Nets, Loaves, and a Modern Revival

The fish resonated with the Gospels independently of the acrostic: the first disciples were fishermen whom Jesus called to be fishers of men, the feeding of the multitude multiplied loaves and fish, and the risen Christ shares a fish breakfast with the disciples on the shore. Tertullian, writing around the turn of the third century, punned that Christians, like little fish, are born in the water of baptism, following the great Fish, Christ himself, a play on words that only works because the acrostic reading was already common currency among his readers.

Fish imagery appears repeatedly in the Roman catacombs, cut into loculus slabs and painted beside eucharistic scenes of bread and wine, alongside the anchor and the Chi-Rho as one of a small vocabulary of signs that let belief be stated without a word. The plain cross displaced the fish as Christianity's dominant public emblem once toleration under Constantine removed the need for restraint, and the ichthys was largely dormant for well over a millennium. Its return, as a chrome car emblem and printed logo from the later twentieth century onward, is a self-consciously revivalist American evangelical fashion rather than a continuous practice, and it has spawned polemical replies, most famously the Darwin fish with added legs and the further rebuttals those in turn provoked, a modern exchange of bumper-sticker apologetics with no ancient counterpart.