Speaker 1: The Bible almost never gives you an exact number. It
Speaker 1: says forty days, twelve tribes, five thousand, fed round numbers, symbols, estimates.
Speaker 1: So when the Gospel of John suddenly records that the
Speaker 1: disciples caught exactly one hundred and fifty three fish on
Speaker 1: the Sea of Galilee, something is off. Scholars have been
Speaker 1: arguing about this for two thousand years. What nobody knew
Speaker 1: is that one hundred and fifty three connects ancient Greek mathematics,
Speaker 1: a Hebrew prophecy from Ezekiel, sacred geometry, and a broken
Speaker 1: fisherman named Simon Peter to a breakfast on a beach
Speaker 1: that rewrote his entire life. To understand why one hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty three matters, you first have to understand the
Speaker 1: morning it happened, because the context is not background noise.
Speaker 1: The context is the entire point. If you had been
Speaker 1: standing on the northern shore of the Sea of Galilee
Speaker 1: sometime around thirty three a d just before dawn, you
Speaker 1: would have seen something strange. A small fishing boat, maybe
Speaker 1: twenty five feet long, riding low in the water, about
Speaker 1: one hundred yards from shore. Inside the boat, a group
Speaker 1: of men working through the night, hauling nets, checking ropes,
Speaker 1: scanning the dark surface of the water for any sign
Speaker 1: of movement beneath it. These were not weekend hobbyists out
Speaker 1: for a relaxing afternoon. Simon Peter Thomas called Didymus Nathaniel
Speaker 1: from Kana in Galilee. The sons of Zebedee, James and John,
Speaker 1: and two other unnamed disciples were Korea fishermen. They had
Speaker 1: grown up on this lake. They knew where the Tilapia
Speaker 1: schooled near the rocky shallows at Tabga. They knew the
Speaker 1: sardine patterns along the northern inlets near Capernium. They knew
Speaker 1: the rhythms of the water the way a farmer knows soilill.
Speaker 1: And yet all night long they caught absolutely nothing. Now
Speaker 1: Here is the part that makes this scene so impossibly
Speaker 1: loaded with meaning. These men had already seen the risen
Speaker 1: Jesus twice. They had watched him appear behind locked doors
Speaker 1: in Jerusalem only days before. They had seen the wounds
Speaker 1: in his hands and his side. They had heard Thomas,
Speaker 1: the skeptic, the one who refused to believe without physical proof,
Speaker 1: fall to his knees and cry out, my Lord and
Speaker 1: my God. They had been told that they were being
Speaker 1: sent into the world the same way the Father had
Speaker 1: sent the son, commissioned, empowered, given a mission that would
Speaker 1: reshape the course of human history. And yet here they
Speaker 1: were back on the water, back in the dark, doing
Speaker 1: the one thing they used to do before any of
Speaker 1: this started, fishing for sardine on the Sea of Tiberius.
Speaker 1: Peter had said to the others, simply, I am going fishing,
Speaker 1: and they had followed him, just like the old days,
Speaker 1: before the miracles, before the sermons on hillsides, and the
Speaker 1: walking on water and the raising of the dead, just
Speaker 1: men and nets and a boat in the dark. Think
Speaker 1: about what that means for a second. Peter, the man
Speaker 1: Jesus renamed from Simon, the man Jesus called the rock
Speaker 1: on which he would build his church, the man who
Speaker 1: was supposed to lead the apostles, establish congregations, preach to nations,
Speaker 1: become the foundation of a movement that would eventually reach
Speaker 1: every continent on earth. That man had gone back to
Speaker 1: his old job. He had seen the resurrection with his
Speaker 1: own eyes, and his response was to pick up a
Speaker 1: fishing net and row out into the dark. Why because
Speaker 1: the last real conversation Peter had with Jesus before the
Speaker 1: crucifixion ended in the worst night of his entire life.
Speaker 1: And to understand the one hundred and fifty three fish,
Speaker 1: you have to understand that night first. It happened in
Speaker 1: the courtyard of the High Priest's house in Jerusalem, on
Speaker 1: the night Jesus was arrested. The temple guards had come
Speaker 1: to the garden of Gethsemone with torches and weapons. Judas
Speaker 1: had betrayed Jesus with a kiss. The disciples had scattered
Speaker 1: into the darkness, but Peter followed at a distance. He
Speaker 1: could not bring himself to abandon Jesus completely, but he
Speaker 1: could not bring himself to stand with him either, so
Speaker 1: he hovered at the edge, caught between loyalty and self preservation.
Speaker 1: In the courtyard there was a charcoal fire. The servants
Speaker 1: and guards were warming themselves around it, and Peter sat
Speaker 1: among them, trying to blend in, trying to stay close
Speaker 1: enough to hear what was happening inside without being noticed.
Speaker 1: And then a servant girl looked at him by the
Speaker 1: firelight and said, you were with him too, weren't you?
Speaker 1: You were with the Galilean And Peter said no. He
Speaker 1: looked her in the face and said, I do not
Speaker 1: know what you were talking about. He moved away from
Speaker 1: the fire toward the gateway, but someone else recognized him.
Speaker 1: This man was with Jesus of Nazareth, and again Peter
Speaker 1: denied it. He swore an oath, I do not know
Speaker 1: the man. And then about an hour later another person
Speaker 1: pressed him, surely you are one of them. Your Galilean
Speaker 1: accent gives you away, And this time Peter began to
Speaker 1: curse and swear violently, I do not know the man.
Speaker 1: Three times by a charcoal fire in the cold, and
Speaker 1: then the rooster crowed, just as Jesus said predicted hours
Speaker 1: earlier at the Last Supper. Before the rooster crows, you
Speaker 1: will deny me three times. And the Gospel of Luke
Speaker 1: adds one devastating detail that the other gospels leave out.
Speaker 1: At the exact moment the rooster crowed across the courtyard
Speaker 1: through the crowd of guards and servants, Jesus turned and
Speaker 1: looked directly at Peter. Their eyes met, and Peter went
Speaker 1: outside and wept bitterly. That was it. That was the
Speaker 1: last real moment between Peter and Jesus before the cross.
