treasury — and is named only in the Synoptic accounts of that moment, where the smallness of the coin is the whole point.

The Widow's Two Lepta

In Mark, the coin is glossed for a Roman audience by its equivalent: "And there came a poor widow, and she cast in two lepta, which make a quadrans" (Mark 12:42). Luke gives the same scene without the gloss: "And he saw a certain poor widow casting in there two lepta" (Luke 21:2). Two lepta is everything she has, and the umbrella around the term mite is bounded by these two verses — the coin's biblical home is this offering, and nowhere else.