In John 21 we have the scene on the shores of the Sea of Galilee after Peter and his fishing colleagues return from a fruitless night of fishing. This occurs some time well after the Resurrection of Jesus but before His Ascension.
Peter and the other apostles appear to have scattered from Jerusalem some weeks after the Crucifixion, and then experiencing the shock and awe, and subsequently the great joy of seeing the Resurrected Christ. But some time after it appears to have been a lull in the appearances of Christ and the absence of any directions, so Peter returns home to Capernaum, and to his earthly profession as fisherman. So, he has re-configured himself to his place and situation at the time of his original calling by Jesus to follow Him some three year earlier.
In the recent weeks, Peter, and the others, went through the trauma of the arrest, trials, beatings, crucifixion, death, and resurrection of the One Whom he had followed and believed to be The Christ, The Son of The Living God. He likely also originally believed that such Christ following journey was to have resulted in a restoration of the Davidic Kingdom now occupied by the true Son of David, Jesus of Nazareth, to resume the rule and reign in Jerusalem over all of Israel, defeating the incumbent, hated Roman rule. The observed miraculous powers of Jesus would make this that appeared impossible possible, by some wave of His hand or pronouncement of His lips.
Things turned out horribly ‘wrong’ for such thinking. And, for Peter, there was even the added pain of his failed boast that he would gladly die in defense of Jesus only to followed within one night’s time, a three fold denial of Jesus even to the lowliest and least threatening people during the night of Jesus’s trials.
So, the Resurrection has taken place, but what Jesus is now up to is still a mystery. And Peter likely believes that in any case Jesus is ‘done’ with the likes of him who failed in the most critical moment of time. Peter may even feel that he caused Jesus to be crucified by his failure to act and lead a defense force.
So, after some time of no information, no command from the Lord, Peter goes home, and returns, he thinks, to his former and rightful way of life, catching fish in the night.
Then, to no doubt great embarrassment he and his fishing followers catch nothing, as in not a single fish. For a professional fisherman this was a serious matter because one relied on each day’s catch to provide the means by which each day’s income is received, and from which one is not only fed but buys all the necessary items of life.
The scene now turns to Peter seeing Jesus on the shore cooking fish! (Where did those fish come from, Peter would have asked himself?). And Jesus instructs Peter where now to cast his net for a catch, improbably right by the shore. (This is not how pro’s do this). Peter obeys and the catch is so vast that hauling it aboard risks sinking the vessel. (That’s not supposed to happen). Peter now recognizes that this is yet another miracle by the Lord.
Now we come to a simple sentence that is part of no soul winner’s memory list: there were 153 fish in that net. Think of how improbable this is. First, the Bible is very focused on the narrative of significance such that it does not give us a lot of details that we might crave. Yet here we get the fish count. Further, think about how hard it is to count anything to 153, and especially living things flopping around. Why oh why are we told that the number of fish was 153.
Well, I’ll tell you. (Ha!)
Peter is about to be restored to the Lord’s work, including a three-fold affirmation of Peter’s love for the Lord in response to Jesus’s three questions. Then later, we learn that Peter and the other Apostles are told to be going through and to the world making disciples (of Jesus Christ, not of themselves), as they are traveling, baptizing, teaching.
But we also know about the Lord’s earlier statement to Peter about “the keys” (Matt 16, addressed in a previous post) and his being a testifier in Judea, Samaria, and the world of the fact of Jesus being the Son of God (the unique Person both fully human and God Himself having come to save sinners).
How does the 153 fish fit into this narrative?
As discussed in the previous post, Peter is miraculously called to open the lock to the Gentiles by way of a Centurion in the capital Roman city of Israel, Caesarea. So now we can see both the “3” and the “100.” The “3” is not only a signature of Peter’s life, recurring again and again, his vision to go to Cornelius the Centurion was by a 3-peat of the sheet of formerly unclear creatures, and the 3 men who are sent by Cornelius. And the “100” can be understood because a Centurion was nominally in charge of 100 soldiers (“cents,” meaning one-hundredth of a dollar, and per cent, meaning percentage, both derive from the Latin for “100”). So this gets us to 103. Where’s the other 50?
We need to go back to Abraham and Lot, some 2,000 years earlier. Recall that because of their combined prosperity, the area of the Promised Land where they were herding their animals became a source of conflict. Abraham then graciously offered any direction / area of the land to his nephew Lot, willing to move to wherever was rejected by Lot. However, Lot chose outside of the Land, or at best on the very edge of it, in the notorious southern Jordan River valley, in the region of the prosperous cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, where the bright lights and city life looked more appealing than chasing around sheep and goats in the countryside.
