Mediterranean Cultural Network of Cities Stations of the Apostle Pauls Missionary Path

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Mediterranean Cultural Network of Cities
Stations of the Apostle Pauls Missionary Path
Jesmond Xuereb Fondazzjoni Temi
Zammit Presentation based on a script by Prof.
Peter Serracino Inglott Rhodes, 17-18 March 2008
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• St Pauls Shipwreck in Malta

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• After we had escaped we then learned that the
  island was called Melite. (Acts 28, 1)
• Hardly any scholars have any doubts today that
  Malta is the island referred to by its Greek name
  Melite in the Acts.
• The traditional belief that the site of St Pauls
  shipwreck is at St Pauls Bay is testified by the
  statue to which Pope John Paul II among others
  paid homage. On that occasion, a monumental
  souvenir was deposited by divers on the sea
  bottom.

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• St Pauls shipwreck in Malta is a highlight in
  the account of the Apostles journey as a
  prisoner from Jerusalem, the old holy city where
  Christ had been rejected by the Jews, to Rome
  then the capital city of the world and where
  Christ was accepted by the Gentiles, making Rome
  the new holy city of the Christians.
• But Festus, wishing to do the Jews a favour,
  said to Paul, Do you wish to go up to Jerusalem,
  and there be tried on these charges before me?
  Then Festus, when he had conferred with his
  council, answered, You have appealed to Caesar
  to Caesar you shall go. (Acts 25, 9-12)

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• The shipwreck is the episode told at most length
  and in greatest detail of all the episodes of the
  New Testament, except the Passion Story of Jesus
  Himself, which it resembles.
• The account of this journey occupies a part in
  the structure of the Acts of the Apostles that is
  in many ways similar to that occupied by the
  Passion narrative in the Gospels.

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• Most scholars agree that Luke is the author of
  the Acts and the Gospel that goes by his name.
  They also agree that Luke made use of previous
  writings in composing his own, making use of
  standard accounts of sea travel and shipwreck, or
  that Lukes source was some kind of diary kept by
  one of Pauls companions Aristarchus of
  Thessalonica in Macedonia. To accompany Paul was
  a courageous act of friendship since it meant
  self exposure to suffering, persecution and
  possible death with him.
• And embarking in a ship of Adramyttium, which
  was about to sail to the ports along the coast of
  Asia, we put to sea, accompanied by Aristarchus,
  a Macedonian from Thessalonica. (Acts 27, 2)

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• The most famous painting of the shipwreck in
  Malta is by Matteo Perez dAleccio, in the church
  of St Paul in Valletta. A striking feature is
  that the figure representing the Roman centurion
  Julius is almost as important as that of Paul
  himself.

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• And when it was decided that we should sail for
  Italy, they delivered Paul and some other
  prisoners to a centurion of the Augustan Cohort,
  named Julius. (Acts 27, 1)
• The Jews had accused Paul not only of breaking
  Jewish religious law but also of disloyalty to
  Caesar. Paul himself believed that he had
  received a divine mission to bear witness in Rome
  to his Christian faith to demonstrate that
  belief in Jesus Christ as the Messiah in no way
  implied disloyalty to Caesar.
• The placing together of Paul the Apostle and
  Julius the Centurion shows that the central issue
  in Pauls shipwreck concerns Church-State
  relations, or more generally the relation
  between Politics and Religion Interestingly,
  Perez dAleccio was commissioned to paint the
  picture by the Bishop of Malta, Gargallo, who had
  just been in conflict with the Grandmaster or
  Political Head of Malta.

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• Pauls ship had sailed from Myra on the southern
  coast of Asia Minor to Fair Havens in Crete.
  Symbolic meanings are evident a sea voyage in
  itself was an image of life and history. From
  Homers Odyssey to Melvilles Moby Dick, many
  great stories of the sea tell of the human
  struggle against supernatural evil. For many
  Jews, the very idea of sea travel smacked of
  defiance of the division between the chaotic seas
  and dry land in the Bible account of Creation.
  In their eyes, shipwreck was as natural a
  conclusion and punishment for seafaring as death
  was for sin.
• Technical detail in the account of Acts is as
  realistic as if it had come from a sailors
  diary A ship of 300 - 500 tons could, with the
  wind behind it, cover 6 nautical miles (11
  km/hr).
• But soon a tempestuous wind, called the
  northeaster, struck down from the land. (Acts
  27,14)

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• Pauls ship was driven by fierce winds some 470
  miles (870 km) from Crete to Malta.
• Marine archaeologists have recently sought to
  raise funds to bring to the surface the remains
  of a Roman ship discovered in the waters near the
  traditional site of the shipwreck. This
  medium-sized Roman ship fits the description of
  the one on which St Paul travelled, which was of
  medium size for the time. Large ships could
  carry 600.
• We were in all two hundred and seventy-six
  persons in the ship. (Acts 27, 37)

