fish eaten as food, especially the small salted or dried fish served as a side dish with bread
This is John's word for fish, but not fish as a creature swimming in the lake. It named fish as food: the prepared portion, most often small salted or dried fish, that ordinary people ate alongside their bread. It was the everyday word of the market stall, where the tidier, more literary word for fish was ἰχθύς.
The word began as a little tag for "relish," whatever tasty thing you ate with your bread. Because fish was the favorite such accompaniment in the ancient world, the word narrowed over time until it simply meant "fish." By the first century its small, cute-sounding ending no longer meant "little" at all, and it had become the plain, popular word for fish as food. The line runs straight into the present: the modern Greek word for fish, "psari," comes directly from this one.
John is the only New Testament writer who uses it, and he uses it in just two scenes, both meals of fish and bread: the boy's lunch of five barley loaves and two fish that Jesus multiplies for the crowd, and the breakfast the risen Jesus grills on a charcoal fire by the lake. Where Matthew, Mark, and Luke wrote the classical ἰχθύς, John reached for the ordinary word a working Galilean fisherman would actually have used. Near Magdala, whose Greek name meant "the salting places," small sardines were pickled and shipped across the Roman world, and many scholars hear that local salted-fish product behind John's word.
In the beach scene John slides between the two words within a few verses, calling the netted catch by the classical word but the fish on the fire this everyday one. Most scholars read that as John's habit of varying his vocabulary rather than a coded difference; a minority hear a real distinction, live fish in the net against fish now readied for the pan. Either way the word keeps its footing in the world of the table.
Whether John's alternation between this everyday word for fish and the classical word (ichthys) in the resurrection breakfast encodes a real distinction, live catch versus prepared food, or is only stylistic variation. John 21:10, where Jesus calls the just-caught fish by the food-word, is the crux.
- majorityThe alternation is Johannine stylistic variation, on a par with the chapter's other interchanged pairs of synonyms, and encodes no semantic contrast.; C. K. Barrett, The Gospel According to St. John, 2nd ed. (Westminster, 1978), 578-583; R. E. Brown, The Gospel According to John XIII-XXI (AB 29A; Doubleday, 1970), 1067-1076; J. R. Michaels, The Gospel of John (NICNT; Eerdmans, 2010), 1023-1040
- minorityThe alternation is meaningful: fish as living creatures are named by the classical word, fish destined for the pan by this food-word, and John 21:10 fits because the caught fish are now bound for the fire.; B. F. Westcott, The Gospel According to St. John (Murray, 1881), 301; K. C. Hanson, "The Galilean Fishing Economy and the Jesus Tradition," Biblical Theology Bulletin 27 (1997): 99-111
Disputed
Whether this word in John carries the specific nuance of small salted or dried fish, the preserved commodity of the Galilean fishing trade, or is simply the ordinary later-Greek word for fish with no such specialized force to be pressed.
- majorityIt denotes the small salted or preserved fish typical of the Galilean fish-curing industry, eaten with bread, and the choice reflects concrete local color.; R. E. Brown, The Gospel According to John I-XII (AB 29; Doubleday, 1966), 232-234; C. S. Keener, The Gospel of John: A Commentary (Hendrickson, 2003), 1:668-669; C. Spicq, Theological Lexicon of the New Testament (Hendrickson, 1994), vol. 2, s.v.; R. Bauckham, ed., Magdala of Galilee (Baylor UP, 2018), ch. 8
- minorityIt is merely the ordinary later-Greek word for fish; the salted-fish nuance should not be pressed.; C. K. Barrett, The Gospel According to St. John, 2nd ed. (Westminster, 1978), 274; D. A. Carson, The Gospel According to John (PNTC; Eerdmans, 1991), 270