Speaker 1: Not a heroic stand, not a declaration of faith, a
Speaker 1: betrayal followed by a look that Peter would carry in
Speaker 1: his chest like a piece of broken glass for the
Speaker 1: rest of his life, and the guilt of that moment
Speaker 1: was still there, still burning. On the morning we are
Speaker 1: talking about, Peter did not feel like an apostle. He
Speaker 1: did not feel like a rock. He did not feel
Speaker 1: like the leader of anything. He felt like a coward
Speaker 1: who had abandoned the person he loved most in the
Speaker 1: world at the moment it mattered most. So he went
Speaker 1: back to the only identity he had left, the only
Speaker 1: version of himself that did not hurt to think about.
Speaker 1: He went fishing, the same thing he had been doing
Speaker 1: on the very first day. Jesus found him three years earlier,
Speaker 1: standing in this same lake, washing his nets, as if
Speaker 1: the calling had never happened, as if he could rowe
Speaker 1: backward through time and become the person he was before
Speaker 1: he ever heard that voice say follow me. And he
Speaker 1: could not even catch a fish. That is the emotional
Speaker 1: set up of John chapter twenty one. A group of exhausted, confused,
Speaker 1: grieving men pulling up empty nets in the dark, haunted
Speaker 1: by what they had done, paralyzed by what they were
Speaker 1: supposed to become. And then, as the sky began to
Speaker 1: lighten over the eastern hills of the Golan Heights, a
Speaker 1: figure appeared on the shore line. The text says they
Speaker 1: did not recognize him at first, just a silhouette against
Speaker 1: the gray dawn. He called out to them across the water, children,
Speaker 1: do you have any fish? They answered no. And then
Speaker 1: the stranger on the shore said something that made no
Speaker 1: logical sense to a group of professional fishermen who had
Speaker 1: been working the water all night. Cast the net on
Speaker 1: the right side of the boat, and you will find
Speaker 1: some the right side. In ancient Jewish tradition, the right
Speaker 1: hand was the hand of power, favor, and blessing. When
Speaker 1: Jacob blessed his grandsons, he placed his right hand on
Speaker 1: the head of the one who would receive the greater inheritance.
Speaker 1: The righteous stand at God's right hand, the condemned stand
Speaker 1: at the left. In a fishing boat on the Sea
Speaker 1: of Galilee, the instruction to cast the net on the
Speaker 1: right side may have sounded like ordinary advice, but to
Speaker 1: anyone steeped in the symbolism of scripture, it carried a
Speaker 1: second meaning. Cast your net toward blessing, cast it toward
Speaker 1: the side of God's favor, and watch what happens. They
Speaker 1: had been fishing all night, They had tried everything they knew,
Speaker 1: they had nothing to show for it. But something about
Speaker 1: that voice made them obey. Without argument. They threw the
Speaker 1: net to the right side of the boat, and immediately
Speaker 1: the net filled with fish, so many fish, so suddenly
Speaker 1: that the net went taut and the boat listed, and
Speaker 1: the muscles in their arms strained, and they could not
Speaker 1: haul it back aboard. John, the disciple Jesus loved, the
Speaker 1: one who had leaned again against his chest at the
Speaker 1: last supper, turned to Peter and said four words that
Speaker 1: changed the entire morning. It is the Lord. John recognized
Speaker 1: it first because he had seen this before. Years earlier,
Speaker 1: on this same lake, Jesus had told Peter and the
Speaker 1: others to cast their nets after a fruitless night, and
Speaker 1: the catch had been so enormous that it nearly sank
Speaker 1: two boats. That was the miracle that started everything, The
Speaker 1: miracle that made Peter fall to his knees and say,
Speaker 1: depart from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man.
Speaker 1: The miracle that made Jesus say, do not be afraid
Speaker 1: from now on you will be catching men. And Peter
Speaker 1: had left everything to follow him. Now it was happening again,
Speaker 1: the same lake, the same empty night, the same impossible catch,
Speaker 1: as if Jesus were saying, I called you once and
Speaker 1: you came. I am calling you again. And Peter, hearing
Speaker 1: those words, did something beautiful and irrational and perfectly in character.
Speaker 1: He did not wait for the boat to reach shore.
Speaker 1: He was stripped down for work, wearing only his undergarment.
Speaker 1: He threw on his outer cloak and hurled himself into
Speaker 1: the water, swimming and stumbling through the shallow surf, half
Speaker 1: drowning in his own clothes, racing toward the figure on
Speaker 1: the beach, like a man who had been holding his
Speaker 1: breath for weeks and could finally finally exhale. Whatever fear
Speaker 1: he had, whatever shame, whatever voice in his head was
Speaker 1: telling him he had lost the right to approach Jesus,
Speaker 1: he ignored it. He just went. The other disciples followed
Speaker 1: in the boat, dragging the enormous net of fish behind them.
Speaker 1: They were only about a hundred yards from shore. When
Speaker 1: they reached the beach, they found something they did not expect.
Speaker 1: Jesus had already built a fire. He was grilling fish
Speaker 1: and bread on the coals. Breakfast was ready. He was
Speaker 1: not pacing the shoreline looking angry. He was not preparing
Speaker 1: a lecture. He was cooking. And here is a detail
Speaker 1: that most readers walk right past without realizing what they
Speaker 1: are looking at. The Greek word John uses for the
Speaker 1: fire on this beach is Anthrucian. It means a fire
Speaker 1: of charcoal, a specific type of fire, and this word
Speaker 1: appears in the entire New Testament exactly twice, once here
Speaker 1: on the beach of the Sea of Galilee, at the
Speaker 1: moment of Peter's restoration, and once before in John chapter eighteen,
Speaker 1: in the courtyard of the High Priest, where Peter denied
Speaker 1: Jesus three times beside a charcoal fire that is not
Speaker 1: an accident. John was an old man when he wrote
Speaker 1: this gospel, probably the last surviving apostle writing from Ephesus,
Speaker 1: decades after the events he described. He chose his words
Speaker 1: with extraordinary care, and he deliberately used the same rare
Speaker 1: Greek word to connect these two scenes like the front
Speaker 1: and back covers of a book, the fire of Peter's
Speaker 1: greatest failure and the fire of his restoration Jesus was
Speaker 1: not just cooking breakfast. He was recreating the exact sensory
Speaker 1: setting of Peter's worst moment, the smell of charcoal, the
Speaker 1: warmth of coals, the gray light of early morning, so
Speaker 1: that he could redeem it. He was building a new
Speaker 1: memory on top of an old wound. And then came
Speaker 1: the conversation that makes grown men cry. Jesus looked at
Speaker 1: Peter and asked, Simon, son of John, do you love me?
