Catch of 153 fish

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The anonymous author of this 16th century painting did not represent a massive quantity of fish.

The Catch of 153 fish is an episode in Gospel of John chapter 21, in which seven of the Twelve Apostles were out fishing when they unexpectedly witness one of the resurrection appearances of Jesus (Luke 5:1-11 has a similar story placed before the resurrection). In the narrative (John 21:1-14), a mysterious stranger asks the apostles for fish, but when they say that they have none, the stranger tells the apostles to throw their net into the water on the other (righthand) side of the boat, and the apostles are unable to pull it back due to the volume of fish. The narrative goes on to state that the (unnamed) beloved disciple identifies the stranger as Jesus, which causes Simon Peter to jump into the water, wrapping his coat around him, while the others follow in their boat dragging the net behind them. The number of fish caught is specified to have been 153.

In the white fish-shaped figure (vesica piscis) in the center, width and height are in a proportion of the square root of 3, the "measure of the fish".

The precision of the number of fish has long been considered peculiar, and many scholars, throughout history, have argued that 153 has some deeper significance. Jerome, for example, claimed that the Greeks had identified that there were exactly 153 species of fish in the sea (modern marine biology puts the figure as something over 29,000, though the disciples were fishing in the Sea of Tibeias, which actually is a lake). St. Louis-Marie de Montfort, in his fifth method of saying the Rosary, considers that the number 153 was foreshadowing of the number of Hail Marys in the Rosary: "its fruitfulness as shown in the net that St. Peter by order of Our Lord threw into the sea and which though filled with 153 [representing 153 Hail Marys in the Rosary] fish did not break." [1] Mathematically, 153 is a triangular number, more precisely it is the sum of the integer numbers from 1 to 17 inclusive; more significantly, 153 also has the rare property that it is the sum of the cubes of its own digits (i.e. 153 = 1x1x1 + 5x5x5 + 3x3x3). In the time of Pythagoras, 153 was most significant for being one of the two numbers in the closest fraction known, at the time, to the true value of the square root of 3, the fraction in question being 265/153 (the difference between this and the square root of 3 is merely 0.000025......). The ratio of 153:265 was consequently known throughout the Hellenic world as the measure of the fish.

The fact that the measure of the fish was known to include 153, as one of its two numbers, and that the measure of how many fish the disciples are said to have caught is also 153, has not gone unnoticed by many scholars, with some suggesting that the number of fish in the New Testament episode is simply down to being the most familiar large number to the writer, or a deliberate reference to the geometric nomenclature as a sort of in-joke. It is significant that a story was told of Pythagoras, and later reported by Plato, that is very similar, even in wording, to the Biblical narrative of this event; some scholars have argued that that the entire Biblical episode is a coded reference to a geometric diagram, since Pythagoreanism saw geometry and numbers as having deep esoteric meaning, and via Hermeticism (and more minor routes) it was profoundly influential in the development of Hellenic mystery religions, and in certain aspects of gnosticism, an early belief system with disputed origins^[1]. While such themes would be unusual if the New Testament was only intended to be taken literally, several modern scholars, as well as most ancient followers of gnosticism, have argued that parts of the New Testament were written as gnostic documents.