The Fish
There are many connections in the gospel accounts between Jesus and his disciples and fish. Here
are some of them:
Jesus chooses fishermen as disciples.
Jesus cites Jonah as an example.
Jesus feeds five thousand.
Jesus feeds four thousand.
A fish with a coin in its mouth.
Jesus feeds his disciples by the Sea of Galilee
after his resurrection.
Whilst these connections may have suggested the idea of a fish symbol, there is actually another reason behind
it.
Although during the earliest period of Christianity the Romans were the main power in the area around the
Mediterranean sea, their language, Latin, was not the most commonly-spoken language. That was Greek. Alexander the Great, who came from Macedonia - northern Greece -
had conquered the area centuries before the Romans. After Alexander's death, his vast empire was broken up
into smaller areas, and between then and when the Romans came, their rulers were of Greek or Macedonian
extraction. (In Egypt, for example, the Ptolemies were Greek, not Egyptian.)
Thus, Greek language and culture became the norm for the
eastern Mediterranean area. It is to the Greek language that we must look for the
explanation of the fish symbol. The box above contains some Greek words. The right-hand box shows the
equivalent in English.
By taking the first letter of each of the words, another word can be made up. This is a form of word game called
an acrostic. It doesn't work in English, but in Greek, the first letters do make up a word, and that word means
"fish". The equivalent of these five Greek letters in English is I CHTH Y S. In modern English, we do have
words derived from this Greek word "ichthys" -
ichthyology, for example, is the name given to the scientific study of fish.
In the early days of the Christian Church, there were some places and times that it wasn't very safe to be
known as a follower of Christ. First the Jewish
authorities tried to stamp out the Church; this is recorded in the book of Acts. Later, there were several
periods during which Christians were persecuted by the
Roman authorities, as documented in many secular histories.
The fish symbol was a subtle way for one Christian to identify himself or herself to another who might be a
total stranger. It is a very simple shape to draw - just
two curved strokes. It could be drawn quickly, and erased just as quickly if there was no sign of
recognition on the part of the stranger.
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