Fishing in the time of Jesus
Robert Myles, Dean of Research and Associate Professor of New Testament, Wollaston Theological College
When we picture fishing in the time of Jesus, we should imagine ordinary people caught up in a world of significant change. The fishermen in the Gospels were not carefree hobbyists with time to spare for a wandering preacher. They were workers of an increasingly managed lake living through precarious times.
In Mark 1:16-20, Jesus encounters several fishers “casting a net into the sea”. After instructing them to follow him to “fish for people”, they immediately drop their nets and follow him. Quite what the motivation to leave their nets behind is not really explained by the text. The passage does, however, directly follow Jesus’ announcement of the good news of God’s coming kingdom (Mark 1:14-15).
In Mark’s Gospel, this kingdom signals God’s decisive, disruptive intervention in the world and it demands an urgent response of repentance and faith. The word kingdom itself carried political weight. It evoked empire, authority, and the concrete realities these fishers lived under: the dominance of Rome, and the Herodian rulers who governed Palestine on Rome’s behalf.
Most fishers and their families lived modestly in small villages dotted around the Sea of Galilee. In Jesus’ lifetime, however, Galilee was being reshaped by massive building projects. The most consequential was Herod Antipas’s founding of a new capital city in 19 CE on the lake’s western shore. He named the city Tiberias, after the Roman emperor whose power lay behind his own. Tiberias became a mechanism for siphoning wealth from the lake’s fisheries - through increased tolls, taxes, and the farming out of fishing rights - toward urban elites in Galilee and beyond.
Traditional patterns of life were upended. Urbanisation and pollution, including resulting effluent runoff and lead contamination, likely contributed to health crises and destabilised the lake’s ecological balance, diminishing the vitality of its fisheries.
Against this backdrop, the fishers heard Jesus proclaim a kingdom of God that would come “with power” (Mark 9:1) to overturn the conditions they were experiencing. When Mark says these men immediately “left their nets”, I personally do not think of their action as a sentimental moment of spontaneous piety (despite this being a fairly popular reading of the text). Taking into consideration their broader context, I see their decision to throw their lot in with Jesus as one forged in the heat of real pressures, uncertainties, and discontent.
Jesus’ call offered them a different and exciting future that was not defined by Herod’s opulent cities, Rome’s taxes, or the exhausting daily struggle to stay afloat in a changing world. It offered a new way of belonging and a new community shaped not by predatory extraction but by generosity, not by fear but by trust and faith in the God of Israel to set things right.
Join Associate Professor Robert Myles this October for Mark: A Gospel of Urgency, an evening module over four Wednesdays in the Archbishop’s Certificate at Wollaston Theological College: wollaston.edu.au/mark-a-gospel-of-urgency