Some time later, Abraham is visited by three ‘people’ (that number 3 again). These were all supernatural beings, although it is uncertain as to whether one of them was a pre-incarnate manifestation of the Lord Jesus. In any case, they visit Abraham for the express purpose of announcing their intended visit to Lot’s neighborhood, so to speak, to discern the extent of evil there. Clearly such visit, announcement, and intended discernment of evil are all in human terms for Abraham’s sake, because as supernatural beings they would have known well what the story was in that river valley civilization. So we have a scene that has as its purpose the determination of the significance of “the righteous” on the impending potential catastrophic judgment of God. (The occasion of the visit also had the important purpose of affirming the promise made by God some 24 years earlier that Abraham, and his wife Sarah, would have a biological heir by which Abraham would become a father of a multitude, as it has happened. So the propagation of GOd’s promised people was the other ‘half’ of the story.)
Abraham understands what’s at stake, and in particular the mortal risk of life for Lot, his family, and extended household. This leads Abraham to ask a most unusual question of the three visitors:
Suppose there were fifty righteous within the city; would You also destroy the place and not spare it for the fifty righteous that were in it?
Genesis 18:24 NKJV
Behind this question is a deeply important issue: how does God handle the conjunction of good and evil, those who are his beloved and those who are the condemned? Although we do not know the combined population of those infamous cities and their surroundings it would have been a far larger number than 50. So Abraham was suggesting that the graciousness of God would spare even many thousand if within their environs there were but 50 “righteous,” that is God-fearers/followers.
Where did Abraham get such starting number as “50?” (And, outside our present scope of interest, he even ‘works’ it down to 10).
The firs occurrences in the Bible of “50” and the only ones prior to Gen. 18:24, had to do with the judgment of the flood on the gross and prevalent unrighteousness that prevailed from the ungodly line of Cain. In Gen. 6:15 we learn that one of the principal dimensions of the ark of safety for the righteous line of Noah was the width (known as the “beam”) was to be 50 cubits. Once, any one of the three principal dimensions of a seagoing vessel is fixed, the others (to a large degree) follow. So for a 50 cubit beam, the length of 300 cubits and height of 30 cubits follow based on principles of naval science and architecture. (Of course the ark was a huge, sealed, unpowered life boat, so its exact naval design dimensions would not correspond to a cruise ship or military ship today, but it is reasonably close).
A second pre-Abraham occurrence of fifty was the duration of the flood itself which was, interestingly, one hundred and 50 days. So, connecting that judgment inflicted on the antediluvian world, and the upcoming judgment on Lot’s land, Abraham could have called to mind such reference to the number 50 (or even 150). Of course, alternatively, it could simply have been the number that came into his consciousness. In either case, or some other, the issue of 50 “righteous” was the starting point for the Grace of God to preserve an entire community from destruction.
Returning to the time of the NT, and Israel, the Gentile peoples and particularly the Romans were absolutely despised, hated. They were military occupiers and hated on that score alone. But they also imposed a heavy burden of taxation as they did through all their occupied colonies to pay for all the infrastructure of the Roman home (Rome), the ruling classes, the large standing armies, fortifications, etc.. Taxes are often a cause of rebellion, because they are a compulsory taking, but the level and use of such taxes were especially onerous to the Jewish people. That’s the second strike against the Romans. Finally, the Romans were “uncircumcised” and not followers of the Jehovah God, and were excluded from the promises given to Israel. Strike 3. Hence, Peter’s reluctance to go to Cornelius the Roman Centurion despite that Peter himself was staying with a tanner, who was totally unclean by profession according to Jewish ceremonial law.
But, about those 153 fish. Peter knew that number. He had to have. It had been counted and noted; it was an essential part of the miracle of Peter’s restoration in John 21. At the beginning of Peter’s calling he experienced a large draft of fish, but not any specifically noted number. Now there was 153. This is now reading the white spaces, but wouldn’t you have wondered as you wandered about what the meaning might be of the 153 fish, especially since God had now restated His call to be instead a fisher of men?