Speaker 1: More than these noticed that he did not call him Peter.
Speaker 1: He called him Simon, his old name, his name from
Speaker 1: before the calling, as if to say, I am meeting
Speaker 1: you where you are, not where you think you should be.
Speaker 1: Peter answered yes. Jesus said, feed my lambs. He asked again, Simon,
Speaker 1: son of John, do you love me? Peter said yes. Again,
Speaker 1: Jesus said tend my sheep, and then a third time, Simon,
Speaker 1: son of John, do you love me? And Peter was grieved.
Speaker 1: The text says he was hurt that Jesus asked a
Speaker 1: third time, not because the question was unfair, but because
Speaker 1: he understood what was happening. Three denials by a charcoal fire,
Speaker 1: Three confessions by a charcoal fire, Jesus was not punishing him,
Speaker 1: He was not interrogating him. He was suturing the wound.
Speaker 1: He was giving Peter the ants to overwrite the worst
Speaker 1: moment of his life with something new. Not just forgiveness
Speaker 1: spoken in the abstract, but forgiveness enacted, felt, lived through
Speaker 1: in the body, in the smell of smoke, in the
Speaker 1: sound of a voice asking a question, you get to
Speaker 1: answer differently this time. And there is a detail buried
Speaker 1: in the original Greek that most English translations flatten. The
Speaker 1: first two times Jesus asked the question, he used the
Speaker 1: Greek word agapao. It is the word for unconditional, self
Speaker 1: sacrificing love, the highest kind. But Peter each time answered
Speaker 1: with a different word, pileo, the word for deep affection,
Speaker 1: for friendship, for the kind of love you know you
Speaker 1: can actually deliver. Peter was not reaching for the highest shelf.
Speaker 1: He was being honest about where he stood. And the
Speaker 1: third time something shifted. Jesus did not ask with agapaw again.
Speaker 1: He came down. He used phileo, Peter's word as if
Speaker 1: to say, I am not asking you to be perfect.
Speaker 1: I am asking you to be honest, and honest is enough.
Speaker 1: Do you love me? Yes? Lord? Feed my lambs. Do
Speaker 1: you love me? Yes? Lord? Tend my sheep? Do you
Speaker 1: love me? Lord? You know everything? You know that I
Speaker 1: love you? Feed my sheep. Three questions to undo, three denials,
Speaker 1: a charcoal fire to heal, a charcoal fire, a full
Speaker 1: net to replace an empty one, and a restored man
Speaker 1: standing on a beach at dawn, being told that his
Speaker 1: failure did not disqualify him, that his calling was still intact,
Speaker 1: that his story was not over. And this is the scene,
Speaker 1: this specific scene in which the one hundred and fifty
Speaker 1: three fish appear. This is not a random fishing trip
Speaker 1: mentioned in passing between other events. This is the emotional
Speaker 1: and theological climax of the Fourth Gospel, a scene about failure, forgiveness, shame, restoration, identity,
Speaker 1: and calling. And somewhere woven into the fabric of this scene,
Speaker 1: like a golden thread through dark cloth, is a precise
Speaker 1: count of fish that the author considered important enough to
Speaker 1: preserve for all time. Simon Peter climbed aboard and dragged
Speaker 1: the net ashore. It was full of large fish, one
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty three, and though there were so many,
Speaker 1: the net was not torn. So What does one hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty three mean, and why in a gospel that
Speaker 1: normally deals in poetry and metaphor and symbolism, did John
Speaker 1: suddenly write down an exact number. The most straightforward answer
Speaker 1: is the one many modern scholars give. John wrote it
Speaker 1: down because it happened. Peter counted the fish. Fishermen always
Speaker 1: count their catch. It is one of the oldest habits
Speaker 1: of the trade. You pull the net ashore, you sought
Speaker 1: them by size, you count them for division. The number
Speaker 1: was one hundred and fifty three, and John, who was there,
Speaker 1: who saw the fish, who probably helped count them, recorded
Speaker 1: the detail. Because eye witnesses remember oddly specific things, the
Speaker 1: number of steps to the upper room, the color of
Speaker 1: the sky at daybreak. The exact count. Nobody invents one
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty three. If you were making it up,
Speaker 1: you would say about a hundred and fifty or more
Speaker 1: fish than they could hold. The sheer unroundness of the
Speaker 1: number is, in its own way, a fingerprint of authenticity.
Speaker 1: There is a scholar named Raymond Brown, one of the
Speaker 1: most respected New Testament scholars of the twentieth century, who
Speaker 1: spent years studying the number, and in a moment of
Speaker 1: academic honesty that is genuinely funny. He admitted that he
Speaker 1: once had a dream in which he met the beloved
Speaker 1: Disciple and asked him why one hundred and fifty three,
Speaker 1: and the disciple answered, because that is how many there were.
Speaker 1: Brown woke up thinking that might actually be the best
Speaker 1: answer anyone had ever given. But the early Church fathers
Speaker 1: were not satisfied with simplicity. And when you start digging
Speaker 1: into what they found, you understand why scholars have been
Speaker 1: circling this number like moths around a flame for twenty centuries.
