Paul and the Fourteen Nights Before Malta

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Imagine a ship in the dark, in a storm, on the fourteenth night of a storm. There is no sun. There are no stars. Nobody on board has seen either for days, and nobody on board has eaten a proper meal for about as long. Two hundred and seventy-odd people are huddled on a deck that tilts one way and then the other. And in the middle of them, with the water running down his beard, stands a prisoner. He is the only one standing up straight. He is the only one who has had a good night's sleep.

How on earth did that happen?

But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Let us start at the beginning, which was a harbour, and a fine day, and a mistake.

Hello, and welcome to Saints by Candlelight, stories of saints, angels and patriarchs from the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, told for bedtime. These episodes are written by an AI and read by a synthetic voice, and they try very hard to be faithful. Tonight's story comes from the Acts of the Apostles, chapters twenty-seven and twenty-eight, which Christians of both traditions read as Scripture, and we will tell it as it is told there. A few small things, the jokes, the weather on the calm days, and what a tired sailor might say about his supper, are our own invention, told in the spirit of the original, and we will say at the end which parts those were. So get comfortable. Dim the lights. And let's begin.

Let us begin with a man in chains, which is how Paul comes into most of the later chapters of Acts.

You may know him already. Paul had been an enemy of the first Christians, and then he had met the Lord on a road, and from that day he had spent his life walking, sailing and writing letters, telling the world about Jesus. He had been beaten, and jailed, and chased out of town after town. He had also, along the way, made a good many friends. Now, at the end of the book of Acts, he is in the hands of the Roman authorities. He has been arrested in Jerusalem, and kept for two years in Caesarea, a port town on the coast, while various officials listened to his case and could not quite decide what to do with him.

In the end Paul did something that sounds odd and was entirely legal. He was a Roman citizen, and a Roman citizen could say, I appeal to Caesar. It meant, I would like my case heard by the emperor himself. And once it has been said, the governor has no choice. As the governor put it, in the book, with a shrug that you can hear across the centuries, you have appealed to Caesar, so to Caesar you shall go.

That is what this journey is about. A trial in Rome. A long way to go, with an uncertain ending, in the company of soldiers.

The soldiers were under the care of a centurion called Julius. A centurion, you will remember, was an officer in charge of about a hundred men, the sort of person who gets things done and does not like surprises. Julius had a number of prisoners to deliver, and his orders were simple. Get them to Rome. Get them there alive.

Paul was not travelling alone. Luke, who wrote the book of Acts, is there too, and we know it because at this point in the book the writer begins to say we. We boarded a ship. We put to sea. So this is an eyewitness story, told by a man who was sick on the same deck. By long tradition that writer is Luke, the doctor, who also wrote the Gospel. There was a second companion, Aristarchus, a man from Thessalonica. And so we have three friends, one of them in chains, the other two as nearly his servants as the Romans would allow.

They set out from Caesarea in the late summer, on a small ship that belonged to a port in the north-west of what is now Turkey, and it was going to call at several harbours along the coast. Their first stop was Sidon, a day's sail north. And here is a small thing that I love. The book says that Julius treated Paul kindly, and let him go and see his friends and be cared for. A Roman officer, with a prisoner in chains, lets the man go ashore to visit his friends. We are not told why. I think Julius had begun to notice that this prisoner was not like the others.

The first part of the voyage went slowly. The wind was against them. They sailed along the lee of the island of Cyprus, which means they kept to the sheltered side, so that the island stood between them and the wind. They crossed the open sea off the coast of the country now called Turkey, which took them a while, and at last came to a town called Myra, in a region called Lycia.

At Myra, the soldiers and prisoners changed ships. Waiting in the harbour was a big grain ship from Alexandria, in Egypt, sailing to Italy. If you have never thought about this, here is a thing to know. The city of Rome ate a very large amount of bread, and a great deal of the wheat came from Egypt, carried over the sea in enormous ships. These were the largest vessels most people ever saw. They were the container ships of the ancient world. Julius put his men and his prisoners aboard.

And, the book tells us, there were two hundred and seventy-six people on board. In some old copies the number is different, but two hundred and seventy-six is the one most copies give, and it is a good number, and it is the one we will use. Sailors, passengers, soldiers, prisoners, and a very great deal of wheat.

