THE REALLY STRANGE thing about Paul’s voyage to Rome is the way in which Paul himself appears to take charge. He is a prisoner under guard. He is neither the ship’s owner nor its captain. He is of course a seasoned traveler and, according to 2 Corinthians 11, has already been shipwrecked three times, once ending up adrift at sea for a night and a day. But that hardly justifies, one would think, his giving advice and instructions, as he does repeatedly throughout the voyage. I think Luke intended this to be a positive portrait of Paul. That is not how it strikes me. He comes across as bossy.
Though Paul had sailed the Mediterranean and the Aegean often enough, he was still the heir to a Jewish tradition in which the sea represented the dark forces of chaos, which had been overcome by God’s good creation, as well as the equally dark force that had threatened the children of Israel before the Red Sea had opened up to let them through. Occasional psalms such as Psalm 93 invoked the same idea. In the book of Daniel, one of the most popular books in the Jewish world of Paul’s day, the “monsters,” representing the wicked pagan empires, come up out of the sea.1 The sea was the symbol of chaos, the source of danger, the untamable power that might at any moment strike back against the One God and his purposes in creation and new creation. Paul treated it warily, planning journeys so that he did not have to travel during winter.2 If there were dangers on the land—plots, brigands, whatever—one might choose to go by sea instead. But that was always a calculated risk.
Luke has constructed Acts in such a way that chapter 27, the great voyage and shipwreck, functions as a kind of parallel to the climax of his Gospel, which is obviously the trial and crucifixion of Jesus. That had been the moment when “the power of darkness” did its worst.3 This, now, is the moment when Paul has to face the worst that the powers can throw at him before he can arrive in Rome to announce Jesus as Lord. His rescue and his arrival in Rome thus have the character of “salvation,” a major theme of the chapter; in fact, Greek words related to “saving” occur seven times in quick succession.4 Luke seems to view the whole episode as a kind of dramatic enactment of the spiritual battle Paul described in Ephesians 6. It is always risky to jump too quickly to the view that Luke and Paul, being close friends and travel companions, must have held the same views on all subjects, but on this point I think they would have been close. Nor will Luke have ignored the fact that the shipwreck, with the entire ship’s company in danger of drowning, was like a dramatic though distorted version of the crossing of the Red Sea—a Passover moment, a baptismal image in itself.
Paul was fortunate in the particular officer who was put in charge of him. Julius, a centurion from the imperial cohort, arranged for a ship from Caesarea up the coast to Sidon, where he let Paul visit his friends. He had already realized that this strange prisoner was quite happy to be taken to Rome and was not going to run away. They then sailed around the northeast Mediterranean to Myra on the coast of Lycia. That was the destination of their original vessel, so they found another ship, this time on its way from Alexandria to Italy. There were, Luke tells us later, 276 persons on board, of whom a significant number would have been slaves. Plenty of people wanted to get to Rome. One can only imagine the diversity of human life cooped up in the small space. If there was little privacy in ancient city life, there was none at all on a crowded ship.
It was late in the year for such a voyage. Sailing in the Mediterranean was generally reckoned in antiquity to be dangerous after the middle of September and more or less impossible from November through to February or March. Rome, however, needed a regular and plentiful supply of grain from Egypt, and Claudius had taken special measures to encourage the shipments to continue for as much of the year as possible. It looks as though the ship owner in this case was one of those prepared to take risks in the hope of a bigger profit.
The early part of the voyage was slower than expected. When they finally made it as far as Crete, it was already well into October, getting into the dangerous period. (Luke mentions that this was after the Day of Atonement, which in AD 59 fell on October 5.) They made landfall at Fair Havens, a small fishing settlement on the south side of Crete, a few miles from the town of Lasea. By common consent this was not a good place to spend the winter. The harbor was not secure against storms, and the town itself was too far back from the port to be easily accessible for those who would need to stay on board to guard the ship. So they wanted to press on, knowing that much better accommodation would be available at Phoenix, about fifty miles farther along the coast.
This is the point where Paul—the prisoner!—gave his advice. This is not as unlikely as some might suppose. Paul was a Roman citizen who had not even been formally charged, far less found guilty of any offense. Since he had a small retinue of friends traveling with him and was obviously a man of integrity and intelligence, he must have commanded respect. There is plenty of evidence, anyway, for decisions about travel in such circumstances being made after discussion among interested parties. He warned that the voyage would be nothing but trouble; heavy losses would be likely, not only to the cargo and the ship itself, but quite possibly to human life. This was actually a reasonable assessment. But the centurion, who as the imperial representative seems to have taken ultimate charge over the head of the ship’s captain and owner, took their advice instead. They had their vested interests to consider, and they seem to have thought it was worth the risk.
