Paul was Shipwrecked on Kefalonia, Not Malta

July 23, 2024

The following article, “Paulus War Nie Auf Malta,” — translated into English by Eric Metaxas — originally appeared in the German magazine DIE ZEIT in December 1988, and can be found at this link.

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Paul was Never in Malta
Dec 23, 1988
Bible files and common translations of the Acts of the Apostles must now be revised
By Agnes Seppelfricke
(translated by Eric Metaxas)

Theologians and lay Christians alike know from the last chapters of the Book of Acts that during the Apostle Paul’s last journey — the journey to Rome — he was shipwrecked off an island, and then wintered on that island. The New Testament Greek text refers to it as “Melite” (Acts 28:1). Even before biblical historical-critical exegesis was known, efforts were made to identify this island, where Paul and his companions were stranded between Crete and Sicily in the autumn of 59 AD.

During the Middle Ages the southern Dalmatian island of Mljet (in current day Croatia) was thought to be the location, but for over a century now, theologians of all denominations have shifted to believe that “Melite” is the Italian island of Malta, so much so that Malta now takes great pride in this identity. Cathedrals, churches and catacombs, as well as streets, squares and festivals are now named after Paul, and a huge marble statue of the Apostle towers over what is now called St. Paul’s Bay. The 1900th anniversary of the day Paul was supposedly shipwrecked there was marked by the Catholic Church with great celebrations.

But now someone has stepped forward to contradict this established theory, and has sought to prove that Paul was not stranded on Malta, but on the western Greek island of Cephalonia (also called Kefalonia).

That man is Heinz Warnecke, an academic outsider and self-taught scholar without a high school diploma, who sees himself mainly as an historical geographer. But many New Testament scholars have been taking what the 35-year-old Warnecke has to say very seriously, so much so that as a result of his work, he was awarded a doctorate in Philosophy from the University of Bremen. His dissertation, entitled “The Actual Journey to Rome of the Apostle Paul,” was also published as book in 1987 by the Catholic Bible Society (Volume 127 of the prestigious “Stuttgart Bible Studies”). In the preface to the 164-page monograph, the Protestant Pauline scholar Professor Alfred Suhl (Münster) says that Warnecke has made “a groundbreaking contribution” to New Testament scholarship that “puts the experts to shame.” And the biblical and religious scholar Professor Hermann Schulz (Bremen), who served as Warnecke’s doctoral supervisor in Bremen, considers the so-called Malta theory, “definitively refuted by Warnecke’s work.”

Just a few months after it’s publication, the first domestic and foreign reviews of his theory appeared, further confirming that scholars are taking it seriously. The stunning eclipse of the long-held Malta theory has become known to a wider public in Greece via newspaper articles and reviews by theologians, much to the delight of the Western Greek Kefalonians (Cephalonians). It is hardly surprising that when he visited Kefalonia this summer, Warnecke was honored at a festive banquet hosted by the island’s Greek Orthodox exarch and metropolitan, and given an official reception at the archbishop’s palace, as well as a liturgy in the famous monastery of the island’s patron saint, Agios Gerasimos.

But returning to the specifics of Paul’s journey as related in the final chapters of the Book of Acts, we recall that, guarded by the Roman centurion Julius, Paul was obliged to travel from Caesarea (Palestine) to Rome to stand before the imperial court and answer the accusations of Jerusalem’s Jewish leaders. From Caesarea until Crete, every stop of his sea voyage can be quite easily reconstructed. But the ship’s troubles — and with them the exegetes’ itinerary problems — begin when the ship leaves southern Crete. It is intended to reach a port called Phoenix, suitable for wintering. Warnecke first encountered this perplexing problem himself as a long-standing student of Homeric geography, and as part of looking into the identification of the present-day location of Homer’s Ithaca in The Odyssey.

Until Warnecke’s bold thesis appeared, most archaeologists and historians assumed that the port of Phoenix mentioned in Acts 27:12 was located in Crete, even though no Cretan port met the requirements mentioned in Acts. Warnecke solved this initial problem in a surprising way: he interprets the Greek phrase “limein teis kreteis” not as a “port of Crete” — which is typically how it is interpreted — but rather as a “port for Crete,”  i.e. as a port serving maritime traffic to and from Crete. Classical philologists were unable to deny this interpretation grammatical confirmation (“genitive of direction and intention”). Warnecke illustrates the idea by using the example of the German port of Bremerhaven, which in a similar way does not refer to a port in Bremen, but to a port for Bremen, that is nevertheless far away from Bremen.