The next few days went badly. The wind kept against them, and they crept along, as the book says, making slow progress for many days, and it was difficult to get as far as a place called Cnidus. After that the wind would not let them go straight on, so they turned and sailed south, under the shelter of the large island of Crete, off a cape called Salmone. They crept along the southern coast, with the wind still in their faces, until they came to a little harbour called Fair Havens, near a town called Lasea.

The name is lovely, and the harbour, as it turned out, was not.

By now a good deal of time had passed. The book says that the Fast was already over. That is a reference to the Jewish Day of Atonement, a fast kept in the autumn, in late September or early October. And what Luke is telling us is that the safe sailing season had come to an end. In those days, ships on the open sea were meant to stay in port from the middle of autumn until the spring, because the weather turned. You did not take a loaded ship across the sea in November, if you could help it. It is the sort of thing you should have known about before you set out.

Paul gave his opinion. He was not a sailor, but he had travelled a great deal. By his own account he had already been shipwrecked three times, and spent a night and a day adrift in the open sea. He stood up and said to the others, gentlemen, I can see that this voyage is going to end in disaster and great loss, not only of the cargo and the ship, but of our own lives as well.

That is a fine thing to say in a meeting. It is also, as every person who has ever said it knows, not very popular.

The centurion listened to the pilot and the ship's owner instead. They were experts, and Paul was not. Hear them out fairly: Fair Havens was not a good place to spend the winter. It was open to the weather and had no town to speak of, and the crew did not wish to sit there for five months. About forty miles further on along the coast there was a better harbour, called Phoenix, which faced both south-west and north-west, and which was sheltered. Most of the crew voted to try for it.

I should like to say a kind word about the people who made the wrong decision. They were not stupid. They were not wicked. They had a sensible reason, and they were guided by experts, and a gentle wind from the south began to blow. If you have ever put off turning back because the weather suddenly seemed to be improving, you will know exactly how that morning felt. The book says, with a lovely dry touch, that when the south wind blew softly, they supposed that they had obtained their purpose. They weighed anchor and sailed along, close to the shore of Crete.

Paul said nothing more. He had said it once. Now he went on board and waited.

It did not last, of course.

Before they had gone very far, a wind came down from the island, a hurricane of a wind, a great gale that the book calls the Northeaster. The ship was caught. It could not be turned to face the wind. The sailors, who must have done everything they could, gave up, and let the ship be driven.

They were carried along under the lee of a little island called Cauda. Here the sailors had a calm moment, perhaps an hour, and used it for what looks like emergency repairs. They hauled in the ship's boat, which was being towed behind and had filled with water, and which took a great deal of effort to get on deck. Then they took ropes and passed them under the hull to hold the ship together. The old ships were built of planks, and a hard storm could open the seams, so a sailor with a coil of rope was a sensible sailor. They were afraid of being driven onto the sandbanks off the coast of Africa, which were known as the Syrtis, a place that sailors dreaded. And so they let down the gear, which is a phrase that scholars have argued over for a long time. Some think it was a sea anchor, a drag to slow the ship. Others think it was a sail. The book does not say, and we will not pretend to know.

The storm went on. The ship was battered so badly that on the next day they began to throw cargo overboard, and on the day after that, with their own hands, they threw out the ship's tackle, the spare ropes and gear. Imagine that. Imagine heaving over the side the very things you would need if the ship survived. It tells you how bad it had become.

And then there is the line that I think is the saddest in the chapter. It says that neither sun nor stars appeared for many days, and no small tempest lay on them, and at last all hope that we would be saved was taken away.

Notice that the writer says we. He was in it too. He was one of those who gave up hope.

Now we come to the fourteenth night, or rather to the night before it, and to the part that matters.

The crew had gone a long time without a proper meal. It does not say that nobody ate at all. It says they had been without food for a long time, and I imagine that people nibbled and sipped a little, and nobody sat down to dinner. They were seasick, frightened, and busy. They were wet through. Everyone was exhausted.

And in the middle of this, Paul stood up among them. We do not know whether it was day or night. He said, gentlemen, you should have listened to me and not set sail from Crete. You would have avoided this damage and loss. He says it once, and I think you can forgive him. Then, in the same breath, he goes on. But now I urge you to take heart, for there will be no loss of life among you, only of the ship.

