<P> Eusebius of Caesarea includes a paraphrased summary of a parable of talents taken from a "Gospel written in Hebrew script" (generally considered in modern times to be the Gospel of the Nazarenes); this gospel was presumably destroyed in the destruction of the Theological Library of Caesarea Maritima in the 7th century (by the Islamic invaders) and has yet to be found . In that gospel, Eusebius writes that while the man who had hid the talent was rebuked for his burial, only the man who had received two talents had invested and gained a return on his investment . The recipient of the five talents instead "wasted his master's possessions with harlots and flute - girls;" it was he, in the Hebrew gospel, that was sent into the darkness (Eusebius expressly identifies the darkness as being imprisonment). </P> <P> A talent (Ancient Greek τάλαντον, talanton' scale' and' balance') was a unit of weight of approximately 80 pounds (36 kg), and when used as a unit of money, was valued for that weight of silver . As a unit of currency, a talent was worth about 6,000 denarii . Since a denarius was the usual payment for a day's labour, the value of a talent was about twenty years of labour, by an ordinary person . By contemporary standards (ca . AD 2009) at the rate of the US minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, the value of a talent would be approximately $300,000 over 20 years, while, at the median yearly wage of $26,363, a talent would be valued at about $500,000 . </P> <P> The third servant in Matthew's version was condemned as "wicked and lazy", for he should have deposited the talent he received with the bankers (Greek: τραπεζιταις, trapezitais, literally, table or counter-keepers, just as bankers were originally those who sat at their bancum, or bench). The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges notes that this was "the very least the slave could have done, (as) to make money in this way required no personal exertion or intelligence", and Johann Bengel commented that the labour of digging a hole and burying the talent was greater than the labour involved in going to the bankers . </P> <P> In Matthew, the opening words appear to link the parable to the parable of the Ten Virgins, which immediately precedes it . That parable deals with wisdom in an eschatological context . This parable, however, has been interpreted in several ways . </P>

What do the talents represent in matthew 25