So, how might the 153 have been part of the Cornelius story? One answer would have been that as Peter was walking the 3 (partial) days from Joppa to Caesarea, he thought about the 3 messengers from Cornelius and his own 3 time vision, and of course the 100 soldiers that Cornelius commanded, but perhaps also the 50 righteous of Abraham’s initial target number for rescuing an entire people group. Another possibility is that Cornelius’s household of family and servants would have numbered 50, in addition to the 100 he commanded in the army. Cornelius was not just a Centurion; he was the head of a household, and as a prosperous individual he would have had many servants–slaves, indentured workers, and day workers–in addition to his direct family and likely some in-laws. This would have created a powerful moment when Peter appeared and saw in his ‘audience’ the 100 soldiers, the 50 household members, and himself, and the three messengers. I can imagine one of Peter’s companions perhaps with a bookkeeper background, compulsively counting noses and then whispering into Peter’s ear the phrase that would have stood the hairs on his neck: “Peter, there are 153 people here to hear you!”
One other possible cue for Peter would have been the occasion of Jesus feeding the 5,000 (Luke 9:14). Jesus instructed the apostles, including Peter, to organize the 5,000 into groups of 50, so that there would be 100 such groups, enabling the 12 apostles to organize the distribution of food to each of these groups rather than attempting to do so with 5,000 individuals, so that each serving apostle was responsible for 50.
We don’t know, because Scripture doesn’t tell us directly, and should not start another denomination on this speculation (“The Church of the 153?” or “153 and Me?”which does have a catchy ring to it). But it is very tempting to connect the 153 with “the keys” being used to the final people group, the Gentiles (Matthew 16:19 and Acts 10).
Now, even further afield in the land of speculation, consider this. There is a certain size / scale that changes how a community interacts, behaves, and can be managed. There has been an enormous amount of research of the best levels of division of very large groups into more manageable smaller units. The military of course is concerned about this question, but companies and city planners are as well. Should local assemblies of believers be also?
The late Eugene Peterson, whose translation of the Bible is published as The Message (n.b. I admire the wordsmithing talents of Peterson in his books, but do not in The Message),and who was a long time local church ‘pastor,’ believed that he was not called to be a leader of a body of believers more numerous than he could know individually by name. I don’t know what that number was, but it could not have been 5,000, and would have been more than just a couple dozen.
There exists a number from research studies known as the Dunbar Number, named after a principal investigator. Here’s background on such Number, which, ahem, is 150:
Dunbar’s number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships—relationships in which an individual knows who each person is and how each person relates to every other person. This number was first proposed in the 1990s by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who found a correlation between primate brain size and average social group size. By using the average human brain size and extrapolating from the results of primates, he proposed that humans can comfortably maintain only 150 stable relationships. Dunbar explained it informally as “the number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them in a bar.” Proponents assert that numbers larger than this generally require more restrictive rules, laws, and enforced norms to maintain a stable, cohesive group. It has been proposed to lie between 100 and 250, with a commonly used value of 150.[6][7]Dunbar’s number states the number of people one knows and keeps social contact with, and it does not include the number of people known personally with a ceased social relationship, nor people just generally known with a lack of persistent social relationship, a number which might be much higher and likely depends on long-term memory size. Dunbar theorised that “this limit is a direct function of relative neocortex size, and that this in turn limits group size […] the limit imposed by neocortical processing capacity is simply on the number of individuals with whom a stable inter-personal relationship can be maintained”. On the periphery, the number also includes past colleagues, such as high school friends, with whom a person would want to reacquaint himself or herself if they met again.[8] ….Dunbar has argued that 150 would be the mean group size only for communities with a very high incentive to remain together. For a group of this size to remain cohesive, Dunbar speculated that as much as 42% of the group’s time would have to be devoted to social grooming. Correspondingly, only groups under intense survival pressure, such as subsistence villages, nomadic tribes, and historical militarygroupings, have, on average, achieved the 150-member mark. Moreover, Dunbar noted that such groups are almost always physically close: “[…] we might expect the upper limit on group size to depend on the degree of social dispersal. In dispersed societies, individuals will meet less often and will thus be less familiar with each other, so group sizes should be smaller in consequence.” Thus, the 150-member group would occur only because of absolute necessity—due to intense environmental and economic pressures.
Wikipedia for “Dunbar Number”
We of course do not have such Dunbar Number prescription in the NT, but we do have some clues:
- Jesus has just 12 disciples (apostles), and He sent out on a mission just 70 persons (Luke 10).
