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{"id":16284,"date":"2014-07-18T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2014-07-18T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leithart.level2d.com\/?p=1212"},"modified":"2014-07-18T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2014-07-18T00:00:00","slug":"sign-of-the-fish","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/leithart\/2014\/07\/sign-of-the-fish\/","title":{"rendered":"Sign of the Fish"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n<\/head>

Martin Bernal (Black Athena<\/a>, 1.128) points out the novelty of Christian association with the sign of the fish, which had no purchase in the Old Testament: \u201cKey disciples were fishermen, and fishing images abound. There is the miracle of the two fishes and the five loaves of bread. Even more strikingly, in the Gospel according to St John, Christ gave his disciples fish in a symbolic last meal. This theme, and the idea that fish were central to the Last Supper, were standard in early Christian iconography. In the sense of transubstantiation, Christ was not merely bread or grain like Osiris, he was a fish or \u2013 as was equally often represented \u2013 two fishes. As Tertullian, the brilliant early Christian thinker, wrote around the year 200: \u2018We little fishes, after the image of our Ichthys . . .\u00a0<\/em>are born in the water.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was an astrologically appropriate sign. Jews weren\u2019t the only millennarians in the first two centuries AD. Romans also believed that a new age was dawning, marked by the stars, in the change from the age of Aries to the age of Pisces, from the ram to the fish. Bernal sees a similar astrological significance behind Virgil\u2019s famous Fourth Eclogue: \u201cthe poet \u2013 as a poet \u2013 employed several different levels of meaning: the birth of Pollio\u2019s child; the beginning of a peaceful age under his and Pollio\u2019s patron, Augustus. The words also seem to indicate the coming of a new young divinity. They certainly refer to a cosmic or astral change of age, which can only be the new age of Pisces\u201d (126).<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"