The assumption that the port of Phoenix is not on Crete at all, as the Bible maps of Paul’s journeys erroneously suggest, solves several problems that have never before been answered. First, how can the heated discussion of the sailors before leaving for Phoenix be explained? If it was merely a trip along the southern coast of Crete, why would Paul warn that their undertaking would be life-threatening during that season (Acts 27:9-11)?  And if it was such a risk, why did those who voted against the journey to Phoenix not simply take the safe overland route? Only with Warnecke’s interpretation do Paul’s words on the ship during the subsequent storm, become understandable: “If only they had listened to me and not gone away from Crete!” (Acts 27:21).

Warnecke’s solution locates the port of Phoenix — which the ship wanted to head for from Crete — at the southern tip of Messinia (a region in the southwest of the Greek Peloponnesus). Indeed, the 1st century travel writer Pausanias mentions this port. In fact the various port cities that lie close together at the southern tip of Messinia supported the sea route from Italy to Crete (and thus to the Levant) even until modern times, principally because there is only one safe natural harbor in the western and southern Peloponnese. That harbor is the large bay of Pylos, which according to Acts 27:12, opens to the northwest and southwest and is excellently suited for wintering. Two famous sea battles took place in this harbor. In 425 BC, the Athenians won the decisive victory over the Spartans in the Peloponnesian War, and in 1827 the combined English, French and Russian navies destroyed the Turkish-Egyptian armada anchored there, finally giving Greece its independence from the Ottomans.

But as we know from Acts, Paul and his companions never reached the harbour of Pylos, because shortly after leaving Crete, the ship came into heavy seas. As Luke recounts, it then drifted helplessly for fourteen days across the open sea, unable to maneuver because of the power of the storm. Finally, it was stranded off an island that Luke calls “Melite”.

Warnecke’s first argument that the Melite of Acts cannot be the Italian island of Malta has to do with nautical and meteorological factors. He surveys the autumnal currents and climatic conditions in the area, and gives a particular analysis of the winds mentioned in Acts 27.

Warnecke says that we know the unchanging nature of the winds of this area, which have been well-documented since Hesiod in the 7th century BC, and says that the ship was surprised by a typical autumnal cyclone (low-pressure vortex), so that it drifted off with the sirocco slowly turning from east to southwest, eventually reaching the western Greek islands of the Ionian Sea. He says that evidence that ships in trouble off western Crete are always driven into the Ionian Sea — by a storm moving across the Mediterranean — can be found in many ancient sources, including Homer’s Odyssey.

Stranded on a reef

Warnecke’s analysis is confirmed by Acts 27:27, which says that the ship was “in the Adriatic” after two weeks of wandering, a term that in ancient usage does not apply to the sea area around Malta. Warnecke says that in ancient times, only the sea between the Apennine and Balkan peninsulas was called the Adriatic, making the western (Ionian) Greek islands the only islands of the so-called “outer Adriatic”.

In fact, because of the Adriatic reference in Acts, it was assumed until roughly a century ago that Paul was stranded off the southern Dalmatian island of Mljet, as we have mentioned, since that island also bore the ancient name Melite. But this identification has always presented the difficulty of how the ship could have drifted so far north into the “inner Adriatic,” and why Paul would have then continued his journey to Rome via Sicily.

Citing many of the individual details of Luke’s account in Acts, Warnecke makes the powerful argument that Paul was in fact shipwrecked on the southwest shore of the island of Kefalonia. Perhaps even more than the island of Corfu, which lies further north, Kefalonia is the largest, and most well-known of the western Greek islands, and its mountains have have the highest elevation by far.

