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Brief Summary Why 153 Fish in John 21:11 ? Sections :
Introduction
John’s Purpose
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The School of Athens in the Vatican museum by Raphael.
The Greeks excelled in natural wisdom. They even looked to mathematical wisdom as the key on how to live. See quote from Wikipedia. However, they had mistakenly thought that their natural wisdom contradicted and precluded the possibility of the supernatural wisdom of Jesus' revelation of being true.
Pastoral Obstacle 1 Corinthians 1:22-24 Above all else the Greeks esteemed wisdom. The greatest mathematical minds of antiquity were all Greek. There was Archimedes, Euclid and Pythagoras, and not to mention Plato. Plato the philosopher had an inscription carved over the archway of his Academy: “Let no one ignorant of geometry enter here.” John 17:3 The Greeks rejected the Gospel as foolishness because it seemed to contradict their natural wisdom. And without the gift of faith, the idea of Jesus who is God, Who dies on a cross for sinners is hard to accept from a worldly point of view. So, St. John as a pastor wants correct this impasse, this seemingly logical contradiction between the natural wisdom the Greeks possessed and accepting Jesus. The Greeks did not have a problem in believing in a god. They had many gods. John's goal is to explain the One True God, and therefore the identity of Jesus who is also the source of all blessings given to mankind. So, John uses the analogy of “153 fish” to represent all wisdom. The Greeks will recognize “153 fish” to symbolize first and foremost Archimedes’ work on π, but in a secondary way all Greek Wisdom including the Pythagoreans and Euclid. This is demonstrated by the facts already seen in Archimedes, and Calculating the Size of the Fish In the analogy, the Apostles have no fish until Jesus appears. Jesus is the source (and master) of the 153 fish. Jesus could command Peter to bring him some fish because Jesus is the rightful owner, and the source of all the fish which represents wisdom. The Greeks had thought that their own wisdom precluded them from accepting the message of Jesus which appeared as a contradiction to their wisdom. They saw the Gospel as foolishness. But, according to John’s analogy, the net contains all the fish. It contains both the wisdom that comes from Jesus as well as the natural wisdom of the Greeks. Because there is no inconsistency or conflict between these two wisdoms the same one net which contains them both does not tear. John 21:11 John was not just communicator, he was also an Evangelist, par excellence. He recognized the spiritual needs of the heart. By having 153 fish swim into the net, Jesus was
enabling John to use his skills as an evangelist. John, being the
ultimate evangelist, knew how to meet his prospective converts where
they were at and to acknowledge the natural strengths, their natural
wisdom,
and to build on that. Compare how St. Paul built on the partial
truths of the pagans in Acts 17:23. So, why does John not explain his
meaning for 153 fish ? John went to the very heart of And so, there was another pastoral reason why John does not make the meaning of 153 fish explicit. John lived with the Greeks and he knew that the Greeks held their natural wisdom in the highest esteem and that they even identified themselves by it. He knew about the problem St. Paul recounted above in his letter to the Corinthians. John knew the Greeks needed to accept that their wisdom had its foundation in Jesus Christ. The Greeks had mistakenly thought that their logic precluded the possibility of the Christian Gospel as being true. They valued their wisdom about natural things, but denied Jesus had any role in it. They were guilty of the sin of pride. “Humility is the mother of all virtues," but the sin of pride puts roadblocks into one's journey towards God. A humble person will accept correction, but a proud man looks down on those who correct him and enjoys dismissing corrective words without any serious examination. John was not just a communicator. He was a pastor. He would have know that most overly proud people will reject correction without serious consideration of ideas that contradict or diminish the false value they place in themselves. A better way to get such a person to examine an idea is to get them to think that a particular idea is their own. One way to plant such an idea into another person's head is by using a gentle metaphor. So, as a pastor, John wants to be as gentle as possible when pointing out to the Greeks that their wisdom was faulty. This is why John uses a subtle and gentle metaphor of 153 fish. And this explains why John does not explain his meaning. He knows his idea that Jesus is the source of all 153 fish, and therefore the source of all wisdom, will surely be perceived by the Greeks. And he does not want to rub the Greeks noses' in the fact that their wisdom, their logic, was faulty in initially rejecting the Gospel.
So, by gentle analogy John shows that not only does Jesus not contradict natural wisdom, He is the source of all wisdom. Father Bob Stine’s answer is like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle that makes all the other pieces fit together. It answers all the questions without leaving any loose ends, unlike all the other proposed answers that really do not fit and could not be John’s primary message. St. Jerome, St. Augustine, and St. Gregory, and St. Cyril all offer ideas which are good theology, and which are plausible secondary meanings. However, their ideas were all different and their is no real evidence that any of their ideas would have been obvious to John’s readers. Therefore, we can safely conclude that neither St. Jerome’s, nor St. Augustine’s nor St. Gregory’s nor St. Cyril’s idea could have been John’s primary intention. Read more details on St. Jerome’s and Fathers.
Here, in these passages after the catch of the
153 fish (John 21:7, 12) John
adds the definite article
“the” Fr. Bob’s explanation shows what “153 fish” really means. John lived with the Greeks in Ephesus. He had first-hand knowledge of their mistaken notion that the Gospel was in contradiction to their wisdom. It is very hard to imagine John not wanting to address and correct the problem the Greeks had.
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