by N. T. Wright
In fact, it wasn’t. The well-known northeasterly wind caught them as they were inching along the coast, and apart from a brief stop in the lee of the small island of Cauda, they were forced to run before the storm. We can well imagine the scene. Nearly three hundred people of all sorts were crowded on a small and vulnerable boat, with the winds getting higher and waves more furious. Everybody on board knew the way the decision had been made; there would have been an element of anger as well as anxiety. Staying in the wrong port would have been better than drowning.
The sailors would have been rushing about anxiously, doing all they could to avoid being driven onto the sandbanks some way off the North African shore. They did their best to lighten the vessel, to enable it to ride higher in the vast waves. First they threw the cargo overboard (so much for the goods that had been intended to make someone money when they arrived in Rome), and then they jettisoned the ship’s tackle too. The passengers, watching all this going on, would have realized only too well what it meant. If the experienced sailors were taking extreme measures, what hope could there be? The nights would have been terrifying, the stormy days not much better. There they were, wet through, chilled to the marrow, huddled together, eating little or nothing in an attempt to preserve what supplies they had, some no doubt seasick. Misery and fear would have reduced them all, soldiers and slaves, tradesmen and apostles alike, to the same condition.
We imagine Paul and his companions muttering to one another about the book of Jonah. This would only have raised the dark question of who the “Jonah” was on this boat—who got them into this mess anyway? Or perhaps they might have reminded one another about Jesus stilling storms in Galilee; they wondered why he didn’t do that now, as they no doubt prayed fervently that he would. On roared the wind, tossing the little craft and its unhappy occupants to and fro, with no letup, no glimpse of the sun by day or the stars by night. Sleep would have been difficult or impossible; the nightmare was real. Dark days turned into even darker nights and back again, as the storm showed no sign of abating. It went on for two whole weeks. There was a good reason, after all, why one would not normally sail the Mediterranean at that time of year. In the end, says Luke, “All hope of safety was finally abandoned.”5 Salvation? Not likely.
But then something happened. Not the lull in the storm for which their bodies and their dizzy minds ached. Not a rescue operation, even had such a thing been possible. Rather, a word—a messenger with encouragement. You might well think, and I expect plenty of those on board did think, that Paul’s mind had finally been addled by the storm, but he had received a revelation, and he needed to share it. He did so in his usual tactless way. In our world, saying “I told you so” at such a moment would not have been the best way to retain goodwill and gain a hearing. But this is the Paul we know, never for a moment shrinking from speaking out. Since his whole life had been shaped by extraordinary visions and revelations, why stop now? So he said what he had heard:
It does seem to me, my good people, that you should have taken my advice not to leave Crete. We could have managed without this damage and loss. But now I want to tell you: take heart! No lives will be lost—only the ship. This last night, you see, an angel of the God to whom I belong, and whom I worship, stood beside me. “Don’t be afraid, Paul,” he said. “You must appear before Caesar, and let me tell you this: God has granted you all your traveling companions.” So take heart, my friends. I believe God, that it will be as he said to me. We must, however, be cast up on some island or other.6
That was all very well. But the sailors still had to sail (without the aid of the ship’s tackle); decisions still had to be made. They seemed to be getting near land, and the sailors were worried that they were going to be smashed on rocks, so they did what sailors in those days often did: with a prayer for day to come they let down four anchors from the stern. Seabed archaeology has made it clear how this system worked. As a ship was driven by wind and waves, anchors would be let down one by one, to slow the ship down as much as possible. Then, when each in turn threatened to break under the pressure, it would be abandoned and the next one lowered. The ship would lurch forward perhaps fifty yards or so and then be caught with a jerk; then again, then again. They would approach the land bit by bit rather than accelerating toward possible disaster. After this maneuver was completed, the sailors tried a more selfish plan—they would themselves escape in the ship’s small boat and leave the rest to their fate. But Paul spotted them—why did it always have to be him?—and told the centurion and the soldiers to stop them. If he had not already acquired a reputation for bossiness, the sailors would have come to that conclusion right then. But he followed this up with a very different proposal.