Speaker 1: The first major theological interpretation came from Jerome. If you
Speaker 1: do not recognize that name, you need to. Jerome was
Speaker 1: born around three forty seven a d. He was raised
Speaker 1: in Strident, educated in Rome, and spent much of his
Speaker 1: adult life in a cave in Bethlehem, surrounded by manuscripts.
Speaker 1: He learned Hebrew from Jewish rabbis. He mastered Greek, Aramaic,
Speaker 1: and Latin. He translated the entire Bible into Latin, creating
Speaker 1: the Vulgate, the standard Bible of the Western Church for
Speaker 1: over a thousand years. Jerome was not a casual reader
Speaker 1: of scripture. He was arguably the most linguistically gifted biblical
Speaker 1: scholar the ancient world ever produced. When Jerome looked at
Speaker 1: the one hundred and fifty three fish, he connected them
Speaker 1: to a prophecy in the Old Testament that reframes the
Speaker 1: entire miracle. Ezekiel chapter forty seven, one of the most
Speaker 1: vivid and strange prophetic visions in all of Scripture. In
Speaker 1: this passage, the prophet Ezekiel is sported in a vision
Speaker 1: to the Restored Temple, and from the threshold of that
Speaker 1: temple he sees a river of living water flowing eastward.
Speaker 1: An angelic guide leads Ezekiel into the water. First it
Speaker 1: reaches his ankles, then his knees, then his waste, and
Speaker 1: then the river becomes a torrent so deep and so
Speaker 1: powerful that no one can cross it. And this river
Speaker 1: flows east through the desert of the Araba, down through
Speaker 1: the Rift Valley, until it reaches the Dead Sea. Now,
Speaker 1: the Dead Sea sits at the lowest point on the
Speaker 1: surface of the Earth, more than fourteen hundred feet below
Speaker 1: sea level. It is nearly ten times saltier than the ocean.
Speaker 1: Nothing lives in it, no fish, no plants, no algae.
Speaker 1: It is by every biological measure dead, and that is
Speaker 1: precisely the point of Ezekiel's prophecy, because when the living
Speaker 1: water from the temple reaches the dead sea, the impossible happens.
Speaker 1: The salt water becomes fresh, and the sea that could
Speaker 1: sustain no life at all begins teeming with fish. Ezekiel
Speaker 1: records this, fishermen will stand beside it, from Engeddi to Eneglame.
Speaker 1: There will be a place for the spreading of nets.
Speaker 1: Their fish will be, according to their kinds, like the
Speaker 1: fish of the great sea, very many. Jerome saw a
Speaker 1: direct line from Ezekiel forty seven to John twenty one. Jesus,
Speaker 1: who called himself the source of living water in John
Speaker 1: chapter seven, was standing on the shore of a sea
Speaker 1: his disciples. The fishermen were spreading their nets, and the
Speaker 1: massive catch of fish represented the nations of the world
Speaker 1: being gathered into the Kingdom of God, the dead sea
Speaker 1: of humanity brought to life by the living water of
Speaker 1: the Gospel. And Jerome added one crucial detail. He cited
Speaker 1: the ancient Greek zoological tradition, claiming that naturalists of the
Speaker 1: ancient world had cataloged one hundred and fifty three distinct
Speaker 1: species of fish in the known seas. If that was true,
Speaker 1: then the miraculous catch was not just a large number
Speaker 1: of fish, it was one of every kind, a complete
Speaker 1: set the entire created world, every nation and people and language,
Speaker 1: gathered into a single net, and the net held. Modern
Speaker 1: scholars have debated whether ancient zoologists actually listed exactly one
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty three species. The surviving works of the
Speaker 1: Greek naturalist Opian do not confirm that precise number, and
Speaker 1: Jerome may have been drawing on a tradition that has
Speaker 1: since been lost to history, but the theological architecture of
Speaker 1: his argument is staggering. Regardless of the zoology, Rome saw
Speaker 1: in one hundred and fifty three a symbol of universality
Speaker 1: and completeness, a god whose reach extends to every corner
Speaker 1: of creation, missing nothing, leaving no species of human experience
Speaker 1: outside the net of mercy. And if that were the
Speaker 1: only layer, this number would already deserve a video. But
Speaker 1: what comes next made people sit up in their chairs.
Speaker 1: Around the same time as Jerome, across North Africa, another
Speaker 1: intellectual giant was studying the same number through a completely
Speaker 1: different lens. Augustine of Hippo born three fifty four, a
Speaker 1: d converted after years of philosophical searching, eventually became the
Speaker 1: Bishop of Hippo Regius in modern day Algeria, and arguably
Speaker 1: the most influential Christian thinker outside the Apostles themselves. His
Speaker 1: writings shaped Western theology, philosophy, and political theory for the
Speaker 1: next fifteen centuries. Augustine was not interested in fish species.
Speaker 1: He was interested in numbers, and what he noticed has
Speaker 1: been echoing through scholarship for sixteen hundred years. One hundred
Speaker 1: fifty three is a triangular number that means if you
Speaker 1: add every whole number from one to seventeen, one plus
Speaker 1: two plus three plus four all the way up to seventeen,
Speaker 1: the total is exactly one hundred and fifty three. If
Speaker 1: you arranged one hundred fifty three dots on a page,
Speaker 1: one on the first row, two on the second, three
Speaker 1: on the third, continuing through to seventeen, they would form
Speaker 1: a perfect equilateral triangle seventeen rows one hundred fifty three points,
Speaker 1: a flawless geometric shape. In the ancient world, this was
Speaker 1: not trivia. Triangular numbers were considered sacred the Pythagoreans, the
Speaker 1: Greek philosophical and mathematical school founded by Pythagoras in the
Speaker 1: sixth century BC, revered triangular numbers as expressions of divine order.