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 friends 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?
What’s more, if Caesar was now presented with a Roman citizen (who happened to be Jewish) coming to complain of his treatment in Judaea, might that not fuel the Roman desire to deal with those troublesome Jews once and for all? Might it not also awaken echoes of Claudius’s decree? Might the Jews once again find themselves unwelcome in Rome, just a few years after returning to their homes and their livelihoods? Might this spark the kind of anti-Jewish backlash we saw when the mob beat up Sosthenes in Corinth or when Alexander tried to speak to the crowd in Ephesus? Paul would be only too aware of this danger. He was eager to head it off before it could begin.
He would not, in fact, have been the first Jew to make a journey to Rome in order to register a protest about the state of affairs back in Judaea. Archelaus, the heir of Herod the Great, had gone to Rome to receive his kingdom sixty years before. Augustus had granted Archelaus his wish, though in a modified form, installing him as “ethnarch” rather than “king.” But not long afterward a combined delegation of Jews and Samaritans went to Rome to protest, and in AD 6 Archelaus was banished.9 That story, with a different twist, is probably reflected in Jesus’s parable about a king going away, receiving kingly authority, and coming back to face local opposition, though Jesus was thinking then of a different kind of kingdom and different opposition.10
So was there now going to be trouble? Was Paul’s appeal to Caesar going to pull down the roof on top of the Jewish community in Rome and Judaea? Might that not undermine all the things he had been trying to accomplish in his letter? He had written what he did in order to prepare carefully for his own arrival in Rome at last. But the delicate balance of what he had said three years earlier might now be jeopardized by the realization that he had come because he had appealed to Caesar.
So Paul insisted to the Jewish elders in Rome, as he had insisted in every speech he had made in Jerusalem and Caesarea, that he was a loyal Jew and that his whole mission was about “the hope of Israel.” This fits so securely with the Paul we know from the letters, not least Galatians, 1 Corinthians, Philippians, and of course Romans, that we can be sure we are on solid historical ground. This is exactly the sort of thing he would have wanted to say. Of course, for him “the hope of Israel” meant both the worldwide inheritance (the king of Israel would be king of the world) and the resurrection of the dead. Paul saw both of these in Jesus and therefore saw following Jesus as the way, the only way, by which this ancient national aspiration would be achieved.
To his relief, no doubt, the Jewish elders told him that they had not received any messages about him from Judaea. Nobody had passed on warnings about him. They did, however, know about this messianic sect, perhaps because that had been the cause of their expulsion by Claudius twelve or more years before. All they knew was that everybody was saying rude things about this crazy antisocial new movement. They were indeed. The Roman historian Tacitus, writing about this period and this movement from the safe vantage point of the early second century, says with a sneer that the Christians are a group of people who hate the whole human race. “What can you expect?” he says. “All the filth and folly of the world ends up in Rome sooner or later.”11 Yes, Paul would have thought had he heard that comment: folly to Gentiles, scandal to Jews. Nothing much had changed—though Tacitus still suggests that Nero’s persecution went a bit too far. (This is rather like Trajan advising Pliny that, though of course Christians must be killed, one does not want people spying and informing on their neighbors. Standards of civilized behavior must be kept up.)12
So the Jewish elders fixed a day where they could meet Paul at more leisure and explore his message. We know the script. The subject would be the hope of Israel: the One God becoming king of all the world. For Paul, this would mean telling the story as we have seen him tell it in city after city: Genesis, Exodus, Numbers (remember Phinehas), Deuteronomy, the Psalms, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and much, much more. Patriarchs, Moses, David, exile, Messiah. Crucifixion, resurrection. We can guess what is coming next. Some would believe; others would not. Paul saw with sorrow that this too was part of the scriptural promise and warning. He quoted Isaiah 6, as Jesus had done: the heart of the people had grown dull.13 He had thought all this through and laid it all out in the letter he had written to Rome three years earlier. Now here, in Rome itself, he saw it before his own eyes.