And then he tells them why. He says, this very night there stood by me an angel of the God to whom I belong, and whom I serve, saying, do not be afraid, Paul. You must stand before Caesar. And behold, God has granted you all those who sail with you.

I want to say a word about that. An angel, you will remember from our other stories, is a servant and a messenger. The angel does not save the ship. The angel does not calm the sea. The angel brings word, and the word comes from God. And Paul says plainly, I believe God, that it will be exactly as I have been told. But we must run aground on some island.

It is a strange kind of promise. Everybody lives. The ship is lost. And there is an island somewhere ahead, though nobody knows which.

Paul is not boasting, and he is not working a trick. A man who has been shipwrecked three times is in a position to know how this sort of thing usually ends. What he has is a promise, and he holds on to it, in the dark, in front of a crowd of tired sailors who have not asked for it. It must have taken some courage. Some of them, I think, looked at him as if he were out of his mind. And some of them, I think, did not.

The fourteenth night came. They were being driven across the sea that the book calls Adria. We have to be a little careful with that name. To the Romans it did not mean only the narrow sea that we now call the Adriatic. It was a much wider stretch of the central Mediterranean, between Greece, Italy and Africa. So this is open water, somewhere in the middle of the sea.

About midnight, the sailors felt that land was near. The book does not say how. Perhaps they heard waves breaking. Perhaps the smell changed. Anyone who has lived by the sea will tell you that you can tell, in the dark, when a shore is close. They dropped a lead weight on a line and found that the water was twenty fathoms deep. A fathom is about six feet, so that is a hundred and twenty feet. They went on a little further and tried again, and now it was fifteen fathoms, about ninety feet.

The water was getting shallower. There was land ahead, and in the dark, with a big ship driven by a gale, that is the most dangerous news there is.

So the sailors did something sensible. They let go four anchors from the stern, and prayed for daylight. The book says it just like that, and it adds that they prayed, though it does not tell us to whom. They were sailors from several places, with many gods among them. But it was night, and the anchors held, and now there was nothing to do but wait.

And here a bad idea arrived. Some of the sailors, the book says, were trying to escape from the ship. They had lowered the boat into the sea, pretending that they were going to put out more anchors from the bow. In fact they meant to row away and leave everyone else behind.

I do not blame them very much. They were frightened. But Paul saw what was going on, and he said to the centurion and the soldiers, quite simply, unless these men stay in the ship, you cannot be saved.

It matters that he said it to the soldiers. It tells you that by now, after fourteen days, the centurion and his men were beginning to listen to the prisoner. And they did. The soldiers cut the ropes that held the boat, and let it fall away.

Then they all waited for the dawn.

Just before day came, Paul did something I find the most moving thing in the whole chapter. He asked them all to eat.

He said, today is the fourteenth day that you have been in suspense and without food, having taken nothing. Therefore I urge you to take some food. It will give you strength, for not a hair is to fall from the head of any of you.

And then he did a simple thing. He took bread. He gave thanks to God in front of all of them. He broke it, and he began to eat.

If you have been listening to our stories for a while, you will have noticed that bread has a way of turning up. Elijah's widow had a jar of flour. Zita had her loaves. The disciples on the road to Emmaus knew their Lord when he broke the bread. I do not say that this meal on the ship is the same as those meals, and the book does not say so either. What the book says is that Paul took bread, gave thanks, and broke it. These are the words that Christians hear whenever they remember the Last Supper, and I think the writer chose them on purpose. But here, on a tilting deck in the dark, it is also very simply a man feeding some very hungry people, and reminding them that they are going to live and they had better have their strength.

And the book says that they all were encouraged, and they too ate. I love that. Two hundred and seventy-six people, in the cold and the dark, sitting down to a bit of bread, and feeling a little better.

When they had eaten as much as they wanted, they threw the rest of the wheat into the sea, to lighten the ship.

At last the day came. They did not recognise the land, which is not surprising, since nobody on board had been able to see the stars for two weeks. But they saw a bay with a sandy beach, and they decided to run the ship ashore if they could.

