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Originally posted by AlphaFrog
I was just thinking about the fish thing, and this is total speculation, not something I learned in church history class, but I'm wondering if the allowance of fish (besides it not being a mammal) on Fridays has to do with the "Feeding of 5,000 with fish" or the "Be Fishers of Men". The bible seems to mention fish quite alot, and I wonder if that's the reason. Like I said - purely spectuation - anyone know anything about this?
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In the first century, Jews fasted on Mondays and Thursdays. The original Christians were all Jewish and were used to the fasting as a spiritual discipline. They moved the fast days to Wednesdays and Fridays, because Judas engineered Jesus' arrest on a Wednesday and Jesus was crucified on a Friday. Most often that fast took the form of avoiding meat in the diet. In those days, meat was a luxury food. You either had to buy it in a market or you had to own enough land to keep cattle. On the other hand, anyone could grow vegetables or forage for them, and anyone could catch a fish in a lake or a stream. You could buy better fish and vegetables, but the point is that you could eat without money if you were poor. So meat was rich people's food and fish was poor people's food. That is why the most common form of fasting was to omit meat and eat fish.