Ray Tiller (Letters, 6 April) has rather missed the point about Jesus’s reply about rendering to Caesar those things which are Caesar’s. It is far from being a clear injunction to pay taxes. First, the incident took place in the Temple, where there should have been no coinage but shekels, since the Roman currency was marked by the idolatrous image of the emperor, who claimed divinity. Second, the question he had been asked was intended to catch him out saying something to offend the occupying forces, in a place overlooked both architecturally, and probably also covertly and more closely, by Romans from the Antonia fortress. He answered as an intelligent rabbi, knowing full well that his audience used prayers which, like the Anglican offertory prayer in use to this day, acknowledged that all things are God’s, and that thus nothing is by right Caesar’s. It is a pity that Jesus could not foresee how, in different times and circumstances, his careful and probably intentionally subversive answer would be used to justify, as Tiller does, withholding succour from the vulnerable.
Penelope Stanford
Longfield, Kent