There was still the hope. In his mind’s eye, he would recall the prayer he had uttered in the letter (“My prayer to God . . . is for their salvation”), the possibility he had held out (“If they do not remain in unbelief, they will be grafted back in”), and the promise to which he had clung (“ ‘all Israel shall be saved’ . . . when the fullness of the nations comes in”).14 But for the moment the pattern continued, the pattern, that is, of Paul’s whole career to date. The gospel was “to the Jew first,” but when the Jews rejected it, as most had rejected Jesus himself, “this salvation from God has been sent to the Gentiles.” This line, from Acts 28:28, directly echoes Romans 11:11 (“by their trespass, salvation has come to the nations”). Paul may himself have echoed, under his breath or in his heart, the words that end the latter verse, “in order to make them jealous,” perhaps going on to 11:14, “so that, if possible, I can make my ‘flesh’ jealous, and save some of them.” But it would be tactless to say this out loud to his visitors, at least on this first occasion. What might make them “jealous,” after all, would not be a word of teaching from him, but the sight of non-Jews celebrating the ancient Jewish hope of the kingdom, of the Messiah, of resurrection. That was, in part, why it was important for Paul that the house-churches in Rome should find their way to united worship and community, whatever it took. These issues were all intertwined.
Paul waited two years, under house arrest, for his case to come before the emperor. A strange Jewish prisoner would not have rated highly on Nero’s list of priorities. Paul was, however, free to welcome people to his quarters and to go on making the royal announcement, the true “gospel” of which the imperial “good news” was, as he believed, simply a parody. Nobody stopped him; he told anybody and everybody who would listen that the One God of Israel was the world’s true king and that he had installed his son Jesus, Israel’s Messiah, as Lord of the world. Paul taught, says Luke, “with all boldness.”15 We are not surprised; “boldness” had been the keynote of Paul’s self-description, even in the tense and contested atmosphere of 2 Corinthians 3 when the “boldness” of his apostolic proclamation had been a major theme. He had never tried to hide things. He never tried to curry favor. (Here is, no doubt, one root of what comes across in the account of the voyage as bossiness and interfering; Paul was used to saying what he thought.) He was much more afraid of not being true to the gospel than of any consequences a “bold” proclamation might have had. He was loyal to Israel’s traditions as he had seen them rushing together in the Messiah. He was loyal, ultimately, to the Messiah himself, faithful to the one who had himself been faithful to the point of death.
But what of Paul’s own death? If he arrived in Rome in AD 60, as seems the most likely, these two years of house arrest take us forward to 62. What happened then?
* * *
Two possible scenarios, very different from one another, follow from this point. In a small way, they integrate with the question of why Acts stops where it does. An early date for Acts places it as a document for use in Paul’s trial, meaning that Luke was writing it down during that final two-year period, telling the story of one “hearing” after another. The whole thing would then have been building up toward the coming appearance before Nero, with a heavy emphasis on Paul’s innocence, on his standing as a loyal (albeit messianic) Jew, and in consequence on his right as a Jewish citizen of Rome, at least as seen by Gallio in Corinth, to pursue his vocation as he pleased. A later date for Acts might indicate that Luke knew the result of the trial, but did not want to draw attention to it—especially if Paul had after all been condemned right away—because it would have spoiled his story of pagan authorities supporting, to their own surprise perhaps, this strange wandering Jew. Or it might indicate that Luke knew Paul had been released by Nero and had been able to engage in other activity, but that his (Luke’s) own purpose had been served; that is, the gospel of God’s kingdom had now gone from Jerusalem and Judaea to Samaria and thence to the ends of the earth.16 The gospel itself, not Paul, is the real hero of Luke’s story. That, then, would be enough.
Trying to guess Luke’s motives for stopping here does not, then, take us very far. We are left, like some postmodern novelists, with the possibility of writing two or even three endings to the story and leaving readers to decide. There are, of course, traditions that Paul was martyred in Rome; you can still see his chains, so it is claimed, by the tomb where he is supposed to lie, in the church of St. Paul Outside the Walls. Once, in October 2008, I heard the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra there, playing Bruckner’s magnificent Sixth Symphony as a command performance for Pope Benedict, who sat enthroned in the middle surrounded by a large number of cardinals. The music was impressive, but it provided me no clue, of course, as to whether Paul is really buried there.
