The Jesus Fish (Ichthys): What the Christian Fish Symbol Means

The Jesus fish is a creed in five letters. Ichthys (ΙΧΘΥΣ) is Greek for fish, and its letters begin the Greek words for Jesus Christ, God’s Son, Saviour. Christians cut it into seal rings, inscriptions and catacomb walls by about AD 200, and since the 1980s it has been common on cars.

The first Christians read even more into it. Christ is the Fish, and those baptised into him, as Tertullian put it around 200, are “little fishes” born in water. So the sign speaks of him first and then of us: who he is, and whose we are. Worn on a ring in Alexandria or stuck to a car today, it says the same thing.

What does ICHTHYS stand for?

Read as an acrostic, the word for fish becomes a sentence, one word for each Greek letter:

Put together, the five words say who Jesus is and what he does. He is the Messiah, since Christ means “Anointed”. He is the Son of God. And he saves. The heart of the gospel fits inside a fish. You will also see the word spelled ichthus, because the Greek letter upsilon can be written in English as y or u, and the word for Son written huios, for the h sound at its start.

If you would like the longer story of what Christians have confessed about Jesus, including why the church called him truly God and truly human, the free course Christianity: What Christians Have Believed for 2,000 Years tells it in eighteen short lessons.

When did Christians start using the fish symbol?

By the end of the second century the fish turns up in Christian writing, art and inscriptions. No single object marks the very first use, but several pieces of evidence point to the same years.

Clement’s seal rings

Clement of Alexandria, a teacher who died about 215, wanted the fish where people would see it: on the hand. In The Instructor (3.11), his guide to Christian conduct, he tells believers what to carve on their seals: “And let our seals be either a dove, or a fish, or a ship scudding before the wind, or a musical lyre,” or “a ship’s anchor.” He adds that “if there be one fishing, he will remember the apostle, and the children drawn out of the water.” The apostle is most likely Peter, whom Clement pictures fishing earlier in the same book, and the children are the newly baptised. Clement ruled out “the faces of idols,” along with swords, bows and drinking cups. He never says why he chose the fish. The Catholic Encyclopedia of 1909, whose articles on the fish and its inscriptions are still worth reading, took that silence to mean his readers already knew.

The epitaph of Abercius

Abercius was a bishop of Hieropolis in Phrygia, in what is now Turkey, and he wrote his own epitaph in his seventy-second year. He remembers a journey to Rome and says that Faith “everywhere provided as my food a fish of exceeding great size, and perfect, which a holy virgin drew with her hands from a fountain,” with “wine of great virtue, and giving it mingled with bread.” The fish is Christ, and the meal is the Eucharist. Wherever the old bishop went, Christ was set before him at the table.

The stone is very old. A gravestone for a man named Alexander, dated AD 216, repeats its opening and closing lines almost word for word, and the same encyclopedia calls the bishop’s own epitaph “generally, and with good reason, regarded as older.” The traveller William Ramsay found Alexander’s stone in 1882, and in 1883 two pieces of the Abercius stone itself, built into the wall of a public bath. Those pieces went to the Vatican’s museum of Christian antiquities.

The inscription of Pectorius

A Greek verse inscription on marble, found at Autun in France on 24 June 1839, uses the same picture of Christ as the fish. It opens “Divine race of the heavenly fish” and tells the reader to “eat with delight holding the fish in thy hands.” Scholars have dated it anywhere from the second century to the sixth; the 1909 judgment was that the late second or early third century is most likely.

Fish in the Roman catacombs

In Rome, the oldest burial galleries of the Catacomb of St. Callistus date from the end of the second century. In its Crypts of Lucina a painting shows fishes on the grass beside baskets of bread and wine, the same fish, bread and wine that Abercius wrote of, painted where Christians laid their dead. Across early Christian art the fish often sits beside the dove, the anchor and the monogram of Christ, on frescoes, carvings, rings, seals and gilded glass.

Augustine and the acrostic

The fullest early explanation of the acrostic comes from Augustine of Hippo (354–430). In The City of God (18.23) he tells how a proconsul named Flaccianus showed him a Greek manuscript of verses said to be the prophecies of the Erythraean Sibyl, in which the first letters of the lines spelled out Jesus Christ the Son of God, the Saviour. “But if you join the initial letters of these five Greek words,” Augustine writes, … “that is, fish, in which word Christ is mystically understood, because He was able to live, that is, to exist, without sin in the abyss of this mortality as in the depth of waters.” Christ lived in our deep waters as a fish lives in the sea, wholly in them and untouched by their sin.

Why is the fish linked to baptism?

Because Christians are born again in water, and fish live in water. Tertullian of Carthage made the link in his treatise On Baptism, written between about 200 and 206 for people preparing to be baptised: “But we, little fishes, after the example of our ΙΧΘΥΣ Jesus Christ, are born in water, nor have we safety in any other way than by permanently abiding in water.” Christ is the Fish, and every baptised Christian is one of the little fishes who takes life from him. Clement’s “children drawn out of the water” are the same little fishes. A fish lives only in water, and Tertullian’s point is that we live only by staying in Christ.

Fish still appeared on baptismal fonts and cups after the fourth century, though by then they were, in the encyclopedia’s words, “merely of an ornamental character, suggested, probably by the water used in baptism.”

Was the fish a secret sign for persecuted Christians?