So they cut the anchors loose and left them in the sea. They untied the ropes that held the steering oars. They hoisted the little foresail to the wind, and they made for the beach.

Now, they did not quite make it. The ship struck a place where two seas met, a sandbank, or a reef, we are not sure which, and ran aground. The bow stuck fast and did not move. The stern, at the back, began to be broken up by the pounding of the waves.

Here comes the one hard moment in the story, and I will tell it quickly. The soldiers, in this crisis, began to plan to kill the prisoners, in case any of them should swim away and escape. That was the Roman rule, and a soldier who lost a prisoner would answer for it with his own life. It was no more than the law.

But Julius the centurion wanted to save Paul. And so he stopped them. He gave an order. Those who could swim should jump overboard first and get to land. The rest should follow on planks, or on whatever pieces of the ship they could find. And so, the book says, it happened that they all reached land in safety.

Every one of them. Two hundred and seventy-six. Just as the angel had said.

The island, they soon learned, was called Malta.

Luke's word for the people is a funny one. He calls them barbarians. But he does not mean it as an insult. In Greek the word was used for anyone who did not speak Greek, a person whose speech sounded to Greek ears like bar-bar-bar. The people of Malta spoke their own language, and no doubt a good number of them spoke Punic, the old language of the Phoenician sailors. They were not Greek or Roman, and that was all the word meant.

What matters is how they behaved. The book says that the people of the island showed us unusual kindness. It was raining, and cold. The shipwrecked travellers were soaked, and half starved, and they had come out of the sea like drowned rats. The islanders lit a fire. They gathered round and called them in to get warm. I think that is one of the loveliest lines in Acts. Unusual kindness, and a fire on the beach.

Paul, being Paul, immediately did something useful. He gathered a bundle of brushwood and put it on the fire. And a snake, which had been sleeping in the sticks, was driven out by the heat. It fastened on his hand.

The islanders saw the snake hanging from his hand, and they drew their own conclusions. They said to one another, this man must be a murderer. He has escaped from the sea, but Justice will not let him live. They were waiting for him to swell up or fall down dead.

Paul shook the snake off into the fire, and was none the worse for it.

They waited a long time. Nothing happened. And so they changed their minds, and said that he was a god. I would like you to notice that Paul says nothing about this. He does not claim it, and he does not argue. The book tells us that he suffered no harm, and it leaves us to understand that it was God who had preserved him, as God had preserved all of them. Paul was a man who had been bitten by a snake and was not hurt. The islanders' two guesses, murderer and god, tell us more about them than about him.

I am fond of the narrator's dry touch there. It was a very short walk from Justice to god, and Paul is not recorded as saying anything.

Nearby was an estate that belonged to the chief man of the island, whose name was Publius. He received the travellers and, the book says, entertained them hospitably for three days. Three days of hot food, dry clothes and a roof. After a fortnight on the sea, I can think of nothing better.

It happened that Publius's father was ill in bed, with a fever and dysentery. Paul went in to see him. He prayed, laid his hands on him, and healed him. The book is plain about this. Paul prayed. He did not do it by his own power. And, once the news was out, the rest of the sick on the island came, and were cured.

They honoured the travellers in many ways, and when it was time to leave, they put on board whatever was needed.

Later tradition says that Publius became the first bishop of Malta, and that he was later the bishop of Athens. This is a very old tradition and a much loved one, but it is not in the book of Acts, and we call it a tradition. In Malta today, Saint Paul is the nation's favourite saint. There is a bay on the northern coast called Saint Paul's Bay, and a cave in Rabat under a church where, by local tradition, Paul stayed during the three months. The place of the landing has been argued about, as many of these places have been argued about, and a few scholars have proposed other islands. The great majority of them think Malta fits the account best, and the Maltese have been quite sure of it for nearly two thousand years.

They stayed three months. It was winter, and nobody was going anywhere. After that came the spring, and another Alexandrian ship that had spent the winter in the island's harbour. It carried, painted or carved at its bow, the figurehead of the Twin Brothers, which is to say Castor and Pollux, the old pagan sailors' protectors. Luke notes it with a very slight smile, I think, and does not comment. It was a perfectly good ship.

