This is a short story, and I fancy a rather obscure one, almost surely marketed as some type of mystery/suspense fiction. It involves a series of murders by (of?) rare-coin dealers and others in order to get hold of a particular set of ancient Roman coins; finally, the main character gets his/her hands on these coins, only to find that they consist of (cue ominous music) precisely thirty pieces of silver!
Has anyone ever heard of this? If yes, what the devil is it? (Er…so to speak. 
)
There is a short story by Brett Halliday (pseudonym of Davis Dresser) called “Pieces of Silver”, which was published in Alfred Hitchcock’s mystery magazine. I have no idea if it is the story you are looking for though … I was just intrigued and gave Google a work out.
Should have said that a reference to the story suggests that it does involve the biblical thirty pieces of silver.
There’s a story called “Treasure Trove”, but the plot is not very similar. In that one, two farm hands, very close friends, find a stash of coins, which they imagine will be very valuable, but one accuses the other of hiding the stash to steal it, and beats him almost to death. The farm owner finds that the one did indeed hide the coins, in his hat, and gathers them up.
The instant he touches the coins, he has a psychic impression that anyone who owns them will face betrayal and ruin. It ends with him repeating under his breath, horrified -Thirty pieces of silver. Thirty pieces of silver.
It was in an Alfred Hitchcock collection named, I believe, Don’t Look a Gift Shark in the Mouth.
Regards,
Shodan
There’s a story in a 1960s Gold Key comic. IIRC, it’s Alfred Hitchcock Presents , about two treasure-hunters who follow an old map to a cave of treasure somewhere in (it would appear) Greece. There are five sealed treasure jars, but in order to open each one you have to commit some evil act. They don’t believe this, of course, but one of them steals from a beggar’s cup the next day, and they are able to open the one marked “Steal from the Poor”, and are rewarded with gold coins (but not any of the others). The other jars require committing crimes of increasing magnitude, and each can only be opened (so they say) after another ten years have passed since the previous one was opened. They seal the cave and agree to come back in a decade, but one guy can’t wait, and he starts committing crimes without waiting, and is rewarded with opening jars. Finally, he gets to the last one, which requires him to betray his closest friend. He says he draws the line there, and can’t do it. Until he realizes that, in opening the jars himself, he already has betrayed his friend. The last jar contains thirty pieces of silver.
Then the guy suddenly ages fifty years at once, in payment for the time he didn’t wait between jars.