The persecution was real; the secret sign is legend. Pliny the Younger, Roman governor of Pontus and Bithynia between 111 and 113, wrote to the emperor Trajan about Christians brought before him: “those who persisted I ordered executed.” In 202 persecution fell on the Christians of Egypt, and Clement himself had to leave Alexandria.

The story told today goes like this. One Christian draws a single curve in the sand, and a stranger who also believes completes the fish with a second curve. When The New York Times wrote about car fish in 2003, it called the older form of the idea legend: “legend has it, the fish was scratched in the sand by persecuted first-century Christians as a secret sign.” None of the early writers who mention the fish describes such a password.

What survives shows Christians using the fish in the open: on seal rings worn in public, in epitaphs, and in burial places that belonged to the church. Some of it does speak in pictures meant for believers. Abercius ends his epitaph: “He that discerneth these things, every fellow-believer [namely], let him pray for Abercius.” Its language is “one not understood by all,” and a Christian reading it would recognise Christ and the Eucharist in the fish, the bread and the wine. The fish was never a password. It was a confession, and anyone who shared the faith could read it.

Where does the fish come from in the Gospels?

The acrostic gave the fish its words, and the Gospels gave it its stories. Jesus called fishermen with the promise, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men” (Matthew 4:19). When his disciples told him, “We have here but five loaves, and two fishes” (Matthew 14:17), he fed “about five thousand men, beside women and children” (Matthew 14:21). After he rose, “they gave him a piece of a broiled fish, and of an honeycomb. And he took it, and did eat before them” (Luke 24:42–43). And by the Sea of Galilee, “Jesus then cometh, and taketh bread, and giveth them, and fish likewise” (John 21:13).

The 1909 encyclopedia thought these meals may have first given Christians the idea, and that the acrostic made the sign popular. It is easy to see why they would. The risen Lord ate fish in front of his friends, and then fed them with his own hands. What each of those stories means is in what fish symbolise in the Bible.

What does a fish with a cross mean?

A fish with a cross puts two Christian signs together. The fish says who Jesus is, Jesus Christ, God’s Son, Saviour, and the cross says how he saved: by his death. Paul wrote, “For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God” (1 Corinthians 1:18). Whether the cross sits inside the fish or beside it, the emblem says both things at once. No early source gives the combined emblem a meaning of its own.

Early Christians did set the fish beside other signs, “quite frequently” with “the dove, the anchor, and the monogram of Christ.” One engraved gem, kept in a museum in Rome in 1909, carries several side by side: two fishes under the crossbar of a T-shaped anchor, a T-shaped cross with a dove on it, and the five letters of ICHTHYS around the border.

Christians in Clement’s day were also making a sign on their own bodies. Tertullian, his contemporary, wrote that at every step of daily life, “when we put on our clothes and shoes, when we bathe, when we sit at table, when we light the lamps,” Christians would “trace upon the forehead the sign.” The translation says only “the sign”; it is usually read as the sign of the cross. After the fourth century “the symbolism of the fish gradually disappeared.” The cross stayed.

Why do Christians put a fish on their car?

For the reason Clement wanted it on a seal ring: to say in public that the owner belongs to Christ. The New York Times reported in 2003 that “by the 1980’s a fish drawn simply with two curved lines” with the word Jesus inside it “had colonized numerous cars as a symbol of Christian belief.” The plain outline carries the old meaning. With the word Jesus inside, it names him. With the Greek letters ΙΧΘΥΣ inside, it spells out the same five words Clement’s readers knew.

What do the Darwin fish and the Truth fish mean?

The Darwin fish is a parody. By the late 1980s, the same Times article reports, cars carried a fish with two feet and the word Darwin inside, announcing the driver’s belief in evolution. Chris Gilman, a Hollywood props maker, said he came up with the idea in the early 1980s, and a company called Evolution Design trademarked it. The answer was a Truth fish shown swallowing the Darwin fish; in the Times‘s words, “A Truth fish could soon be seen devouring a Darwin fish.” Tom Lessl, a professor at the University of Georgia who surveyed Darwin fish owners, found two groups: one “openly hostile to traditional religious beliefs,” and another that saw the fish as a sign that Darwin’s ideas and religion could live together.

In Germany the fish was turned against Christians. An eagle catching a fish was the emblem of Die Artgemeinschaft, a neo-Nazi association, and it stood for the victory over Christianity that the group claimed. The association has been banned since 2023.

Did Christians take the fish symbol from pagans?

Pagans had the fish first, as an ornament, and Christians gave the picture a meaning of its own. In the 1909 encyclopedia’s words, “the use of the fish in pagan art as a purely decorative sign is ancient and constant.” What made a fish Christian was what Christians said about it: the five words of the acrostic, the water of baptism, and the meals of bread and fish in the Gospels.

Under all three stands one person. The little fishes still live by him, and he still says to anyone who will come, “Follow me” (Matthew 4:19).

Related reading

• Fish in the Bible: What Do They Symbolize?
• 20 Bible Verses About Fish
• Why Is Jesus Called Christ? It Means “Anointed,” the Greek Word for Messiah
• What Did Jesus Eat? Bread, Fish, Wine and the Passover in the Gospels
• What Does the Dove Represent in the Bible? The Holy Spirit Dove and the Christian Dove
• Protestant and Reformation Symbols and What They Mean