Speaker 1: Their central symbol, the Tetractys, was itself a triangular arrangement
Speaker 1: of ten dots. Initiates swore their most sacred oaths by it,
Speaker 1: by him who handed down to our generation the Tetractys
Speaker 1: the source and root of everlasting nature. For the Pythagoreans,
Speaker 1: numbers were not just counting tools. They were the architecture
Speaker 1: of reality, and a triangular number was a number that
Speaker 1: had achieved its perfect geometric form. Augustine then looked at
Speaker 1: the base of the triangle seventeen and broke it down further.
Speaker 1: Ten plus seven Ten the number of the commandments God
Speaker 1: gave Moses on Sinai, the foundation of divine law. Seven
Speaker 1: the number of the gifts of the Holy Spirit. The
Speaker 1: number of creation since God rested on the seventh Day,
Speaker 1: the number of completeness and perfection in the Jewish symbolic vocabulary,
Speaker 1: appearing more than seven hundred times across the Hebrew Bible,
Speaker 1: so one hundred and fifty three, as the triangulation of
Speaker 1: seventeen encoded, the total union of law and Grace, the
Speaker 1: Ten Commandments and the Sevenfold Spirit, Moses and the Holy Spirit,
Speaker 1: the Old Covenant and the New encoded in a single number,
Speaker 1: caught in a single net. And there is more. The
Speaker 1: fifth century theologian Cyril of Alexandria offered yet another reading.
Speaker 1: He broke one hundred and fifty three into three components,
Speaker 1: one hundred representing the fullness of the Gentile nations, fifty
Speaker 1: representing the faithful remnant of Israel, and three representing the
Speaker 1: Holy Trinity, Father, Son, and Spirit, the complete gathering of
Speaker 1: all peoples, Jewish and Gentile, held together in the embrace
Speaker 1: of the Triune God. Three theologians, three frameworks, all pointing
Speaker 1: toward the same conclusion, completeness, totality, everyone in the net.
Speaker 1: If you are finding this as deep as I think
Speaker 1: you are, hit subscribe. We break down biblical mysteries like
Speaker 1: this every single week. But we are not done with
Speaker 1: the mathematics, not even close. One hundred and fifty three
Speaker 1: has a property that modern mathematicians find genuinely remarkable. It
Speaker 1: is a narcissistic number. Some call it an armstrong number.
Speaker 1: Here is what that means. Take each of its three
Speaker 1: das digits separately one five, three, Now cube each one.
Speaker 1: One cubed is one, five cubed is one hundred and
Speaker 1: twenty five, Three cubed is twenty seven. Add the cubes together.
Speaker 1: One plus one hundred and twenty five plus twenty seven
Speaker 1: equals one hundred and fifty three. The number reconstructs itself
Speaker 1: from its own parts. It is self referential, self generating.
Speaker 1: You break it apart, and it puts itself back together.
Speaker 1: That is not a typo, by the way, and it
Speaker 1: gets stranger. Still. Take any multiple of three. Pick one
Speaker 1: at random twelve, twenty seven, three hundred and sixty nine,
Speaker 1: it doesn't matter. Cube each digit and add the results.
Speaker 1: If the answer is not yet one hundred and fifty three,
Speaker 1: take the new number and repeat the process. Cube the digit,
Speaker 1: add the cubes, keep going. Every multiple of three in existence,
Speaker 1: no matter how large, no matter how far away it seems,
Speaker 1: will eventually arrive at one hundred and fifty three. Through
Speaker 1: this process. It is a mathematical fixed point, a destination.
Speaker 1: Every number that carries the signature of three, the trinity,
Speaker 1: the triune God eventually finds its way to one hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty three. The way streams find their way to
Speaker 1: the sea. Ancient mathematicians did not use our modern terminology,
Speaker 1: but they recognized when a number behaved in unusual ways.
Speaker 1: And in a world where numbers were believed to reflect
Speaker 1: the hidden structure of the divine, a number that generates
Speaker 1: itself from its own pieces and draws all related numbers
Speaker 1: toward itself would have been regarded as extraordinary. A number
Speaker 1: with a gravitational center a numerical signature of something much
Speaker 1: which larger than itself. But Augustine and Jerome were working
Speaker 1: within the Christian tradition. The connection that reaches back before
Speaker 1: Christianity even existed involves not one, but two figures from
Speaker 1: the ancient Greek world. The first is Pythagoras himself. There
Speaker 1: is an ancient tradition preserved by the third century biographer
Speaker 1: Porphyry that Pythagoras once encountered a group of fishermen hauling
Speaker 1: in their nets on the coast of Italy. Before the
Speaker 1: net was pulled ashore, Pythagoras told the fishermen he could
Speaker 1: predict the exact number of fish in the catch. The
Speaker 1: fishermen were skeptical. Pythagoras gave his number, they counted he
Speaker 1: was right. The ancient sources do not all agree on
Speaker 1: what the number was, but several later commentators connected the
Speaker 1: story directly to one hundred and fifty three, the number
Speaker 1: the Pythagoreans already knew as the measure of the fish
Speaker 1: because of its role in sacred geometry. Whether the connection
Speaker 1: is historically air tight or a later embellishment, the fact
Speaker 1: remains that one hundred and fifty three was already a
Speaker 1: number associated with miraculous fish catches in the Greek intellectual world,
Speaker 1: centuries before the Gospel of John was written, and that
Speaker 1: leads us to Pythagoras's greatest successor, Archimedes of Syracuse born
Speaker 1: around two eighty seven BC, Widely regarded as one of
Speaker 1: the three greatest mathematicians in human history, alongside Newton and Gauss.
