The Apostle St. Paul & Malta's Under-The-Sea TempleActs 27:20-28:2
"Since both the Sun and the stars remained invisible for days on end and the storm raged unabated, all the hope we had that we might be saved was finally abandoned… The fourteenth night came, and we were still drifting hopelessly in the Sea of Adria. However, about midnight the sailors began to suspect that they were approaching land. So they took soundings and made it twenty fathoms; and after a brief interval they took soundings again and made it fifteen fathoms. Afraid, therefore, that we might run aground on some rocky spot or other, the sailors dropped four anchors from the stern, while being filled with a longing that daylight might come… (There were two hundred and seventy-six of us, all told, on board ship.) When they had had their fill, they lightened the ship by throwing the corn overboard into the sea.
When daylight came and they could see land, they did not recognize it. However, they were in a position to make out that there was a kind of bay there with a sandy beach; and their plan was, if possible, to run the ship on that beach. So they cut the anchors free, leaving them in the sea. At the same time they loosened the ropes which secured the steering rudders, and setting the foresail to the wind, they headed for the beach. However, they found themselves caught between cross-currents, and so came upon a spot that had water on both sides. It was there that they let the ship run aground, the forepart becoming fixed and immovable, while the stern began to break up with the pounding of the waves… They all reached the land safe and sound.
Having thus been brought to safety, we subsequently learned that the name of the island was Malta. Its inhabitants, uncultured as they were, showed a concern and care for us which was quite out of the ordinary."
Heinz W. Cassirer, God's New Covenant - A New Testament Translation
William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, Grand Rapids, Michigan (1989)
From the heart of me that is the heart of G-d let Love stream forth into all my worlds so that I become One with the waters of Life.
The ancient and massive submarine structures discernible on the high-altitude post-World-War-II aerial photo-map shown above stand in fairly close proximity to the traditional location of St. Paul's shipwreck in October/November AD 59, if Peter Serracino Inglott's dating is correct (David Trump still accepts AD 60 as the likely date). What may we reasonably infer to be the nature of their historical involvement in the actual circumstances of that significant event but for which Christianity as we now know it might never have been brought to birth? What may we properly suppose is the religious meaning of an under-the-sea and prediluvial "temple" - and this temple! - coming just now to the light of day? Meditating these questions you are invited to take a close look at each of these three quite different but all equally relevant maps.
Comm S. A. Scicluna, whom I was privileged to speak with, shortly before he died in June 2000, is the author of "The Shipwreck of St. Paul - Underwater Researches" (12 unpublished pages + charts), in which he adumbrates "the results of underwater researches carried out during the period 1961-1985, by members of the Malta Underwater Archaeological Branch of the International Institute of Mediterranean Underwater Archaeology, in the areas of St. Paul's Bay, Raw Qawra and Ghallis. Various objects from the wreck of an ancient sailing-ship were identified" (cf.: Michael Galea & John Ciarlo, editors, St. Paul in Malta - A Compendium of Pauline Studies, Malta, 1992, p.88).
Offshore underwater archaeological explorations, in addition to being expensive and so quite out of the question without generous international assistance, will undoubtedly require the courageous development of new skills and their persistent application to the task in hand - but above all, despite the clamour of our news-hungry world, they will also require supreme integrity and patience, if the mistakes of the 1830's and '40's are not to be repeated! In addition to containing a great deal of relevant information this and other pages on our websites include a few words of, I hope, helpful advice.
"Some writers," as Albert Ganado acutely and pertinently avers in his Foreword to Canon John Ciarlò's The Hidden Gem - St. Paul's Collegiate Church, Valletta, Malta (4th edition, 1999), "consider that the shipwreck of the Apostle Saint Paul on our hospitable island shores was the greatest event in the history of Malta.." Now, however, that we have, all of us together, successfully crossed what Pope John-Paul II had earlier identified as the Threshold of Hope and find ourselves, remaining problems notwithstanding, still alive and on our feet, surely it is high time we acknowledged that, in fact, St. Paul's shipwreck is actually one of the greatest events in the history of Life on this planet.
In the course of his own much more recent pastoral visit to Malta & Gozo from 25-27 May 1990 the Pontiff (whom our photo shows on the deck of the catamaran "St. Francis" as he imparts his apostolic benediction to a statue of St Paul being lowered to its resting place on the sea-bed in St. Paul's Bay) expressed it as his personal opinion that, although St. Paul had not spoken Maltese, the islanders had experienced no difficulty in understanding his message. One good reason in favour of this opinion is, of course, the fact that even though, as a Roman citizen, Paul of Tarsus will have spoken Greek, the lingua franca of those days, quite well, he will undoubtedly have felt much more at home when conversing in whatever sort of Phśnician was then current in Tarsus, and that, we may with some degree of confidence affirm, will not have differed markedly from Punic as then spoken by the generality of his "barbarian", i.e, "non-Greek-speaking" (Acts 28:2) hosts on Malta and Gozo, where there have never been any "dialects" in the strict sense of that term to contend with.
