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It's not speculation on their part. A Rai once fell off a canoe and sank. Everyone agreed it must still be there even though they couldn't get to it or recover it and juat sorta shrugged and kept using it as money. The Mayans and Aztecs used Cocoa Beans as currency. For them money literally did...

On Yap in Micronesia the natives use giant stone coins called Rai with a hole cut in them so they can be moved as money. They rarely move the large ones because they can weigh thousands of pounds but do keep track of who owns which one. Anything can be money as long as people agree it's money...

Paper money (and banking) actually began as letters of credit which worked as followed: A merchant deposits money with a trusted third party in exchange for a letter telling someone trusted in a different city to "give this person X amount of money when they present this letter." It worked...

Fiat currency isn't really all that different from money made from/backed by precious metals: it's only worth what people agree it's worth. Sure, precious metals can be used to make physical things in ways paper currency or an entry in a bank's ledger can't but at that point you're just getting...

They weren't money lenders. They were money changers. The problem wasn't that they were doing currency exchange. It's that they were plying their trade in the Temple. The reason they were in the Temple: offerings in only one currency were accepted as valid and it wasn't Roman currency.