Speaker 1: He calculated pie, He discovered the laws of buoyancy and
Speaker 1: the principles of the lever. He designed siege engines that
Speaker 1: held off the Roman army at Syracuse, and in a
Speaker 1: foundational work called Measurement of a Circle, Archimedes needed to
Speaker 1: express the square root of three as a fraction. The
Speaker 1: best approximation he could find, using the smallest possible whole
Speaker 1: numbers was two hundred and sixty five to one hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty three. The square root of three does not
Speaker 1: sound like something that should matter to a conversation about
Speaker 1: the Bible, but in the ancient world this ratio was
Speaker 1: considered one of the fundamental constants of the universe. The
Speaker 1: square root of three is the governing ratio of the
Speaker 1: equilateral triangle. It defines the exact relationship between a triangle's
Speaker 1: side length and its height, and in the philosophical tradition
Speaker 1: of the Pythagoreans, the equilateral triangle, with its three equal
Speaker 1: sides and three equal angles, was one of the most
Speaker 1: perfect expressions of harmony and balance in nature. But the
Speaker 1: square root of three is also the controlling ratio inside
Speaker 1: a specific geometric shape that is far more important to
Speaker 1: this story than any triangle. It is called the vesica PICIs.
Speaker 1: To make this shape, imagine two circles of equal size
Speaker 1: overlapping so that the outer edge of each circle passes
Speaker 1: through the exact center of the other. The almond shaped
Speaker 1: region where the two circles overlap is the vesica pissis,
Speaker 1: and the ratio of its height to its width is
Speaker 1: the square root of three, which, according to Archimedes is
Speaker 1: best expressed as two hundred and sixty five over one
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty three. The name vesica pissis is Latin.
Speaker 1: It translates to bladder of the fish. And if you
Speaker 1: see the shape, you instantly understand why it looks like
Speaker 1: a fish, exactly like the fish symbol that early Christians
Speaker 1: began scratching into the walls of catacombs and into the
Speaker 1: dust of Roman roads to secretly identify one another during
Speaker 1: the persecutions. The ichthys the fish of Christ and the
Speaker 1: geometric ratio that defines this shape. The formula that literally
Speaker 1: creates the fish symbol has one hundred and fifty three
Speaker 1: as its denominator. Archimedes worked out this ratio two and
Speaker 1: a half centuries before Jesus was born. John recorded the
Speaker 1: number one hundred and fifty three decades after the resurrection.
Speaker 1: Neither could have been consciously coordinating with the other, and
Speaker 1: yet the number sits at the intersection of Greek mathematical
Speaker 1: tradition and Christian sacred narrative, like a hinge connecting two
Speaker 1: completely different doors that happened to open into the same room.
Speaker 1: Was John aware of the Pythagorean resonance of this number.
Speaker 1: This is where scholars genuinely disagree, and both sides deserve respect.
Speaker 1: But the Gospel of John is not as simple fishman's memoir.
Speaker 1: Its opening lines in the beginning was the logos, and
Speaker 1: the logos was with God, and the logos was God
Speaker 1: use a concept drawn directly from Greek philosophy. John was
Speaker 1: writing for an audience that included Greek educated readers who
Speaker 1: would have recognized mathematical symbolism. And for that audience, one
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty three was not just a fish count.
Speaker 1: It was a number already loaded with sacred connotation. But
Speaker 1: the connection that makes scholars actually lose sleep comes from
Speaker 1: neither mathematics nor zoology. It comes from the Hebrew language itself.
Speaker 1: Remember Jerome's reference to Ezekiel forty seven, the vision of
Speaker 1: fishermen spreading their nets from Engedi to Eneglame by the
Speaker 1: shores of the restored Dead Sea. In the nineteen fifties,
Speaker 1: a Cambridge scholar named J. A. Emerton published a paper
Speaker 1: in the Journal of Theological Studies that sent a quiet
Speaker 1: earthquake through biblical scholarship. Emerton noticed something about those two
Speaker 1: place names that had apparently been overlooked for centuries. In
Speaker 1: ancient Hebrew, every letter doubles as a number. A lef
Speaker 1: is one, bet is two, gimmel is three. This system
Speaker 1: extends through the entire alphabet, with later letters representing larger values.
Speaker 1: Yod is ten, kof is one hundred. Calculating the numerical
Speaker 1: value of a Hebrew word by adding up the values
Speaker 1: of its letters is called gematria, and it was not
Speaker 1: some obscure occult practice. It was a standard feature of
Speaker 1: Jewish intellectual life. Rabbis used it routinely in their commentary
Speaker 1: on the Torah. You can find gematria in the Talmud,
Speaker 1: in the Midrash, in the Dead Sea scrolls, even in
Speaker 1: secular life. Roman era graffiti found on the walls of
Speaker 1: Pompeii includes the phrase I love the girl whose name
Speaker 1: is five hundred and forty five. Gematria was simply how
Speaker 1: the ancient world understood the relationship between language and number.
Speaker 1: They were two sides of the same coin. Emeerton applied
Speaker 1: standard gematria to the two place names in Ezekiel's fishing
Speaker 1: prophecy Ngedi means spring of Gedi strip off n, which
Speaker 1: simply means spring or fountain. And calculate the value of
Speaker 1: gedi three letters Gimel equals three, Dalette equals four, Yod
Speaker 1: equals ten. Three plus four plus ten equals seventeen seventeen
Speaker 1: the base of the triangle. Enegleame means spring of egglame.
Speaker 1: Strip off the prefix and calculate egglame. Five letters Ayen
Speaker 1: equals seventy, Gimmel equals three, Lumd equals thirty, Yod equals ten,
Speaker 1: mem equals forty. Seventy plus three plus thirty plus ten
Speaker 1: plus forty equals one hundred and fifty three one hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty three the sum of the triangle. The two
Speaker 1: place names in Ezekiel's fishing prophecy, when decoded through standard
Speaker 1: mainstream Hebrew gematria, produce the exact pair of numbers that
Speaker 1: define the seventeenth triangular number written into the Hebrew text
Speaker 1: of the Old Testament hundreds of years before the Gospel
Speaker 1: of John existed. I mean, think about that for a second.
Speaker 1: These are the real numerical values of the real Hebrew
Speaker 1: consonants in specific place names in a specific Old Testament
Speaker 1: prophecy about fisherman's rereading nets beside a sea that has
Speaker 1: been miraculously brought to life by living water flowing from
Speaker 1: the Temple of God, and those values correspond exactly to
Speaker 1: the number John recorded in his Gospel caught when the
Speaker 1: disciples obeyed the risen Jesus, who called himself the source
Speaker 1: of living water, standing on the shore of the Sea
Speaker 1: of Galilee. This is where things stopped being funny. Take
Speaker 1: a step back and look at what we have so far.