Recognising that Malta's "religious and spiritual history is closely tied to the figure of the Apostle to the Nations, St. Paul" and accepting St. Luke's description of their "adventure-laden trip" the Pope, in the course of a General Audience held in the Vatican on 30 May 1990, specifically referred to "the dramatic turns of the storm, which caught the ship on which Paul was travelling by surprise and left him shipwrecked on Malta's shores where the sailors and passengers found refuge."
Clearly, therefore, neither the Pope nor his advisors shared Agnes Seppelfricke's opinion that Heinz Warnecke's Die tatsächliche Romfahrt des Apostel Paulus (The Actual Voyage of Paul to Rome: Stuttgart 1987) was a masterpiece of historical research that proved that Paul, as a prisoner on his way to Rome, had never reached the Maltese islands at all, but had instead simply landed near a place sometimes called Melitae on the promontory of Argostoli in the West Grecian island of Cephallenia. So, although this bizzare thesis, which has already earned for its author a considerable some of money and not a little fame, has been more recently set forth again in Paulus war nie auf Malta (Paul has never been in Malta: H. Warnecke & T. Schirrmacher, Neuhauden-Stuttgart 1991), it is little more than a literary curiosity. Jürgen Wehnert published a masterly refutation, "Gestrandet" (Shipwrecked) in Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche (87, 1990, 67-99), a revised English version of which may be read in Michæl Galea & John Ciarlò's unfortunately now out-of-print but admirably well edited St. Paul in Malta - a compendium of Pauline studies (Malta 1992, pp.5-38), which also contains a most useful 16-page bibliography.
Wehnert reminds us that Luke's Acts are not simply "immediate reflections of historical events" but a contribution to Heilgeschichte bringing together the complex structure of his "political, religious, poetical and other interests" in a way we may not hope properly to interpret "without propedeutic reflection and a proper methodology", and what Anthony J. Frendo has written about this, albeit in a seemingly quite different connection, certainly needs to be kept well in mind (cf. his "Archæology, Epistemology and the Earliest Phase of Maltese Prehistory" in Anton Mifsud and Charles Savona Ventura, editors, Facets of Maltese Prehistory 1999, Prehistoric Society of Malta 1999).
Mgr Carmelo Sant, emeritus Professor of Theology in the University of Malta, who contributed to this Compendium (pp.39-51) a 10-page essay entitled "St. Paul's Shipwreck on the Island of Melite - Acts 27,1-28,", accompanied by a 1-page map showing the Apostle's itinerary as specified in the Acts and an Appendix reproducing the text of two ancient inscriptions referring to the Protos Melitaion and Primus Melitensium respectively (the very title used by Luke in referring to Publius), will, I feel sure, have noted the Holy Father's very careful choice of words: "religious and spiritual history", "the figure of the Apostle", "adventure-laden trip", and "dramatic turns of the storm", and he will, I think, have rejoiced in them as so many prudent echoes of his own even more circumspect choice of title, St. Luke having, in his opinion, provided us with an account of Paul's voyage that is "historically accurate" as regards the essentials, yet not devoid of "literary artifice".
As Paul Guillaumier, to whom this Compendium's editors entrusted the task of providing its readers with a "New Perspective on the Historicity of St. Paul's Shipwreck on Melite" (pp.53-114), very helpfully reminds us:
"In relation to the writing of Luke-Acts in general, and the we-passages in particular, communal inspiration animates the individual authorship which is probably anonymous in origin. Only, a later church tradition attributes the writing to an Apostle, or to one of his followers. This means, in fact, that there exists an oral Gospel and Church tradition(s) based on Old Testament prophetic inspiration which, when written down by a member of the community, excludes any personal motives for authorship or any ephemeral literary aim or purpose." To put it quite simply, prophets do not write for profit. "All theories, then, which consider Luke as an individual Hellenistic church-historian juggling with ecclesiology or theology, are suspect" (op.cit, pp.64-5).
"Mylitta" was, of course, an ancient Assyrian name for the goddess of love, and I am rather surprised that none of the authorities so far quoted thought that fact worth mentioning on account of its possible relevance to our wider and deeper understanding of the counsels of Divine Wisdom in relation to Malta and its sister islands. However, until the nearby under-the-sea temple has been appropriately explored, any further comment at this stage appears premature. Certainly Robert Cornuke's recent attempts to locate Paul's shipwreck somewhere near Munxar, in other words quite close to a local temple of Juno, fall very far wide of the mark. Meanwhile, what little I have ventured to add here to what has already been mentioned above, must be judged on its own merits as a very slightly more precise specification of where it actually was that the great Apostle of the Nations set foot for the very first time on Maltese soil.