So the options divide, and then divide again. The first and most obvious is that Paul was killed in the persecution of Christians that followed the great fire of Rome in AD 64. Since most of the Christians, as we mentioned, lived on the impoverished southwest bank of the river, and since the fire was confined to the wealthier northeast side, they were an easy target—people would say, they must have started it, since their own homes were untouched! (In any case, since they didn’t worship the gods, any disaster was probably their fault.) It is perfectly possible that Paul and perhaps Peter as well were among the leaders rounded up and made to suffer the penalty for a disaster whose actual origins have remained unknown from that day to this. Paul, as a citizen, would have been entitled to the quick death of beheading with a sword rather than the slow, appalling tortures that Nero inflicted on many others or the upside-down crucifixion that tradition assigns to Peter. But even then, if Paul were killed in 64, that leaves two more years after the two that Luke mentions. Would that have been enough time for a visit to Spain?
Quite possibly. There was a regular traffic between Rome and Tarraco, quite enough to justify, if not finally to vindicate, the enthusiastic advocacy of some today in the historic Catalan town of Tarragona. (Tarraco was the capital of Hispania Tarraconensis, which since the time of Augustus had stretched right across the north of the Iberian Peninsula to the Atlantic coast.) We can see why he might have wished to go. The original temple to Augustus had been replaced in Paul’s day with a dramatic terraced complex for the imperial cult, in which the main temple was easily visible from several miles out to sea, as is the present cathedral on the same site. If I am right in suggesting that Paul was eager to announce Jesus as king and Lord in places where Caesar was claiming those titles along with others, then Tarraco, in the province at the farthest reaches of the world, would have been a natural target.
I am inclined now to give more weight than I once did to the testimony of Clement, an early bishop of Rome. Writing about Paul in the late first century, he says:
After he had been seven times in chains, had been driven into exile, had been stoned, and had preached in the east and in the west, he won the genuine glory for his faith, having taught righteousness to the whole world and having reached the farthest limits of the west. Finally, when he had given his testimony before the rulers, he thus departed from the world and went to the holy place, having become an outstanding example of patient endurance.17
“The farthest limits of the west” would of course mean Spain. Clement could have been simply extrapolating from Romans 15, and it would suit his purpose to give the impression of Paul’s worldwide reach. But he was a central figure in the Roman church within a generation of Paul’s day. He is writing at the most about thirty years after Paul’s death. It is far more likely that he knew more solid and reliable traditions about Paul than we, discounting him, can invent on our own.
The other alternative at this point is that Paul, given his freedom at a hearing in 62, changed his mind from what he had said in Miletus (about not showing his face in that region again) and more conclusively in Romans 15:23 (having no more room left for work in the East). This too is possible. Paul makes a great play in 2 Corinthians about having the right to change his mind. Just because he had said before that he would do this or that, he might nevertheless do something else when the time came. He would follow God’s leading in the moment. All his plans carried the word “perhaps” about with them.
But to what end? Why go back to the East? If he did make it to Spain, could he not then have gone north? Might we not have had the chance of a Pauline version of Blake’s famous poem “Jerusalem” (“And did those feet in ancient time / Walk upon England’s mountains green?”). Perhaps on reflection it is as well that we do not. How do we fit together the travel details in those most tricky of Pauline pieces, the so-called Pastoral Letters?
I have kept these back until now because they are, in my judgment, far harder to fit not only into Paul’s travel plans, but into Paul’s writing style than any of the other relevant material. (Some earlier generations thought that Paul wrote the Letter to the Hebrews. The standard objection to this—that the theology of the letter is so unlike Paul’s—is considerably overstated; but there is no evidence that he had any hand in it.) Granted, as I said before, writers may easily change their style between one week and the next, between one work and the next. But the changes required for us comfortably to ascribe to Paul the letters we call 1 Timothy and Titus, especially, are of a different kind to those required for us to accept Ephesians and Colossians; more too than those required for us to recognize those two other very different letters, 1 and 2 Corinthians, as both from the same hand.
However, if we were to make a start, it ought, in my judgment, to be with 2 Timothy. If this were the only “Pastoral” letter we had, I suspect it would never have incurred the same questioning that it has endured through its obvious association with 1 Timothy and Titus. Second Timothy claims to be written from Rome in between two legal hearings; Paul has been lonely and bereft, though Onesiphorus, a friend from his time in Ephesus, has come to Rome, searched for him, and found him.18 Onesiphorus contrasts sadly with “all who are in Asia,” who, Paul says, have turned away from him—presumably to something more like the message urged upon the Galatians in the late 40s. But where is Timothy? He cannot now be in Ephesus if he needs Paul, in Rome, to tell him what is happening there. And where has Paul been?