The whole ship’s company had been conserving their food, going without, for two weeks. It was time, he said, to eat. Rescue (“salvation” again, for Luke) was at hand. So Paul broke bread, saying a prayer of thanks in front of them all. They cheered up and ate. Then they lightened the ship even more than before by throwing the rest of the grain over the side. The whole point of the voyage, as far as the ship owner was concerned, had now been lost. But at least they were near to land.
That did not itself assure safety. Many ships have been wrecked, with loss of life, within sight of an apparently welcoming shore. In any case, nobody on board recognized the coastline ahead of them. Nobody, then, knew the possible places where one might bring the ship in, if not to an actual harbor, then at least to a safe landing. We sense the mixture of hope and fear among sailors and passengers alike. They could make out a bay, and perhaps all they would have to do would be to head the boat in that direction! They slipped the anchors, let the tillers go slack, and hoisted a sail for the wind to take them in.
Their reckoning did not include a reef just below the surface. We hear in our mind’s ear the horrible grind and crunch as the ship, scudding before the wind, rushes straight onto rock. We feel the shudder and lurch as it suddenly stops, while the wind continues to scream in the sail. We hear the rush of water coming through the broken hull, the shouts of the sailors, the passengers shrieking in panic. The ship has stopped dead, but the waves have not, and the relentless beating of water begins to smash the stern to bits. Then, suddenly, a grim extra element is added to the chaos: in the confusion and noise, the soldiers realize (as the Philippian jailer had realized) what might happen to them if they let their prisoners escape. Wouldn’t it be better to kill them rather than risk being blamed for letting them get away? Paul’s fate hangs for a horrible moment between the sea and the sword. Has it come to this?
Fortunately, the centurion has learned a deep respect, perhaps even affection, for his brilliant if bossy prisoner. (Perhaps it was moments like that that made Luke, in his writings, give centurions the benefit of the doubt.) In any case, he gives a different order: those who can swim should swim, and those who can’t should grab a plank and do their best. The ship, their home for the last few terrifying weeks, is falling apart under the battering of the waves. Two hundred and seventy-six frightened men—merchants, businessmen, ship owners, soldiers, apostles, sailors, slaves, and prisoners alike, in the sudden egalitarianism of emergency—gasp and splash their way to shore. There is no distinction: all are soaked, scared, freezing, and exhausted. Rank and wealth mean nothing as they crawl or stagger onto dry land. But the trial by water is over. All have been saved.
The dark powers have done their worst. Once again Paul has put his faith in the God who raises the dead, the God who wins the victory over the forces of evil, the God of the Exodus. Once again, though he and his companions are just as tired and wet as everybody else, they are at least alive. And, despite everything, they are still on their way to Rome.
But that can hardly have been their first reflection in the initial minutes after dragging themselves onto shore. It was cold and raining, but the local people, seeing a shipwreck, came to help, explaining to anyone who was interested that the island was Malta. The first thing needed was a fire, to warm everybody
up, and they set about gathering brushwood. Paul, never idle, lent a hand by collecting a bundle of sticks. As he put them on the fire, a viper wriggled out at speed, escaping from the flames, and, before Paul could get out of its way, sank its fangs into his hand. The sea, the soldiers, and now a snake! Paul, alert as ever for deeper meanings in everyday events, might have been reminded of the ancient prophecy about a man escaping from a lion only to be met by a bear, then darting into a house, leaning against a wall to catch his breath, and being bitten by a snake.7
What happened next, however, is more or less the opposite of what had happened to Paul in Lystra. There, the locals had begun by thinking Paul was a god and ended by stoning him. The Maltese inhabitants, by contrast, began by thinking he must be a murderer: he’d been rescued from the sea, they said, but a blind divine “Justice” had caught up with him nonetheless. Paul didn’t believe in a blind divine force of “justice,” only in the “justice” of the living God; even so, it must have been a nasty moment. His instant reaction was to shake the snake off his hand into the fire, but surely, thought the watchers, the poison would get into his system in a minute or two. We imagine not only the local people but also Paul’s friends crowding around him, with Luke the doctor anxiously examining him, to see if there was anything they could do. The pessimists were muttering that he would soon start to swell up or simply collapse. Gradually they realized it wasn’t going to happen; he felt fine, no ill effects at all. “Ah,” said the locals, “we were wrong. He isn’t a murderer. He must be a god.”
