I started Robert Grant's 1952 book, Miracle and Natural Law in Graeco-Roman and Early Christian Thought. In this post, I'll talk about John 21:11,
which states (in the KJV): "Simon Peter went up, and drew the net to
land full of great fishes, an hundred and fifty and three: and for all
there were so many, yet was not the net broken."
Why does John 21:11 mention 153 fish? Grant proposes that we compare this story with a story in Porphyry's Life of Pythagoras. (Porphyry lived in the third century C.E., and Pythagoras lived in the sixth century B.C.E.) In Life of Pythagoras 25, we read:
"Meeting
with some fishermen who were drawing in their nets heavily laden with
fishes from the deep, he predicted the exact number of fish they had
caught. The fishermen said that if his estimate was accurate they would
do whatever he commanded. They counted them accurately, and found the
number correct. He then bade them return the fish alive into the sea;
and, what is more wonderful, not one of them died, although they had
been out of the water a considerable time. He paid them and left."
According
to this story, Pythagoras knew how many fish the fishermen had caught,
before they even counted them. Is that what we see in John 21? There
are some parallels, such as the statement that the nets are full of
fish, and something about the number of fish that were caught. But
there is no statement in John 21 that Jesus predicted the number of fish
that were caught, and that he turned out to be right.
So why
does John 21:11 mention 153 fish? My guess is that it mentions the
number to highlight that a lot of fish were caught, and yet the net was
not broken. What better way was there to show that there were a lot of
fish in the net, than to mention a specific large number?