They sailed to Syracuse, in Sicily, and stayed three days. They went on to Rhegium, at the toe of Italy, and the wind from the south came up the next day, which carried them to Puteoli, in the Bay of Naples. And at Puteoli something happened that Luke clearly thought worth a line. They found Christians there. Brothers, he says. They begged the travellers to stay with them, and so they stayed seven days.

Remember where this began. A prisoner in chains, in a harbour on the far side of a whole sea. And here, on the other side of it, he walks into a town in Italy and finds friends waiting, as if the news had flown ahead of him. The Church had got to Italy before him.

From Puteoli it was a journey by land to Rome, along the great road called the Appian Way. And the book says that the Christians of Rome, hearing that Paul was coming, walked out to meet him. Some of them came as far as a place called the Forum of Appius, which was about forty-three miles from Rome, and some to a place called the Three Taverns, a little nearer. When Paul saw them, the book says, he thanked God and took courage.

You will notice that he needed it. A man who has stood up straight for fourteen nights in a storm, for the sake of other people, is also a man who sometimes needs to be met on the road by friends.

And so they entered Rome. Paul was allowed to live by himself, with a soldier to guard him. The book of Acts ends a little later, with Paul in a rented house in the city, welcoming everyone who came to see him, and telling them about the Lord Jesus Christ with all boldness, and no one forbidding him. We will leave him there tonight.

It is time to slow down now. The lamps are low.

Think for a moment about the ship. All the best of the ancient world's knowledge went into building it, and it was broken on a sandbank at the end of the journey. Everything on it was lost, the wheat and the tackle and the grand big mast. And not one person was.

The angel had told Paul exactly that. Not the ship, but the people. I think there is something in that for the end of a day. We spend so much of our worry on the ship, which is to say on our plans, our cargo, our carefully arranged things. We forget that the promise is made about the people. The cargo goes over the side. The planks break up on the shoal. And everyone, every one, is carried to the shore on a plank, or on a piece of the ship, or on their own two arms, to a fire on a beach and a stranger who is kind.

The Catholic Church in Malta keeps a feast on the tenth of February, the Shipwreck of Saint Paul, and in the old town of Valletta there is a church dedicated to it. The Orthodox Church remembers Saint Paul together with Saint Peter, on the twenty-ninth of June. The calendars do differ, so please check your own.

Some notes for the curious.

The only source for this whole story is the Acts of the Apostles, chapters twenty-seven and twenty-eight, and it is among the most detailed pieces of travel writing from the ancient world. The depth soundings, the ropes round the hull, the four anchors, and the names of the harbours are so specific that sailors and historians have studied them closely, and many of them have found the account accurate. In the nineteenth century, a Scottish yachtsman and scholar named James Smith, who knew the Mediterranean well, worked out the likely track of the ship from the wind and the drift, and came to Malta. The chapter also seems to be an eyewitness account, which is why it switches to the word we. By long tradition the writer is Luke.

A few things are open. The book gives the number of people as two hundred and seventy-six in most old copies, though some give a different figure. The gear that was lowered in the storm is uncertain, as we said. The exact site of the landing is uncertain, though Malta is the usual answer. And the later stories about Publius are traditions, not Scripture.

The talk among the sailors, the jokes, the thoughts of the crew, the details of the weather on the calm days, and the small suppers are mine, which is to say they are an AI's, and they should be taken as colour for the story and not as its content. What happens, and what Paul says, we have taken from the book.

That's the story of Saint Paul and the voyage to Malta for tonight. The Catholic Church in Malta keeps the feast of his shipwreck on the tenth of February, and the Orthodox Church remembers him on the twenty-ninth of June. Thank you for listening to Saints by Candlelight. If you enjoyed it, share it with someone who could use a gentle story at the end of a long day.

And here is a blessing. May you be spared the storms you fear, and given courage for the ones you cannot avoid. May someone on your ship stand up straight when you cannot. May you be fed, in the dark, with a little bread, and be given thanks to say over it. May you never be left behind by those who were meant to stay. May the sea carry you home, if it has to, on a plank. And may you find, on whatever shore you come to, a fire already lit, and a stranger who is kind. May the God who kept two hundred and seventy-six people through fourteen nights keep you through this one.

Goodnight, and God bless.

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