A silver denarius struck at Lugdunum — modern Lyon — the principal western mint of the early empire, in continuous production through the reign of Tiberius from AD 14 to 37. The obverse carries the laureate head of the emperor in profile and the Latin legend TI CAESAR DIVI AVG F AVGVSTVS — "Tiberius Caesar, son of the divine Augustus, Augustus." The reverse shows a seated female figure — most numismatists identify her as Livia, the emperor's mother, personified as Pax — holding an inverted spear and an olive branch, with the legend PONTIF MAXIM, Pontifex Maximus. Roughly 19mm across, weighing 3.8 grams, struck in nearly pure silver until later debasements; the type ran in the millions across the twenty-three-year reign. This is, by near-universal scholarly consensus, the coin of Matthew 22:15–22, Mark 12:13–17, and Luke 20:20–26. A trap is set for Jesus in the Temple courts — Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, or not? He asks them to bring him a denarius. They produce one. He asks whose image and inscription it carries. The image is Tiberius. The inscription is the imperial cult formula calling Augustus a god and his son the son of a god. The trap is the trap of holding such a coin in the Temple precinct at all. The reply — render to Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God what is God's — turns on the visible blasphemy of the inscription his questioners have just handed him. The denarius of Tiberius is one of the most common Roman silver coins in the European and Levantine numismatic record. Examples sit in the British Museum, the American Numismatic Society, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and a thousand private cabinets. Andrew Burnett's Roman Provincial Coinage and Hendin's Guide document the issue in detail. The coin's continuing reception is itself a sermon: every museum tray that holds one displays the inscription that made the question loaded. Sources: Andrew Burnett, Michel Amandry, and Pere Pau Ripollès, Roman Provincial Coinage vol. 1 (British Museum / Bibliothèque nationale, 1992); David Hendin, Guide to Biblical Coins (5th ed., Amphora, 2010); H. St. J. Hart, "The Coin of 'Render Unto Caesar...'" (in Jesus and the Politics of His Day, ed. Bammel and Moule, Cambridge, 1984); Matthew 22:15–22.
The Tiberius denarius anchors the "render unto Caesar" exchange — Matthew 22, Mark 12, Luke 20 — to a datable, physically recoverable object. Its obverse inscription invokes the imperial cult directly, clarifying why producing the coin inside the Temple precinct was itself the theological provocation Jesus exploited in his reply.