RufusAtticus

Please pardon the rant:

From Here:

IXOYE? IXOYE? IXOYE!!! Oh he means ichthus. :banghead: :banghead: I can forgive the X and the Y, but O and E??? WTF!

Why is it so hard for people to realize that it's written in Greek letters not Latin letters? This isn't the first time that I've seen someone render ichthus like that. Please forgive me while I go cry for the American Education system.

Yellum Notnef

I'm glad you brought this up. I was driving behind one of those IXOYE fish people just the other day and was like "What the fuck does it say in that fish?".
I kept speeding up to get closer to the back of the car to try and figure out what the hell those letters were and when I finally got close enough to see it clearly it made no sense at all.

Up until you started this thread I wasn't even sure if that damn fish was supposed to be about Jesus or not.

Weltall

I've never seen that symbol before, although I've run into a lot of 'Jesus Fish' with or without the name spelt out in English. Ichthus means what exactly? My ancient languages are a little rusty.

TerriNPA

pardon my lack of knowledge but what DOES ichthus and IXOYE mean?

RufusAtticus

Ichthus is Greek for "fish."

For an overvew of the symbol see here.

IXOYE means absolutely nothing. It is written by people who think the Greek letters for ichthus are English (or rather Latin).

Compare IXOYE with the actual Greek rendering: ΙΧΘΥΣ (uppercase) and ιχθυς (lowercase).

Heathen Dawn

Such a use of the correct standards (Unicode, and not the damn Symbol Font) warms my heart. (here’s an explanation why)

IXOYE is probably the best approximation available to the ASCII-confined. Compare XPICTOC as a surrogate for ΧΡΙΣΤΟΣ.

Haran

Ichthus, in addition to being the Greek word for fish, is an acronym as well which does stand for Jesus.

The letters stand for:
Jesus Christ God, Son, Savior (or various other slight derivatives)

Do a web search and you'll find more info on it. Most people don't know Greek and don't care to learn. That is probably why they can't seem to get the symbols straight...

Biff the unclean

Odd that early Christians who couldn't even read would take the first letter of every word like they were a twentith century USA govt. agency. NASA or the CIA or FBI or some such thing. What an unlikely thing to do.

Odd also, that this symbol was used by the followers of Apollonius of Tyana only to them it was the sign of the fish-in those days a single fish and not the pair it became in the middle ages-from the Zodiac. It meant "rebirth" and though these people used it as a sign of their religion it was the commonly used sign of Pisces outside of their religion.

How strange that the Xians should independently come up with exactly the same commonly used symbol and do so by such tortured convoluted means.

Heathen Dawn

That’s

Ιησους Χριστος Θεος Υιος Σωτηρ

or transcribed,

Iesous Khristos Theos (h)Yios Soter

Haran

Cute, but where on earth do you get the idea that none of them could read?

Strange how someone would think that people couldn't use the same symbol to mean different things, especially to a group which began with fishermen. Talk about torturing and convoluting, Biff...