Why the Fish is the Symbol of Jesus

The term the Year of Favour is found in Isaiah and elsewhere, clearly connected with the Jubilee. One might therefore speculate that the early Christian symbol of a fish originated as a hint at the number fifty. The Aramaic word nun means fish. The letter Nun has the numerical value of fifty. This is not meant to exclude the intention of using the Greek word ichthys as an acronym of Iêsous Christos Theou [sic] Sôtêr. It is not unusual for an important symbol to have two intentional derivations.

Against conventional guesses going back to antiquity, I prefer to read Theou Sôtêr and not Theos Sôtêr. The term could have come from several verses of the NT working together. One of the most obvious is Titus II:13 with the phrase “the appearing of the Glory of the great God and our saviour Jesus the anointed”. (This is how the verse is understood in the Old Syriac and the Peshitta. In my observation and that of others that are comfortable in Aramaic, the feeling of the Syriac translators for the intention of the text is better than that of many modern commentators and translators). It is a useful rule to remember that the explanation of a verse or term in the NT that finds a deliberate echo of the Torah is to be treated as the right explanation. In the present case, Titus II:11, 13, 14 are meant to echo Deuteronomy XXXIII, and specifically verses 2 and 29. If Jesus is Saviour, it is as the agent of God. The Glory of God is the manifestation of God. The creative word or the Son or what has been called the second God is manifest in Jesus, as it says in John I:14 and 18, which echo Deuteronomy XXXIII:2. This passage in Titus also shows the implication of the term “anointed” that was applied to Jesus. If Deuteronomy XXXIII is a blessing, it must refer to the future as well as the past. Verse 5 of Deuteronomy XXXIII in its future meaning refers to one that is King in the sense that Moses was (and not in the sense that David was). As King, he can be called anointed. Moses was made King at Sinai, as verses 2 and 5 say. He also embodies the whole twelve tribes. For both these reasons, Jesus is King by nature. This is not at all the same thing as being descended from David, a very secondary concept, irrelevant or at best peripheral to Christology. Furthermore, Jesus seems to have implicitly applied the term “anointed” to himself in his sermon at Caphernaum (Luke IV:16-30). Jesus seems to agree with the Greek translation of Isaiah LXI:1 in interpreting the tem “anointed” as having the spirit of God upon him; or otherwise, the early Church thought the Greek version was relevant here. What is this spirit? This spirit was in Joshua, the successor of Moses (Numbers XXVII:18; note that whereas the Mt has “a man in whom is spirit”, the Samaritan has “the man”, that is, the only man). Joshua was full of the spirit of wisdom because Moses laid his hands upon him. Wisdom can be taken to mean the creative wisdom. That means Moses must have been full of the creative wisdom and in greater measure than Joshua. He must have been filled with it in this way unique to him at Sinai. We are back to the opening verses of Deuteronomy XXXIII. I go out of my way to say all this about the words I read as Theou Sôtêr because the reading preferred by me removes any objection to a very early date of origin of the Greek acrostic. The straight equation of Jesus with God, justifiably criticised by Moslems as a deliberate corruption of the Gospel by the Church, took time to creep in. Isaiah LXI:2 connects the Jubilee with the eschatological Day of Vengeance and Recompense (Deuteronomy XXXII:35, which it quotes as “To the Day [LYWM] of Vengeance”, in agreement with the Samaritan text and the LXX (against MT “Mine [LY] is vengeance”. This implies a great and final Jubilee, and thus a connection with Deuteronomy XXXIII as being about the future coming of a unique figure as a final and greater salvation. We are back to the Aramaic word nun, the letter Nun, and the number fifty. More could be said, but this is not the occasion.