TO MARK the 1700th anniversary of the Edict of Milan, which
brought freedom to the Church under the emperor Constantine, the
Ecumenical Patriarch, Bartholomew I, visited Pope Francis in Rome
and then Milan (15 May). In the Roman Coliseum (until 15
September), there is a substantial exhibition that has transferred
from Milan, and in Serbia another is being held at Viminacium.
In the farther reaches of the former Roman Empire, this
significant date seems to have passed with little notice, although
Anglicans might have been encouraged to observe the feast of Sts
Helen and Constantine on 21 May.
This fascinating gallery show, which currently does not even
appear on the British Museum's own website of listed exhibitions,
is London's contribution, although it seems to have been arranged
without much encouragement from the Churches. It is tucked away in
a small, inaccessible room off the numismatic gallery, but is well
worth seeking.
The exhibition covers the use of coinage in the biblical
tradition, with later coins that include a rare example of the
first on which Jesus himself is depicted: a gold solidus,
minted in Constantinople for Marcian (AD 450-57), seemingly shows a
beardless Jesus, with a nimbus cruciger, uniting the
Emperor and Empress Pulcheria in marriage (The Hunterian Museum and
Art Gallery, University of Glasgow).
Representing Jesus on Byzantine coinage became commonplace after
the iconoclastic period, while maintaining a repertory of demi-gods
and the like. The obverse of a pre-decimal penny (abbreviated to a
"d." for denarius in £. s. d.)
depicted Britannia, and to this day Americans remind themselves
that they put their trust in God every time they reach for a
greenback.
Since the Mosaic Code long predates the introduction of coinage,
reckoned to have begun in Lydia (Modern Turkey) around 650 BC and
to have spread across the Persian Empire, Israelites therefore
first made use of standardised weights and measures from which
coinage developed; we should remember that the pound is still both
an Imperial measure of weight and a unit of currency.
In the New Testament (and examples of papyri texts from
Oxyrhynchus are shown separately), there are fewer passages that
relate to money than we might imagine. The shekel, originally a
Jewish measurement of weight, and half-shekel occur in Matthew's
account of the collection of the drachma (17.24ff.) and in the
Lucan parable of the lost coin (Luke 15.8).
As a silver coin, the shekel was produced from about 126 BC at
Tyre, and the mint may later have transferred to Jerusalem to
provide for the Temple cult, even though one side of it depicted
the demi-god Melqart-Hercules; with the AD 66 Revolt, the coin
ceased production. Those Churches that claim Judas's 30 pieces of
silver among their relics, most usually turn out to hold silver
coins from Rhodes. Judas would have been paid off in shekels.
Thirty of them are shown here.
In St Mark's Gospel, still held by most to be the earliest
written record of the sayings of Jesus, there is an extraordinary
altercation with some of the Pharisees and the Herodians in 12.13
and following.
Commentators and expositors, including my namesake, have
uniformly explored the passage simply as a way of understanding
Church-State relations. "Render unto Caesar the things that are
Caesar's." Quite so.
But biblical exegetes often fail to look at the flip side of the
coin: one side of the coin held an image of the emperor, but the
reverse had a symbol of a deity, such as Fortuna or Diva Faustina,
or a provincial emblem. Commonly, the denarius issued
under Emperor Tiberius had an image of the emperor on the obverse
and, on the other side, one of his mother Livia, part of the cult
of the imperial divinity.
Jesus and his disciples would have daily carried in their scrip
and scrippage and in their bags and baggage coins bearing the image
of an emperor, an earthly suzerain, and symbols of tutelary deities
and of local authorities. Religious Jews and early Christians alike
felt unhappy about having images of pagan gods on their
coinage.
The most extraordinary, and possibly contentious, coin is the
unique quarter-shekel in the British Museum's own collection which
depicts a seated deity inscribed YHW (or possibly YHD), suggesting
that the proscriptions contained in the Ten Commandments were to be
observed only by the Israelites among themselves, and not outside
Judah.
"Coins and the Bible" runs at the British Museum (Gallery
69a, free entry), Great Russell Street, London WC1, until 20
October 2013. Phone 020 7323
8299.www.britishmuseum.org