He speaks of leaving a cloak at Troas.19 This would fit easily enough with the earlier trip from Corinth to Jerusalem; Paul might well have been absentminded after an all-night preaching session enlivened by someone falling out of a window. But if he had wanted to send somebody to retrieve the cloak, he would have been far more likely to do that from his two-year imprisonment in Caesarea than to wait until he was in Rome. Indeed, had it not been for the mention of Onesiphorus looking for Paul in Rome in 2 Timothy 1:17, a case could have been made for the letter being written from Caesarea, though other details would remain puzzling. He speaks of sending Tychicus to Ephesus, which might work if Ephesians and Colossians were after all written from Rome, not Ephesus itself, though as I said earlier that raises other problems. He sends greetings to Prisca and Aquila; maybe they had moved back one more time from Rome to Ephesus, but if so, they hadn’t stayed in Rome very long. He says that Erastus had stayed in Corinth, whereas in Acts 19:22 he goes ahead of Paul to Macedonia. He mentions leaving Trophimus behind, ill, in Ephesus, whereas according to Acts 21:29 he is with Paul in Jerusalem. None of these, individually or taken together, is historically impossible. It may be that the comparatively easy convergence we have seen between Paul’s other letters and the narrative of Acts has lulled us into thinking that we know more than we do. But it does seem to me that if 2 Timothy is genuine, then it certainly implies some additional activity back in the East, despite Paul’s earlier plans, after an initial hearing in Rome. And it implies that this time, unlike the situation reflected in Philippians 1, Paul really does believe he is facing death at last:
I am already being poured out as a drink-offering; my departure time has arrived. I have fought the good fight; I have completed the course; I have kept the faith. What do I still have to look for? The crown of righteousness! The Lord, the righteous judge, will give it to me as my reward on that day—and not only to me, but also to all who have loved his appearing.20
We can easily imagine Paul writing that—as we can the next passage, where he comes across as tired, anxious, weary of having people who let him down (“Demas . . . is in love with this present world!”21). If 2 Timothy is genuine, then, it reflects a complex journey—and a return to Rome—of which we know nothing else.
First Timothy seems altogether brighter, somewhat like the contrast we see when we move back from 2 to 1 Corinthians. Timothy is in Ephesus,22 and Paul is giving him instructions about his work there. Much of the instruction in this letter could have been given, in its basic content, at any time in the first two centuries; there is little to connect it directly with Paul, or indeed with Timothy either. Hymenaeus and Alexander are mentioned as blasphemers who have been “handed over to the satan,”23 as Paul recommended doing with the incestuous man in 1 Corinthians.24 Hymenaeus then crops up in 2 Timothy 2:17, this time in company with Philetus, this time over a more specific charge: “saying that the resurrection has already happened.” We are left looking at small fragments of a jigsaw puzzle for which we have far too few pieces and no guiding picture to show us what might belong where.
As for the letter to Titus, the problems are compounded. It is possible that the journey from Miletus to Jerusalem in Acts 21 took a far more circuitous route than Luke indicates and that the party went around by Crete, dropping off Titus on the way. Acts 21:1–3 does, however, offer a close description of events, and we have already been told that Paul was in a hurry because he wanted to be in Jerusalem for Pentecost.25 The only other geographical detail of possible significance is that Paul tells Titus he has decided to winter in Nicopolis, a small town on (with strong Roman imperial associations) the northwest coast of Greece. Again, we have no indication anywhere in Paul or Acts that he was going in that direction, which—to repeat the point yet again—does not mean that it is either impossible or unlikely, merely that we do not have the larger picture within which a small detail like this might fit.
So, as with Paul’s putative trip to Spain, I have become more open to the possibility of a return visit to the East after an initial hearing in Rome. The problem might then be that these two, Spain and the East, might seem to cancel one another out. If Paul was to be back in Rome by the time of Nero’s persecution, facing additional hearings in difficult circumstances, two years would hardly be enough for the relevant trips, both west and east. But perhaps that is the point. Perhaps the persecution would not need any legal trappings. The emperor had laid the blame for the fire on the Christians, and that would be enough. Perhaps, then, one or both trips might after all be feasible; Paul might have been away either in the East or in the West when Nero was rounding up the Christians. Perhaps Paul came back sometime after 64 to find that it was all over, but that the social mood had changed and that, citizen or not, appealing to Caesar or not, he was straightforwardly on trial as a dangerous troublemaker. Perhaps. Paul had to live with a good many “perhaps” clauses in his life. Maybe it is fitting that his biographers should do so as well.
Before we can look, finally, at how Paul would have approached his oncoming death, it is important to stand back and survey the larger picture of the man and his work.