One of Jesus Christ's most famous miracles could actually be true, according to scientists.
The Bible tells us about two occasions when Jesus helped fishermen turn their luck around, from unsuccessful fishing attempts to huge catches that fed their communities for weeks.
This miracle was known as the 'miraculous catch of fish' and was said to have been performed in Israel's Lake Kinneret where Jesus preached.
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In both accounts of the stories, Jesus and his apostles are struggling to catch anything on the Sea of Galilee and are about to give up when he encourages them to try once more.
After casting their nets, they suddenly haul in a massive load of fish. However, there's a bit of inconsistency as to when this happened.
Luke (of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) wrote that this happened early on in Christ's ministry. Meanwhile, according to John, it happened after He came back from the dead pointing out that specifically 153 fish were caught.
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Anyhow, scientists may have found proof of this actually happening.
Researchers from Kinneret Limnological Laboratory have been studying the Sea of Galilee and discovered a layer of colder, oxygen-depleted water.
This is due to an increase in phytoplankton blooms which block out the oxygen and eventually cause the fish to suffocate to death.
When this occurs, you can quickly end up with a lot of dead fish. And of course, it's then pretty easy to scoop them all up into one massive net.
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The researchers found that these 'fish-kill events' happen around the same spot on the Sea of Galilee miracle event and their results support the idea that Jesus and his miracles of pulling over a hundred fish from the sea were real.
The researchers wrote in their study published in the journal Water Resources Research: "[Our study] may explain the appearance of large numbers of easy-to-collect fish close to the shore described in the biblical narratives."
They added that the conditions in the lake at that time might have been similar to what we see today and '2,000 years ago (when the biblical miracles took place), Lake Kinneret watershed was densely inhabited by agriculturalists numbering about 200,000, which is similar to the present population in the region.'
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However, the findings have raised questions about whether Jesus' actions were genuine miracles or simply coincided with natural events in the lake, putting the worlds of science and religion back in direct conflict.