- The first gathering called Christians, in Syrian Antioch, had only five elders (Acts 13). Although Antioch was then a city in the hundreds of thousands, it seems likely that the local fellowship of believers was at the most in the hundreds in order to be ably served by only five leaders who themselves were possibly holding regular day jobsf believers.
- We have an enumeration of people whom Paul knew as part of the body of believers in Rome (Romans 21). There is an extensive list, including some referred to without specific names. But overall it is less than 30 people in a city of about one million. There were of course likely others present who Paul did not know, but there is no reference in the text to some massive number of others. Here is a commentary on the chapter.
- In 1 Corinthians there is an extensive discussion, and admonition, of the practice of the Lord’s Supper / Communion. It is clear from that context that it was a dinner gathering on the first day of the week (Sunday) in the evening. This would be understandable as Sunday then was a working day and the people would not be free to come together at 11 a.m. as is the apparently mandatory hour and day today. It was an evening gathering that included a meal along with teaching, hymn singing (Psalms only?), fellowship, counseling, etc, all together as an entire evening together, again quite unlike our customary practice today where it’s parking lot to parking lot and off to football watching or home BBQ. How large was such a Lord’s Supper gathering. Again we’re not told. But we do know from reliable accounts that there did not exist Christian buildings at the time because Christianity was an illegal religion and subject to persecution by the Roman government even to the point of arrest and martyrdom, which did from time-to-time occur. Accordingly, these meetings were likely in the home of some believer of means who had the capacity for a large gathering. Was it 50? Conceivably. 150? That would be a stretch, but possible as larger homes had inner courtyards that were unroofed but could accommodate a large gathering in clement weather. Was it 500? Very very unlikely. Further recall that famed open area preachers of more recent times such as George Whitfield, and gifted, powerful orators such as Charles Spurgeon (who had the opportunity to speak in a large auditorium configured to make his voice heard), and whose voices were able to reach crowds of thousands and even tens of thousands, were unique in their vocal ability. It is very unlikely that within any local fellowship of believers at the time of the NT there would one or multiple such speakers even if there was the indoor or outdoor venue safely available for it t0 occur.
- Later in 1 Corinthians they are admonished to control the number of people who may bouncing up from the seats to speak to the gathering. (1 Cor. 14). In the time before electronic amplification, there were great limitations of the ability to project a speaker’s voice to a crowd. We read of the Sermon on the Mount that Jesus spoke to many who had gathered. But this was a natural auditorium like terrain. Further the text (Matt 5) states that he spoke to His “disciples.” This was likely a much smaller number than the mass feeding events recorded (4,000 and 5,000)
- Jesus affirmed to His disciples that wherever two or three are gathered in His name, He is present. (Matthew 18:20). He did not say wherever two or three thousand are gathered in my name…
So what do we conclude? Did Peter speak to 153 at Caesarea that epochal moment of last set of keys opening the door to the great rest-of-the-world people group. I’d like to think so. In any case, it’s one of the early questions I’m gonna ask in heaven (right after I ask why the fine structure constant of the physical universe is 137, and whether the value of Pi ever repeats or ends after billions of digits as has been calculated so far beyond the famed 3.14).
What about the right upper bound for a fellowship of believers? The argument against such a number, as ca. 150, is that of overhead efficiency. Put another way, we can hire a bunch more ‘pastors’ and musicians, etc., on an incremental basis if we grow a congregation into the thousands than if there were splits into independent groups of ca. 150 (or less). That argument, seems to me, to be utterly pagan, carrying no weight. A more challenging issue is what do elders do if their local body has ever increasing numbers attend, and faithfully so, ‘busting the doors?’ Some try multiple services (I’ve seen examples where four identical Sunday morning messages were used to manage the numbers). Some try multiple “campuses” under a common headship, which is only a partial fix. Others try preaching intensely on God’s Sovereign Election (such as, say, a year long study of the one great Greek sentence of Ephesians 1:3-12, or Calvin’s 159 Six a.m.messages on the Book of Job), with good success in keeping the numbers down of ‘seekers’ and ‘tire kickers.’ There does not seem to a Biblical directive on this, so perhaps we should believe that God manifests His Grace as the need requires, even to the extent of massive numbers on ‘one’s doorstep’ and preach on, using ever higher decibel powered speakers (but I do lean to the 159 messages on the Book of Job: www.iDealmaking.com, though not being a Calvin, I did it in less an 50 meetings, to a group that shrunk substantially in the process, ending, as I recall, with about 10 people, all ready to move on.)