A Fishy Theory, That Doesn't Net Up Very Well
Last October (which tells you how far behind I am in my posting schedule {g}), I was having a correspondence with someone who referred to a fringe theory (in the sense that most scholars don't advocate it or think much of it, in at least one sense of that phrase) concerning the 153 fish caught by the apostles in the final chapter of GosJohn in a sort-of-repeat of the Lukan big-catch incident. (John 21:1-11; Luke 5:1-11) This theory, is that the author (editor/final-redactor/whatever) of GosJohn completely invented the anecdote by, in effect, copy-pasting it over from a story about the Greek philosopher Pythagoras that was having a bit of a revival in its popularity thanks to a book about Pythagoreanism, written by Plutarch more-or-less contemporaneously with GosJohn. (Obviously it helps if one has already decided GosJohn was written in the final quarter of the 1st century, or later. But that's another discussion, and is probably still a majority opinion across the ideology bo...