I suspect to many readers of the Bible this is a silly question. Honestly, who cares? The idea that I constantly want to convey is that we should ask the questions we find curious about the scriptures, assuming that there are answers deeper than the obvious.
We can, of course, become enamoured of all sorts of novelty and get caught up in the esoteric at the expense of the main point of a given passage. My approach to reading the Bible is at risk of that, in theory, and because my writing tends to be exploring those sorts of side issues and minutiae I suspect readers might think that of me to a greater degree than if you were listening to my preaching, for example. You are, of course, at liberty to judge as you will.
Assuming this is not being enamoured by novelty, let’s back up a step and see where the question arises from. Had you noticed that when Jesus eats, we often see him eating fish? In fact, we only see him partaking of bread, fish, wine, and water. The theological and symbolic resonances of bread, wine, and water are—I hope—more obvious. Fish may be less so.
Of course, you might point out that he clearly ate other things, not least because we see him partaking in a Passover meal at which we assume he ate the lamb. It is unreasonable to assume that he never ate anything else. I am not saying that Jesus was a pescatarian. I am saying that the Bible does not have words that are not there for the sake of meaning and that the world is a world of symbols. Jesus’ choices, as well as the choices of the gospel writers under the inspiration of Jesus by the Spirit, are freighted with meaning that we should not take for granted.
On that basis, let’s take the question at face value: why did Jesus eat so much fish? There are three reasons.
1. He lived by the coast
This is the dull, uninteresting, but nevertheless important one. He ate as the people around him ate. Jesus was born into a specific cultural moment in a specific historical milieu. He acted as other Jewish men in Judea under the Roman Empire did.
Going a touch deeper, the two symbolic meanings I’m going to draw out (one sure, one more tenuous) are not why the writers depicted fish as though Jesus didn’t actually eat it. All of the Bible’s symbolism happened. Symbolism happens. The fact that we assume saying something is a symbol means it didn’t historically happen and isn’t being reported as reportage is a distinctly modern way of looking at the world that we need to lose.
2. For the sake of the Gentiles
Three major images in the Bible’s symbolic world are the tree, the table, and the sea. We are in this question of fish thinking about the sea: the symbolic domain of the sea includes chaos and evil—which is why eventually the sea is no more (Revelation 21)—but there is a link therefore with the Gentiles, like me.
Those who are not the people of God are associated with the sea in the Bible (partly due to chaos and partly because that’s where they lived), which means that Jesus’ choice to eat fish along with bread (life/friendship/covenant) and wine (blessing/cursing/wisdom) is not an indication that we should eat fish at the Lord’s Supper (though there is a minority argument that some in the early church replaced wine with fish), but rather that those who are not the people of God are being invited to the table. Jesus chose to indicate in what was reported of his mealtimes that he would like you to join him at them in the future, whoever you may be.
3. To eat the dragons
You knew I was going to go there.
This is much more tentative and should be read in that vein. In the apocryphal book of 2 Baruch the eschatological banquet—the feast at the end of history that Revelation calls the marriage supper of the Lamb (Revelation 19)—includes the people of God eating Leviathan as their dinner. They literally eat the chaos dragon to celebrate his demise. Macabre.
It is possible that since this was well known at the time among Jewish people and readers of the gospels we are supposed to think ‘I wonder if this is a bit like Jonah, but backwards?’ Jonah is eaten by a fish, Jesus eats a fish. Jesus is the one who will crush Leviathan’s head on the cross; every demonic entity, every power and principality, that the Bible refers to as dragons in the Old Testament, will lose. Every dragon must fall. Their end is assured. Instead, Jesus declares victory.
In much the same way that we eat bacon with gusto, knowing not only that it is a privilege of our inclusion in the covenant but that its gospel food (pigs smell awful when alive and beautiful when dead), perhaps Jesus ate fish with a knowing wink towards the evil that lurks in the watery darkness of the place of the dead. One day they too will be nothing but food.
Photo by Jakub Kapusnak on Unsplash
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