I have somewhere a photocopy of a document produced by a small church whihc used to meet in our school. They had meetings intended to be public in the evening, and left a display of literature out ready which I saw when I went in for some work purpose. I say small - there was one other congregation of the denomination somewhere in the East Midlands.

On the back of this document was a sort of cladistics diagram charting the ancestry of this congregation via all its splits over the millenia. Once past the obvious ones with the Orthodox, and the RCs and the Anglicans, it got more and more weird - one schism was over what the women should use to cover their heads (this particular ecclesia favoured hats of a sort which suggested there was a specialist milliner of boring felt hats which could not be found in the generality of shops).

And there are many layers in the render unto Caesar statement below the superficial not-challenging-Caesar's-right-to-tax one. For instance, there should have been no Roman coins in the Temple, there should have been no images of supposed divinities such as the Emperor in the Temple. There would have been, in living memory, events which challenged that, with negative outcomes. There is still, in church services, the acknowledgment that all comes from God and is, in essence, still His, and of His own do we offer Him. That would have been the message to good Jews, and there would have been good Jews on both sides of the argument about Jesus right to teach on the subject - leaving aside the Roman spies from the Antonia, who probably weren't up to subtleties in a foreign language. One wonders whether the Roman redactors of the gospels got it, either. The surface meaning would have been very useful for Constantine.

One also wonders what Jesus would have said in the absence of a Roman coin.

Penny