After things calmed down and arrangements for the travelers were made, Paul and his companions were welcomed by “the leading man of the island,” one Publius, whose father was sick with a fever and dysentery. (Publius was not the Roman magistrate in charge of the island; such a person would neither have owned lands in the region nor had his father living with him.) Paul laid his hands on the father and prayed, and the fever and sickness left him. The news of this, predictably, produced a crowd of sick people from all around the island. Paul cured them all, earning an outpouring of gratitude that spilled over to the whole party; the local people now looked after them well and eventually sent them on their way with a liberal supply of provisions.
This scene, as told by Luke, is no doubt compressed and idealized. But it explains what otherwise might be puzzling, namely, how the whole party, presumably now without money or other means to rent accommodation, was able to last through the winter months of 59/60 before it was once again possible to sail. Paul and his friends must have had a sense of marking time, but also a sense of relief, gratitude, and renewed hope.
* * *
And so to Rome. The travelers spent three months on Malta, from late October or early November 59 to January or February 60. The next leg of the trip, crossing from Malta to Sicily, is short, and from there the journey up the Italian coast is easier than that across the larger expanse of the Mediterranean. As we think of the last stages of Paul’s journey, he does not seem like a prisoner on his way to the highest court in the known world. It feels as though he is on some kind of celebratory procession. The ship docks at Puteoli, seven or eight miles north of Naples. An old Roman colony from the Republican days, Puteoli was by this time a harbor of considerable importance for the grain arriving from the East. If the ship owner and his colleagues were still with the party at this stage, they must have thought sadly of what might have been.
In Puteoli Paul and his party find a group of Christians. There is evidence at this time for Christian groups in Pompeii, just inland in the same region. Clearly the gospel had already borne fruit all up this stretch of coast. The travelers were allowed to stop and spend a week there before continuing up the road on their final journey, probably taking inside of a week. Word of their imminent arrival brought fellow Jesus-followers from Rome to Appian Forum, forty miles southeast of Rome, and Three Taverns, ten miles closer. This must have been a great encouragement to Paul. It was now early in AD 60, nearly three years since he had sent Phoebe to Rome with his remarkable letter. Like an artist sending his greatest-ever painting to a far-off gallery for a major exhibition, he must have wondered a thousand times how it had been received. These reception parties would have reassured him. They indicated that, for many in Rome at least, he was seen as an honored and respected guest. It would normally only be nobility or returning generals who would expect people to come miles to meet them and escort them to their destination.
He was, of course, still under guard. But he was not a condemned criminal. It was he, after all, who had initiated the appeal to Caesar. In a strange way, he still held that initiative. He was allowed to lodge privately in the city, with a soldier in charge of him.
Archaeologists think they may have found where he lived at this time. There is a first-century dwelling with decorations that seem to indicate this as a distinct possibility. The house in question, below the modern street level, is just beside the Corso, the main street running northwest to southeast through Rome, roughly halfway between the Forum and the Pantheon. It is underneath a church, in the lower part of the building that now houses the Palazzo Doria Pamphili. If this is right, it would put Paul in the very middle of the ancient city. It is normally assumed that most of the Christian groups lived across the river in the poorer district of Trastevere. But from the indications that there were several house-churches in Rome, which might well not have had much to do with one another, it is quite possible that some were located in the main part of the city and that Paul would have been living close to one or more of them.
