It is well known, that the earliest Christian emblems--before it was ever attempted to represent the bodily appearance of Jesus--were the Lamb, the Good Shepherd, and _the Fish_. The origin of the latter emblem, which has so puzzled the archæologists, thus becomes comprehensible. The whole secret lies in the easily-ascertained fact that, while in the _Kabala_, the King Messiah is called “Interpreter,” or Revealer of the mystery, and shown to be the _fifth_ emanation, in the _Talmud_--for reasons we will now explain--the Messiah is very often designated as “DAG,” or the Fish. This is an inheritance from the Chaldees, and relates--as the very name indicates--to the Babylonian Dagon, the man-fish, who was the instructor and interpreter of the people, to whom he appeared. Abarbanel explains the name, by stating that the sign of his (Messiah’s) coming “is the conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter in the sign _Pisces_.”[534] Therefore, as the Christians were intent upon identifying their Christos with the Messiah of the _Old Testament_, they adopted it so readily as to forget that its true origin might be traced still farther back than the Babylonian Dagon. How eagerly and closely the ideal of Jesus was united, by the early Christians, with every imaginable kabalistic and Pagan tenet, may be inferred from the language of Clemens, of Alexandria, addressed to his brother co-religionists. When they were debating upon the choice of the most appropriate symbol to remind them of Jesus, Clemens advised them in the following words: “Let the engraving upon the gem of your ring be either _a dove_, or _a ship running before the wind_ (the Argha), or _a fish_.” Was the good father, when writing this sentence, laboring under the recollection of Joshua, son of Nun (called _Jesus_ in the Greek and Slavonian versions); or had he forgotten the real interpretation of these Pagan symbols? Joshua, son of Nun, or Nave (_Navis_), could have with perfect propriety adopted the image of a _ship_, or even of a fish, for Joshua means Jesus, son of the fish-god; but it was really too hazardous to connect the emblems of Venus, Astarte, and all the Hindu goddesses--the _argha_, _dove_, and _fish_--with the “immaculate” birth of their god! This looks very much as if in the early days of Christianity but little difference was made between Christ, Bacchus, Apollo, and the Hindu Christna, the incarnation of Vishnu, with whose first avatar this symbol of the fish originated.