Jesus Did Not Eat Fish or Help Catch Fish. By Dr Chapman Chen

The post-Resurrection fish-eating and fishing narratives in Luke and John, respectively, cannot simply be invoked as uncontested historical evidence that Jesus ate or sanctioned the killing of fish. They belong to resurrection traditions whose chronology, geography and literary development are disputed. They directly contradict Matthew’s and Mark’s narratives in terms of both time and venue (cf. Vujicic 2016). 

Jesus had long told his disciples that he would go to Galilee, not Jerusalem, upon resurrection (Mark 16: 7, 14:28). And, within Matthew's narrative, the 11 disciples met the risen Jesus for the first as well as the last time on a mountain in Galilee (Matthew 28:16), where no fish catching or fish eating occurred. Luke, by contrast, locates an appearance of Jesus to the eleven disciples in Jerusalem on the very night of His Resurrection and depicts Jesus eating fish there to prove that He’s no ghost (Luke 24:39–43). John describes how Jesus helped Peter and others to catch fish (John 21:1–14) at the Sea of Galilee, when He manifested Himself to the disciples for the third time after resurrection.

The dubiousness of the post-Resurrection fishy narratives is further increased by the scholarly debate over whether John 21 represents a later addition or redaction (Ehrman 2012; Koester 2000; Thompson 2015). The Galilean fishing narrative appears only after what already reads like the Gospel's literary conclusion at John 20:30–31. John 20:30–31 summarizes the many signs Jesus performed in the presence of His disciples and states the purpose for which “these” were written; it could therefore represent an earlier ending of the Gospel. A similar concluding statement then appears, in greatly expanded form, at John 21:25.

Significantly, in Against Praxeas 25.4, the Church Father Tertullian refers to John 20:31 in explicitly concluding language: “And wherefore does this conclusion of the Gospel affirm that these things were written, unless it be that you might believe, it says, that Jesus Christ is the Son of God?” Tertullian's characterization of John 20:31 as a “conclusion of the Gospel” is at least consistent with the striking literary finality of John 20:30–31. These discrepancies provide reasonable grounds for questioning whether the fish episodes preserve the earliest resurrection tradition.

Full Text: https://www.vegantheology.net/post/jesus-did-not-eat-fish-or-help-catch-fish-by-dr-chapman-chen

For the debunking of all fishy stories about Jesus, please refer to https://www.vegantheology.net/post/all-those-fishy-stories-about-jesus-revised-by-dr-chapman-chen