No doubt "the beach" the sailors at first did their best to make for, once they had lost their anchors where they would appear to have been recently found and once they had come to realise that their ship couldn't possibly ride out the storm, was, as others have suggested, that at Pwales in the innermost recess of St. Paul's Bay (this is the "aigialós", "coast", "beach" or "sandy beach" mentioned by Father Paul Galea, OP, in his The Routes and the Cities of St. Paul's Travels, Malta: A. C. Aquilina & Co., 1960, p.59) - it may not have been all that suitable, but the sailors had no means of knowing that and, as things turned out, they never got that far.
The wind, which had previously been North-Easterly (sometimes called the 'vento euro-siculo') was by now coming from the East, and they were not so foolhardy as to leave their vessel fully exposed by heading for St. Paul's Island, as it is called to-day. Instead, seeking as much shelter as was available - and that as quickly as possible, they sailed as close as they might hope safely to contrive to the Qawra-Bugibba-St. Paul's Bay-Tal-Veccja coast-line, very likely following something like the route indicated on our accompanying map of the area, and then they naturally attempted to land at the very first reasonable opportunity they had.
Clearly, this will have brought them to Ta'l-Ghazzenin in Gillieru bay, very close to where the former church of San Pawl il-Bahar used to be and not far distant from where a new church in honour of St. Paul now stands, embellished with marble-plaques setting out the salient verses of St. Luke's account of this incident in Acts in several languages, including Maltese, English, French, German, Italian and Polish. As we know, and as they very soon found out, there are also some very dangerous rocks there too, a sort of mini-barrier reef - hence the final stage of their shipwreck.
To quote Father Galea again (op.cit.,pp.63-4):
Despite the awkwardness of some of his syntax, from among the various authors I have consulted it is undoubtedly Paul Galea who has approached most closely to the truth, which is not that "tal-Ghazzelin" or "tal-Ghazzenin" derives from "Thalassa", but that St. Luke's "dithalassos" is simply his attempt to transliterate and set down in writing what St. Paul told him was the name of the place where they had both just, thank God, landed.
St. Paul speaking to the local "barbarians" in his own not too different brand of Phśnician had, quite naturally, asked them what this blessed spot was called, and they had been very happy to tell him its name, or, to be more precise, what it was called. Locally, of course, it quite definitely was never referred to as "tal-Ghazzenin" ('The place of the lazy fellows' - cf. Joseph Aquilina's "A Brief Survey of Maltese Place-Names" in his Papers in Maltese Linguistics, 6th reprint, University of Malta 1997, p.200) but it was known as "tal-Hassilin", meaning "The Place of the Washers of Fleeces."
Sheep-skins are valuable commodities and, in order both to free their wool from its own rich natural oil (lanolin) which tends to make the individual strands all clog together, and also in order to impart to each fleece the salty taste that moths don't like, by ancient tradition they were (until as recently as seventy years ago and perhaps, in one or two places, even less) washed in sea-water at some suitable location, and "tal-Hassilin" was long ago well recognised as a spot admirably suitable for that purpose. So, in fact, "tal-Hassilin" is not a place-name like "Luqa", but an identification by functional-description like "the Harbour" or "the Airport". Paul may or may not have passed on all this information to Luke, but that important key-word at least he will surely have mentioned to him - and then Luke either slightly miss-heard him, or else simply felt he must use a word that at least looked something like Greek!
I realise that Ta'l-Ghazzenin isn't the only place along the Maltese shore-line where fleeces used to be treated in sea-water as I have described. Shepherds in the old days used several other shallow rock-strewn or pebbly beaches for the same purpose, whichever happened to be most convenient, depending on where they lived. Those from Siggiewi, for instance, would make their way down to a particular spot at Ghar Lapsi known as "T'a' Nghag", which means "Of the sheep". I've also visited a small beach not far from the Mnajdra Temple which is clearly suitable, and am reliably informed that shepherds from Qrendi were still using it when I was a boy.
I am also aware that as eminent an authority as Mgr Saydon rejected L. Cutajar's suggestion (in Fejn Nizel San Pawl, Malta 1953) that the Greek thalassa is in this instance a corruption of the then local thalassanejn as "discordant", since in Maltese thalassa would yield not thalassanejn but thalassetejn but, of course, the question before us is not that of how Paul translated Luke's Greek into Phśnician for the benefit of their Punic-speaking bystanders, but of how Luke more or less adequately transcribed in Greek characters the sounds he heard when Paul repeated to him the precise local name their hosts had used - and then perhaps, at least in his own mind, linked this word with his own memories of Peter's preaching and of his loving insistence that Jesus is the Good Shepherd for us all.
Perhaps, too, that new church of St. Paul stands, as many believe, on the very spot where the Apostle shook the snake into the fire? There isn't a single word in Acts that settles that question. But if drinking water is what you want, I don't deny to Tal-Veccja its claim to be the place where St. Paul miraculously produced a whole fountain full of it for himself and all his companions; he certainly can't have landed there, the rocks are much too steep.
- Shalom & Welcome! - 
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