According to Matthew 26:15 in the New Testament of the Bible, Judas Iscariot is offered 30 silver pieces to betray Jesus.
What sort of coinage would a "silver piece" have been in the 1st-century AD Judean province of the Roman Empire have been? What would have been the buying power of that money?
Would it have been enough to buy land or otherwise dramatically increase one's wealth and social status?
I highly recommend this thread with answers from /u/Celebreth, /u/Erusian, and /u/gingeryid.
In short we don’t know exactly what coin the “silver pieces” would have been, but there are a few decent candidates. Depending on coin it would have been somewhere in the neighborhood of a month’s to a year’s salary for a common laborer. The Bible itself says it was enough to buy “the potter’s field.” So it’s likely in the neighborhood of a very nice chunk of change for a common person, but nothing life changing.