Speaker 1: Jerome found one hundred and fifty three species of fish,
Speaker 1: and a prophecy in Ezekiel about fishermen spreading nets. Augustine
Speaker 1: found a triangular number encoding law and grace. Cyril found
Speaker 1: the trinity holding together jew and Gentile. The Pythagoreans found
Speaker 1: the measure of the fish in sacred geometry, Archimedes found
Speaker 1: it in the square root of three, and now Emerton
Speaker 1: found it in the Hebrew consonants of the very place
Speaker 1: names Ezekiel chose for his fishing prophecy. Each discovery was
Speaker 1: made independently in a different century, using a different method
Speaker 1: in a different language, and they all converge on the
Speaker 1: same number. That is not how coincidence works. Coincidence scatters
Speaker 1: whatever this is, it gathers because you can dismiss any
Speaker 1: one of these connections on its own. You can say
Speaker 1: Jerome was speculating about fish species. You can say Augustine
Speaker 1: was playing mathematical games. You can say the Vesica Pissis
Speaker 1: link is a coincidence. You can call the gematria of
Speaker 1: Engadi and eneglame cherry picking. But when you stack them together,
Speaker 1: when you see the same number surfacing in different languages,
Speaker 1: through different mathematical systems, in texts written centuries a part
Speaker 1: by people who could not possibly have coordinated with each other,
Speaker 1: the responsible thing to do is not dismiss it. It
Speaker 1: is to sit with the weight of it and ask
Speaker 1: what it means. There is one more thread worth pulling,
Speaker 1: and it involves the most famous symbol in Christianity, the Icthys,
Speaker 1: the fish, the Greek word for fish that early believers
Speaker 1: used as a secret acronym during the Roman persecutions. Es
Speaker 1: Sucristos Teo Huios Sota Jesus Christ, Son of God Savior.
Speaker 1: The first letter of each word spells Ichthys fish. Some
Speaker 1: scholars have observed that if you apply a reverse gematria
Speaker 1: to the first three letters of Ichthys, assigning value one
Speaker 1: to the last letter, of the Greek alphabet, and working backward,
Speaker 1: the letters Iota, Chai, and theta add up to one
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty three. The abbreviation for the Phish symbol,
Speaker 1: decoded through an alternative Greek numerical system, produces the Phish number.
Speaker 1: In Hebrew, the place name in the Phishing prophecy of
Speaker 1: Ezekiel gives you one hundred and fifty three. In Greek,
Speaker 1: the abbreviation for the symbol of Christ gives you one
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty three. Two languages, two systems, one number,
Speaker 1: always connected to Phish, always connected to Christ. Now full honesty.
Speaker 1: Not every scholar considers the reverse Greek gemetria convincing. Some
Speaker 1: call it speculative, and the broader debate about how much
Speaker 1: of this John consciously intended is real with serious people
Speaker 1: on both sides. The question of whether a first century
Speaker 1: author embedded multiple layers of mathematical symbolism in a narrative
Speaker 1: of a breakfast on the beach is genuinely open. Maybe
Speaker 1: he did, Maybe Providence did the embedding for him. Maybe
Speaker 1: the convergence of meaning is itself the point. But here
Speaker 1: is what I cannot get past. It is not any
Speaker 1: single thread alone. It is the convergence of all of them.
Speaker 1: The triangular number encoding law and grace, the narcissistic number
Speaker 1: that reconstructs itself from its own parts, the measure of
Speaker 1: the fish in the sacred geometry of Archimedes, the gematria
Speaker 1: of egglame in the fishing prophecy of Ezekiel, the ancient
Speaker 1: zoological catalog of all fish species, the mathematical signature of
Speaker 1: the ichthys, and the precise number of fish pulled from
Speaker 1: the sea on a morning that was never really about
Speaker 1: fish at all, but about a broken man being put
Speaker 1: back together by the only one who could. You would
Speaker 1: think someone would have noticed all of this sooner. Nobody did.
Speaker 1: The full picture only emerged when scholars from different centuries
Speaker 1: and different disciplines started laying their findings side by side.
Speaker 1: But the number kept echoing through history even before anyone
Speaker 1: fully understood why. In the fourth century, the desert monk
Speaker 1: Evagrius Ponticus wrote a work on prayer containing exactly one
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty three chapters, deliberately structuring his text around
Speaker 1: the number from John twenty one. In fifteen twelve, John
Speaker 1: Collet founded Saint Paul's School in London, to educate exactly
Speaker 1: one hundred and fifty three poor men's children, again as
Speaker 1: a direct reference to the miraculous catch. Something about this
Speaker 1: number kept pulling people back century after century, as if
Speaker 1: it contained a gravity they could feel but not fully explain.
Speaker 1: And this brings us to what I believe is the
Speaker 1: deepest layer, not mathematical, not linguistic, human Because John did
Speaker 1: not write his Gospel for number theorists. He did not
Speaker 1: write it for Gematria enthusiasts or people who get excited
Speaker 1: about Pythagorean geometry. He wrote it for real people, living
Speaker 1: real lives, people who were exhausted, people who had failed,
Speaker 1: people who had denied the thing they believed in most
Speaker 1: and did not know if they could come back from it.
Speaker 1: People who had gone back to the only thing they
Speaker 1: used to be good at and found that even that
Speaker 1: did not work anymore. Look at this scene one final time,
Speaker 1: not through the lens of numbers, but through the lens
Speaker 1: of what it felt like to actually be there. Its
Speaker 1: early morning on the Sea of Galilee. The sky is
Speaker 1: going from black to gray. You have been on the
Speaker 1: water since dark, and your hands roar from the nets,
Speaker 1: your shoulders ache, your eyes sting, with salt and exhaustion.
