When a collector asks, “what coins do you have from the bible?” there are a few common answers. This is one. Commonly known as a “Tribute Penny”, the coin is a denarius of Tiberius and depicts his deified mother Livia on the reverse. This is supposedly the coin that Jesus was referring to when he asked, "Whose is this image and superscription?" and later stated ''Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's and unto God the things that are God's" (Matthew 22:20-21).

Regardless of whether or not this particular type of coin is the one from the bible, one question persists: why is it called a “Tribute Penny”? It is most likely due to when the word "peny" was first used in the 1480’s handwritten Wycliffe’s Bible New Testament Later, Tyndale's 1526 English New Testament changed the spelling to "penny". It also helped that the Roman denarius was a similar shape and size to the historic British silver penny issued for hundreds of years by English kings!