As often in ancient history, we now want to know several things on which our sources are silent. First, had the letter to Rome had the desired effect? The local believers had had three years to ponder it. Were they now doing what Paul had urged? Had the largely Gentile Roman church learned to respect the synagogue community and to pray for them, as Paul had prayed in Romans 10? Had the divided house-churches found a way to “welcome one another,” so that they could “glorify the God and father of our Lord Jesus the Messiah,” as he had put it, “with one mind and one mouth”?8 Were they, in other words, worshipping and praying together? Were they thus able to support him in any further work? Or had his letter alarmed or even alienated them? The welcome parties indicate that some had been enthusiastic. What about the others? We do not know.
Second, what then happened after Paul’s two-year house arrest, when, we assume, he was brought before Nero? Was there another great scene like the one before Festus and Agrippa, only more so? Or was it an anticlimax? Did Nero see the apostle in person, or did he delegate this unsavory and trivial task to a minor official? Again, we do not know.
More specifically, third, was Paul put to death then, or did he have a new lease on life—unrecorded in any contemporary sources—that allowed him more travel and perhaps more writing? If so, when and how did he ultimately die? It may seem strange to modern readers that we know so much about Paul, so much intimate detail of his thoughts, his hopes, his fears, his joys, but not how it all ended. We can, and will, speculate a little, but first we must look at what Luke chooses to tell us instead of all this.
The book of Acts has focused, up to this point, on the way Paul was perceived in Jerusalem and on the charges that were brought against him in relation to undermining the Torah and defiling the Temple. These were, in other words, charges of radical disloyalty to the Jewish world and its ancestral heritage, charges that of course Paul rebutted in both his letters and the various legal hearings. But there was a large synagogue community in Rome. Having returned from the banishment under Claudius, this community might well have been sensitive about someone who might look outwardly as if he spoke for the Jewish people but who might actually be undermining their ancient culture and threatening their national security. Their question would have been one that resonates to this day: Was Paul really a loyal Jew?
Paul made it a priority on his arrival in Rome to address this issue. We assume, of course, that he made contact with his own fr
iends as soon as possible. But the key question, which might in fact determine how everything else including the trial before Nero would turn out, had to do with the Jewish community itself (as opposed to the various Jewish Jesus-followers, some of whom might still be part of the synagogue community, but others of whom might well not be). Just as in one city after another on his earlier travels Paul had made straight for the synagogue or at least the proseuchē, and just as in the opening of Romans he had declared that the gospel was “to the Jew first, and also, equally, to the Greek,” so now he stuck to his principles and his habits and—assuming he was under house arrest and could not attend a synagogue himself—invited the leaders of the Jewish community to call on him.
The point of their first meeting was not scriptural or theological discussion. Before they could even get to that, Paul wanted to make one thing clear, something we from our distance might not have guessed from the earlier story. He had realized that, after the prolonged legal wrangling in Jerusalem and Caesarea, his appeal to Caesar might have been seen not so much as a way of getting out of trouble himself, but as a way of turning the tables and bringing countercharges against his fellow Jews. And this might have had significant implications in several directions.
The early 60s were, after all, an increasingly tense time for Roman-Jewish relations. Not only was there the bad memory of the expulsion under Claudius. In Judaea itself, a string of inept and corrupt governors, of whom Felix and Festus were simply the most recent, had enraged the locals. Rome had repressed and suppressed potential movements of revolt intermittently over the previous hundred years. But this had succeeded only in clamping down the lid on a pot that, heated to boiling point by scripture-fueled “zeal” of the sort that Paul knew only too well, was now ready to explode. All this would be well known to the Jewish communities in Rome. Might it not look as though he was now part of the problem, coming as a Jew to bear witness against his own kinsfolk?
