Acts 28:1

St. Paul's Stay of Three Months in MelitaMiracles wrought there by the Apostle, 1-10.

Acts 28:1. When they were escaped. The original verb here and in Acts 28:4 is the same that is translated ‘save' in Acts 27:43, and ‘escaped all safe' in Acts 27:44. See note on the former of these passages.

Then they knew. Probably the true reading is ‘then we knew.' St. Luke took an active part, or at least a keen interest, in the inquiry. See note on Acts 27:39.

That the island was called Melita. More correctly, ‘is called Melita.' The information would be obtained immediately on landing. The island was very well known to traders in the Levant, and it was doubtless quite familiar to the sailors, and especially the captain, in this case, though they were perplexed when they found themselves on a part of its coast which was not familiar to them.

This is the right place for a slight notice (a very slight notice is all that is requisite) of the theory that the island now under our attention was Meleda in the Adriatic. There was in the seventeenth century an animated literary warfare on this subject, which seems to have given new life to certain apocryphal Acts of St. Paul, mentioned in an Excursus at the close of this chapter. It is a curious extinct controversy, but it is now extinct for ever. That the honour of St. Paul's shipwreck should be claimed for the Dalmatian Meleda was natural. At a much earlier period, however, the same claim was put forward by one of the Byzantine Emperors; and in this case, too, it is not unlikely that local ecclesiastical feeling suggested the belief. It is more strange that some modern English writers should have fallen into this old delusion.

We have seen above (Acts 27:29; Acts 27:41) that irresistible arguments converge to the conclusion that it was on the island of Malta that St. Paul was wrecked. But the following decisive considerations should be added: (a) When St. Paul left this island, he sailed by Syracuse and Rhegium to Puteoli (Acts 28:12-13). These are precisely the natural stages for a voyage from Malta, but altogether alien from any reasonable relation with the other island. (b) Rome was the destination of Julius and his prisoners, and from the Dalmatian Meleda the natural course would have been to have gone not by the road leading through Appii Forum and the Three Taverns (Acts 28:15), but by a totally different road, (c) We find that a corn ship from Alexandria, bound for Puteoli, had wintered in the island on which St. Paul was wrecked (Acts 28:11). The harbour of Malta is a place where we should naturally have expected to find a ship under such circumstances; but at the Dalmatian Meleda she would have been altogether out of her course, (d) Under these circumstances of weather described above, St. Paul's ship could not have reached this Dalmatian island without a miracle. This point is so well put in the MS. notes of Admiral Penrose, that it is useful to quote what he says on the subject: ‘If Euroclydon blew in such a direction as to make the pilots afraid of being driven on the quicksands (and there were no such dangers but to the south-west of them), how could it be supposed that they could be driven north towards the Adriatic?... We are now told that the Euroclydon ceased to blow.... To have drifted up the Adriatic to the island of Meleda in the requisite curve, and to have passed so many islands and other dangers in ten route, would, humanly speaking, have been impossible. The distance from Claude to this Meleda is not less than 720 geographical miles, and the wind must have been long from the south to make this voyage in fourteen days.' See Life and Epistles of St. Paul, chap. xxiii. As to the arguments based upon the mention of ‘Adria,' see above on Acts 27:27. Other arguments, equally fallacious, based upon what we find in the second and third verses of this chapter, will be noticed in their proper places.