Speaker 1: The hills of Galilee are black outlines against a sky
Speaker 1: that does not care how tired you are. Somewhere on
Speaker 1: the shore, a dog is barking. The water slaps against
Speaker 1: the hull in a rhythm that has become unbearable because
Speaker 1: it is the rhythm of failure. Pull nothing, pull nothing,
Speaker 1: pull nothing, and the net is empty again. You went
Speaker 1: back to the one thing you thought defined you before
Speaker 1: everything changed, and it turns out you cannot even do
Speaker 1: that anymore. The water gives you nothing, the net holds nothing.
Speaker 1: You are nothing. And then a voice from the shore
Speaker 1: tells you to try again. Cast it one more time
Speaker 1: on the right side, And something in your gut, some
Speaker 1: instinct you cannot name, some echo of a voice you
Speaker 1: heard years ago beside this same lake, makes you listen,
Speaker 1: maybe because you have nothing left to lose, Maybe because
Speaker 1: underneath all the shame and exhaustion you recognize who is speaking.
Speaker 1: And the net fills. It fills so fast and so
Speaker 1: completely that the boat tilts, and the rope's strain, and
Speaker 1: you know, before anyone says a word, who is standing
Speaker 1: on that beach. You drag the net to shore and
Speaker 1: count one hundred and fifty three, every one of them large,
Speaker 1: and the net is not torn. That last detail is
Speaker 1: doing more work than any other sentence in the passage.
Speaker 1: And to see why, you have to remember the first
Speaker 1: miraculous catch back in Luke chapter five, when Jesus first
Speaker 1: called Peter. The catch was so massive that the nets
Speaker 1: began to break. Luke uses the Greek word dierrecetto the
Speaker 1: nets were tearing apart. Peter had to call a second
Speaker 1: boat just to keep from losing everything. But here in
Speaker 1: John twenty one, with a catch just as large, John
Speaker 1: makes a point of recording the opposite, The net was
Speaker 1: not torn. The Greek word is eskisti. It did not split,
Speaker 1: it did not rupture, it held. That is not a
Speaker 1: casual observation, that is a theological statement, because in the
Speaker 1: ancient churches reading of this miracle, the net represents the
Speaker 1: community of faith, the gathering of every nation and every kind,
Speaker 1: exactly as Ezekiel prophesied, every species of fish, every type
Speaker 1: of person, pulled from the depths by fishermen who had
Speaker 1: been called to become fishers of men. The first net
Speaker 1: before the cross broke under the weight, the second net
Speaker 1: after the resurrection held, and the message embedded in that
Speaker 1: contrast is a promise. What God builds after the Cross
Speaker 1: is stronger than what came before. The net will hold,
Speaker 1: it will not tear under the weight, It will not
Speaker 1: rip apart from the diversity of what it carries. It
Speaker 1: is strong enough for everything and everyone that enters it.
Speaker 1: And then Jesus invites you to sit down. He has
Speaker 1: already prepared the meal. He is not angry, he is
Speaker 1: not disappointed. He has fish on the fire and bread
Speaker 1: warming on the coals, and he says, simply come and
Speaker 1: eat and over that meal in the same setting as
Speaker 1: your worst memory, he gives you a chance to speak
Speaker 1: the words your heart has been screaming for weeks. Do
Speaker 1: you love me, feed my sheep? Do you love me?
Speaker 1: Tend my sheep? Do you love me? Feed my sheep?
Speaker 1: Three questions to replace, three denials, a charcoal fire to redeem,
Speaker 1: a charcoal fire, a full net to overwrite an empty one,
Speaker 1: and a number woven into all of it, one hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty three carrying the mathematical d NA of completeness,
Speaker 1: the prophetic fingerprint of Ezekiel, the geometric signature of the
Speaker 1: fish of Christ, and the promise that the God who
Speaker 1: embedded order into the laws of mathematics is the same
Speaker 1: God who shows up on a cold beach at dawn
Speaker 1: to cook breakfast for a man who thought he was finished.
Speaker 1: That is what one hundred and fifty three means, all
Speaker 1: of it at once, the math and the mercy, the
Speaker 1: geometry and the grace, the code and the kindness. A
Speaker 1: God who speaks in the language of triangular numbers to
Speaker 1: the minds of scholars, and in the language of grilled
Speaker 1: fish and quiet questions to the hearts of fishermen who
Speaker 1: have failed. And maybe that is the real code hidden
Speaker 1: in this number, not a secret to unlock, but a
Speaker 1: pattern to recognize the pattern of a God who refuses
Speaker 1: to let the final chapter be written by your worst moment,
Speaker 1: who plant seeds in the Old Testament that bloom in
Speaker 1: the New who hides mathematical precision inside a breakfast invitation,
Speaker 1: and who asks only one question, the same question, three
Speaker 1: times until you are finally ready to hear it. The
Speaker 1: real question this passage asks is not a math problem.
Speaker 1: It is the same question Jesus asked Peter two thousand
Speaker 1: years ago. With charcoal smoke drifting through the cool morning
Speaker 1: air and the sun rising over the hills of Galilee.
Speaker 1: Do you love me? That is not a theological exam,
Speaker 1: That is not a test you can pass or fail.
Speaker 1: That is an invitation, and it is being asked right
Speaker 1: now of you, wherever you are, whatever empty net you
Speaker 1: have been hauling through dark water, whatever charcoal fire still
Speaker 1: haunts your memory. Peter's answer was not eloquent. He did
Speaker 1: not cite Archimedes, he did not explain Gematria, he did
Speaker 1: not calculate triangular numbers. He just told the truth. Lord,
Speaker 1: you know everything, You know that I love you, and
Speaker 1: that was enough. It always has been. If this video
Speaker 1: showed you something in scripture you had never noticed before, subscribe.
Speaker 1: We go deep into mysteries like this every week, and
Speaker 1: what we are about to uncover in the Book of
Speaker 1: Revelation makes this look like a warm up. Click the
Speaker 1: video on your screen right now and keep going.