Note 22 — Chapter V · THE DISCIPLES OF JESUS.

It is easy to show how, out of the expression preserved by the first Evangelist, the miraculous story of the third might be formed. If Jesus, in allusion to the former occupation of some of his apostles, had called them fishers of men; if he had compared the kingdom of heaven to a net cast into the sea, in which all kinds of fish were taken (Matt. xiii. 47); it was but a following out of these ideas to represent the apostles as those who, at the word of Jesus, cast out the net, and gathered in the miraculous multitude of fishes.22 If we add to this, that the ancient legend was fond of occupying its wonder-workers with affairs of fishing, as we see in the story related of Pythagoras by Jamblichus and Porphyry;23 it will no longer appear improbable, that Peter’s miraculous draught of fishes is but the expression about the fishers of men, transmuted into the history of a miracle, and this view will at once set us free from all the difficulties that attend the natural, as well as the supranatural interpretation of the narrative.