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• The ship was carrying grain from Egypt to Rome,
  where it was so urgently needed in Rome that the
  ship was sailing in winter despite the danger
  The ship drifts for days and weeks from the Isle
  of Crete southwards.
• As we were violently storm-tossed, they began
  next day to throw the cargo overboard and the
  third day they cast out with their own hands the
  tackle of the ship. And when neither sun nor
  stars appeared for many a day, and no small
  tempest lay on us, all hope of our being saved
  was at last abandoned. (Acts 27, 18-20)

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• It was natural for those on board (as the
  spectators on land later) to blame Paul,
  suspecting that the gods were condemning the
  political troublemaker to death by drowning even
  before he was found guilty by the Emperor. At
  this point, Paul breaks his silence with a
  promise of salvation from his God.
• I now bid you take heart for there will be no
  loss of life among you, but only of the ship. For
  this very night there stood by me an angel of the
  God to whom I belong and whom I worship, and he
  said, Do not be afraid, Paul you must stand
  before Caesar and lo, God has granted you all
  those who sail with you.' So take heart, men, for
  I have faith in God that it will be exactly as I
  have been told. But we shall have to run on some
  island. (Acts 27, 22-26)

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• On the fourteenth night, suspecting that they are
  nearing land and fearing a shipwreck, some
  sailors intend to abandon the ship by taking the
  dinghy, but Paul ensures that this does not
  happen.
• As usual, there are both realistic and symbolic
  reasons for Pauls actions realistically, the
  skill of sailors was probably needed for the
  safety of the inexperienced soldiers and
  passengers symbolically, Paul is stressing that
  salvation is not achieved by self-seeking
  individuals, but by a community bound together by
  love of each other.

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• The travellers had not been able to eat and day
  was about to dawn.
• And when he had said this, Paul took bread,
  and giving thanks to God in the presence of all
  he broke it and began to eat. (Acts 27, 35)
• Clearly it was not just an ordinary meal in the
  circumstances the language used reminds a
  Christian reader of the Mass.

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• Having eaten, the crew throw the cargo of wheat
  into the sea. The difficult situation arisen
  because of the greed of some to get the extra
  money promised by the emperor to those who
  brought wheat to Rome in the stormy winter
  months. Although the god of Paul would ensure
  the safety of all human life, they would lose the
  material object for which they had risked their
  lives in the hope of exorbitant profit.
• This act of purification precedes the
  destruction of the ship itself. The sailors
  trust in the ships high technical quality and in
  their own skill as navigators does not ensure
  salvation from the forces of nature, but turned
  out to be unjustified pride. True salvation
  required that they rid themselves of it.

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• In trying to run the ship ashore, they strike a
  sandbar. The spot is spoken of as the double
  sea or a place where two seas meet. Even
  today, when a strong easterly wind is blowing, a
  streak of surf stretching from some rocks for
  about 400m is often seen. The stern of the ship
  breaks up under the pounding of the waves.
• The soldiers' plan was to kill the prisoners,
  lest any should swim away and escape. (Acts 27,
  42)
• Thus, the narrator suggests that the storm was
  due to natural causes but the outcome was due to
  the divine will.

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• The second part of the story begins when Paul
  gets on land. The natives had lit a bonfire to
  welcome the uninvited guests from the wrecked
  ship. So Paul did not have to light the fire
  himself. The suggestion is that there always is
  some sort of fire love of some sort in
  peoples hearts, from the moment of their
  creation.
• What the apostle needs to do is just to feed the
  bonfire with dried twigs or sticks. Paul picks
  up some broken branches out of which the life has
  gone and uses them to stoke up the fire of faith.
  To kindle the fire was a very natural thing to
  do, but it is also a highly symbolic act. Christ
  had said I came on earth to light a fire.

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• Even though the sticks Paul piled upon the fire
  looked dry, there still was a living poison
  active in them and it hit back at Paul. A deadly
  viper darts out as if to show the natives that
  there was danger to life on land as well as at
  sea the whole of humankind was really embarked
  on the same planetary boat.
• When the natives saw the creature hanging from
  his hand, they said to one another, No doubt
  this man is a murderer. Though he has escaped
  from the sea, justice has not allowed him to
  live. (Acts 28, 4)

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• The Greek word Dike, which means justice, is
  probably used here as the name of the goddess
  whose function it was to punish the wicked and
  reward the good. It was a common belief that
  animals, often serpents, acted as the agents of
  God. Thus both storm and snake, on behalf of
  God, declare Paul to be not guilty but innocent.
  The natives conclude now that Paul is a god. Gods
  were probably conceived by them to be just like
  men except that they were immortal.

