Roman Imperial Coinage as the background to Paul’s letter to the Romans

[Extract] Archaic Greek and early Roman coinage is largely imprinted with mythic symbols and short, often cryptically abbreviated inscriptions.1 By way of illustration, SNG Lockett 2917 (480–460 BCE)2 depicts a nude winged male figure on the obverse who also wears winged sandals and is shown running to the right holding a herald’s staff in his left hand, a figure that has evaded numismatic consensus (proposals include Hermes and Thanatos, among others). The reverse portrays a lion crouching to the left and head turned toward the right. Inscribed above the lion are three Carian letters BMZ, the decipherment of which was aided by the Egyptologist John Ray’s study of Carian-Egyptian bilingual tomb inscriptions.3 Fortunately, however, the iconography and inscriptional material attested on Roman imperial coinage is much more transparent in meaning in comparison with the archaic Greek and early Roman material.