the fish that first cometh up

Chapter 17 of the Gospel of Matthew describes a small incident that does not appear in any of the other three. Jesus and the disciplines come to Capernaum and are asked for the usual payment as a tribute to the temple. (Hendrik van der Loos points to the book of Exodus (30: 11-16) for the law that 'all male Israelites above the age of twenty were obliged to give half a shekel for the service in the tabernacle of the congregation'.) Jesus asks Peter: 'What thinkest thou, Simon? Of whom do the kings of the earth take custom or tribute? Of their children, or of strangers?' Peter says: 'Of strangers'. And Jesus concludes by saying, 'Then are the children free', which is often interpreted as meaning that, being children of heaven, the disciples are strangers to the authorities in Capernaum and hence have no obligation to them.

Then, however, Jesus takes a different line: '[L]est we should offend them, go thou to the sea, and cast an hook, and take up the fish that first cometh up; and when thou hast opened his mouth, thou shalt find a piece of money: that take, and give unto them for me and thee.' It's a rather strange detail. Although it is sometimes included among the miracles, we are not told that Peter did as he was told. No miraculous event is described as taking place. Some have rationalised it by saying that Peter is to catch a fish and sell it, thus raising money to pay the temple tribute. A fragment in Joseph Reuss' collection, Matthaus-Kommentare aus der griechischen Kirche, offers an allegorical account of the episode:

[T]he fish provides a type of the church: once [it was] held by the brine of faithlessness and superstition, submerged in the depths of the sea and swamped by the storms and distress of worldly pleasures. But now [it is] raised up by the apostles' hook of teaching and the fishing nets of the Word to the knowledge of God, of him 'who calls us from darkness to his amazing light'.

Thus, the episode is read as a reference to the status of the disciples as 'fishers of men' and we can add it to our collection of allegorical hooks - that of Mara (which catches those who have not managed to put aside sensual desire), that of the Christian God (which captures death through the bait that is Jesus), and that of the teaching used by the disciples to bring their listeners to 'knowledge of God'.

Some commentators see the story as borrowed from another tradition - a folkloric element that has cognates in all kinds of other places. It has been compared with a range of other stories. One appears in the Babylonian Talmud:

Joseph-who-honours-the-Sabbaths had in his victory a certain gentile who owned much property. Soothsayers told him, 'Joseph-who-honours-the-Sabbaths will consume all your property. — [So] he went, sold all his property, and bought a precious stone with the proceeds, which he set in his turban. As he was crossing a bridge the wind blew it off and cast it into the water, [and] a fish swallowed it. [Subsequently] it [the fish] was hauled up and brought [to market] on the Sabbath eve towards sunset. 'Who will buy now?' cried they. 'Go and take them to Joseph-who-honours-the-Sabbaths,' they were told, 'as he is accustomed to buy.' So they took it to him. He bought it, opened it, found the jewel therein, and sold it for thirteen roomfuls of gold denarii.  A certain old man met him [and] said, 'He who lends to the Sabbath,  the Sabbath repays him.' [link]

Another appears in Herodotus' Histories in the story of the ring of Polycrates (which I might look at in another post). Both the Talmudic and the Herodotian stories are centred upon loss and restoration, a dynamic that is not so evident in the Gospel story. To lose something in the sea is to lose it more or less irrecoverably and so the rediscovery of the jewel and the ring are particularly striking signs of the virtue and good fortune of Joseph and Polycrates respectively.

I have to say that I like some of the stranger moments in the texts of the Gospels. (The cursing of the fig tree in both Mark and Matthew is another one.) There is something compelling about watching the commentators worry about the significance of the coin in the fish's mouth.

Augustin Tünger Facetiae Latinae et Germanicae, Konstanz 1486, Württembergische Landesbibliothek Stuttgart, Cod. HB V 24a. - Illustration from the life of St. Peter: Saint Peter paying a fee by extracting coins from the mouth of a fish.