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• The Church called by the Maltese The Bonfires
• (with reference to the viper episode)
• Built by Grandmaster Wignacourt in the 16th
  Century to replace another church said by the
  16th-century French writer Quintin to have been
  built by the Normans, who brought the Muslim
  denomination of the island to an end probably to
  renew a pre-Muslim tradition.

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• St Paul is said then to have cured of dysentery
  the father of Publius, the Protos or Chiefman of
  the island, and all the sick who were brought to
  the same place.
• It happened that the father of Publius lay sick
  with fever and dysentery and Paul visited him
  and prayed, and putting his hands on him healed
  him. (Acts 28, 8)

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• Before the healing, Paul prays. Since gods do
  not pray to themselves, Paul was refuting the
  conclusion of the natives that he was a god. He
  also shows that he does not pretend to divine
  honours, but that both his preservation from the
  bite of the viper and the healings were graces
  bestowed by his God. These graces confirm that
  Paul is a just man and that all that happened was
  according to the divine plan that governs human
  history. Both Jews and pagans in the
  Mediterranean world at the time believed that it
  was only in the light of such a divine plan that
  events had meaning.

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• The Church of St Paul Welcomed also built by
  Wignacourt, now stands on the site of a
  considerable Roman estate, mostly devoted to
  olive production, that has been excavated around
  and under the church. The Italian archaeologists
  who dug the site found signs of its conversion
  into a place where baptism was administered.
  According to Acts, Paul and his entourage spent
  three days as guests on the estate of Publius.

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St Pauls Cathedral, at Mdina some believe it
was built on the site of the residence of
Publius, the Roman Governor mentioned in the Acts.
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• After three months we set sail in a ship which
  had wintered in the island And so we came to
  Rome. (Acts 28, 11-14)
• The Maltese loaded Paul and his companions with
  timais, a word which can mean both financial
  rewards and honours. The scene recalls the
  putting in common of their resources by the early
  Christian Communities. Paul, possibly assisted
  by the physician Luke, had given freely of his
  both physical and spiritual therapeutic skills,
  and the Maltese gave equally abundantly out of
  their resources.
• Their descendants have continued to keep alive
  the memory of this constitution of the first
  Christian Community in Malta, through the
  dedication of this whole area to St Paul and to
  cherish its apostolic foundation.

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• Malta had been a Roman dependency from the year
  218 BC. It formed part of the province of
  Sicily. Its inhabitants are described in Acts as
  being barbarians. The word actually means
  speaking neither Greek nor Latin. Although
  inscriptions in both languages have been found in
  Malta, the Maltese almost certainly spoke
  Phoenician as their native language. Most
  interestingly, the Religion prevalent on the
  island was almost certainly still that of the
  Mother Goddess.

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• The Acts presents St Pauls vocation of bringing
  the news of Christs victory over death to the
  pagans, after it was rejected by most Jews.
  There is a clear strategy in the choice of places
  to which Paul preaches
• 1. There is Philippi, where God is worshipped in
  the open country and the powerful exploit the
  magical talents of their servants. In the
  religion to which Paul counterposes Christianity,
  the gods are the supreme despots.
• 2. In Athens and Corinth, the religion was that
  of the philosophers who worshipped the unknown
  god.
• 3. In Ephesus, the main focus of worship was the
  statue of the goddess Artemis with 100 breasts.
  She embodied wealth as the supreme value.

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• Basically, these represent three styles of the
  religion prevalent in the Graeco-Roman world.
  The Greeks had in fact substituted Zeus and the
  sky gods for the previously dominant
  Mediterranean cult of the Goddess of Fertility.
  Malta, as archaeological findings show, had
  remained faithful to the earth goddess as
  embodying the supreme value, that of life.
• Malta represents Paul venturing into more alien
  territory than that of Jewish, Greek or Roman
  culture, into the Phoenician or Punic world that
  had been historically a rival civilization to
  that of the Greeks and Romans. In this way, St
  Paul is seen to bear witness of salvation to the
  ends of the earth. The story of the Shipwreck in
  Malta serves Luke very well to sum up both books,
  the Gospel and the Acts, with a fitting
  conclusion.

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St Pauls Collegiate Church and statue Rabat
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• Thank you

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• Contacts
• Fondazzjoni Temi Zammit
• Ir-Razzett tal-Hursun
• University of Malta
• Msida MSD 2080
• Tel [phone]
• Web www.ftz.org.mt