aeebee50

Maybe it could be put on the Angel Wings to have an anti-protest against Westboro.

Yellum Notnef

Yeah, that makes perfect sense.

aeebee50

Worked for the Xmas tree.

bacht

Is there a connection with the "sign of Jonah" mentioned in the gospels?

show_no_mercy

Joshua, Moses' successor, was the son of a guy named "Nun". Nun means fish. And of course we all know that Joshua rendered in Latinized Greek is Jesus. So there was a precedent for a relationship between fish and the name Jesus hundreds of years before Christianity arrived.

Toto

Stroumsa, in the article in the OP, thinks there is a connection between the fish as a messianic symbol, Jonah's spending 3 days in the belly of a fish, and the Christian fish symbol. I don't know if the fish as a Jewish messianic symbol can be tied to the age of Pisces.

Toto

I am not sure how this all relates, but there is a fascinating article online from Bar on Zodiacs in Jewish Synagoges. It emphasizes that Rabbinic Judaism rejected the astrology of the time, but the archaeology shows extensive use of zodiacs in synagogues, in conjunction with more standard Jewish symbols.

bacht

Thanks mercy. There is also the Oannes connection for John the Baptist IIRC

mountainman

Isn't Latinization late and what does the Greek manuscript evidence say? Of course we all also know that the earliest christians responsible for the preservation and transmission (via codex or scroll) of the original Greek LXX and the original Greek New Testament rendered both Joshua and Jesus with the same identical nomina sacra code "ΙΣ" . So maybe the "ΙΣ" code has the "son of a fish" built in?

The answer to the question depends implicitly upon the date that the Hebrew Bible was translated to the Greek LXX, and further, proliferated with the standard series of characteristic "Christian" nomina sacra codes. Those who authored/preserved the Greek codified New Testament, must have also authored/preserved the "Christian" codified Greek LXX manuscripts, and these people themselves must have drawn the relationship between Joshua and Jesus, since they were the documentors of Jesus. The fact that Joshua and Jesus appear in the earliest Greek manuscript evidence only as the "ΙΣ" code (and not by their full names) cannot IMO be a coincidence. The earliest date is given in the "Letter of Aristeas", but this is seen by many as a later Josephan (??) forgery. When is the latest possible time this could have happened? AFAIK this latest possible time is the time of Origen.