Warnecke says that Acts mentions a number of significant topographical features that argue for this part of Kefalonia as the site of the shipwreck. First, there is an extensive, approximately 30-meter-deep sea with dangerous shoals. Second, there is a protective gulf, as well as a distinctive headland with gently sloping beaches.  The shallow sea of this region faces the open Ionian Sea, where the sailors of the Pauline vessel at night could take the depth soundings that are mentioned in the text, the first being 36 meters, and the second being 27 meters. Only this part of Kefalonia matches these depths, with a shallow area over 20 square kilometers in size, and an average depth between 25 and 35 meters. In addition, this area has many reefs that are dangerous for shipping, which one can see by the foam crowns that form during windier conditions.

This area of shallow sea on this part of the Kefalonia coast is funnel-shaped and lies in front of the huge Livadi Gulf, one of the most impressive gulfs of all Mediterranean islands, with a length of 13 kilometers. This gulf, running from south to north, is particularly peculiar because on its eastern side a four-kilometre-long bay branches off in an odd south-easterly direction, on the eastern shore of which lies the island’s capital Argostoli. Thus, the Livadi Gulf and its elongated side bay form the headland of Argostoli, whose coast slopes gently into the sea and has beautiful sandy beaches in places.

Warnecke argues that it was to one of these sandy beaches of this headland — where today many of the island’s best hotels are located — that the sailors aimed their ship. As Acts tells us, it was just before reaching the intended coast that the ship ran into a reef and burst. The nearly 300 passengers had to save themselves by swimming to shore, some of them using pieces of wood to assist them.

The island of Malta — about a third the size of Kefalonia — offers neither the shallow sea, nor any gulf or headland with beaches suitable for landing, as recounted in Acts. It must also be explained how the sailors and soldiers were unable to identify the island on the morning of the last day of their journey. One may assume that if it had been Malta — with its distinctive bays — it would have been recognized by a ship drifting past to the northeast. The sailors may also have been familiar with Kefalonia — if only because of the famous 1628-meter-high “Black Mountain” (today called Mount Aenos), that is covered with fir forests. But it is reasonable to think that the island could not be initially identified because of the peculiar sirocco fog that so often veils the island. This meteorological phenomenon was even described by Homer, such that even Odysseus, the returned “king of the Cephallenians,” was unable to recognize his native island.

As Acts recounts, after Paul came ashore in front of the promontory of Argostoli — which in ancient times indeed bore the name of Melite, after all — he had to seek shelter from the rain and warm up by the beach fire they had made. Both the rain and the coolness are not consonant with Malta. It rarely rains there, and the temperature in October is typically around 22 degrees Celsius. This is why many biblical exegetes originally settled on the much farther northern location of Mljet as the island of the shipwreck.

Although Kefalonia itself is only about 250 kilometers further north than Malta — and about 500 kilometers to the east — it has dramatically different climatic conditions. Although extremely sunny throughout the summer, the island has always had heavy, long-lasting rains in autumn, along with colder weather than one might expect. In fact, the highest ridges of Mount Aenos are often covered with snow by the end of October.

As the account in Acts mentions twice, Paul and his fellow castaways encountered “barbarians” on the island, which in ancient times meant incomprehensible — or even uneducated and crude — people. It would have been impossible to refer to the Maltese this way, since that island was culturally  sophisticated during the Roman Empire, and had a century earlier received official Roman citizenship shortly after the assassination of Julius Caesar.  We know that if the ship had been stranded off Malta the Roman centurion could easily have communicated with the natives. But it would have been difficult to communicate with the Kefalonian natives, who spoke a South Illyrian dialect of Greek. Even the Greeks referred to the northwestern Greek tribes (except the Corinthian colonists and their descendants) as barbarians. Furthermore, we know from Acts 28:4 that the natives Paul encountered worshipped Dike, a Greek goddess of justice, for whom there is no Roman equivalent.

Acts says that the 276 shipwrecked people received accommodation and food on the estate of the island’s governor Publius, not far from the stranding site. It is quite unlikely that the Governor of Malta would have owned such a large estate in the barren north-east of the island, near what is today called St. Paul’s Bay. But Kefalonia has precisely just an area. Very close to the beach on the promontory of Argostoli stretches the almost ten-square-kilometre plain of Kranis, where the island’s capital was often located.

On the edge of this very fertile alluvial plain, the Roman governors maintained their seat of land and government as well as a naval base. Among the Romans who ruled Kefalonia was the notorious blackmailer Gaius Antony, the uncle of Marc Antony and co-consul of Cicero, and Proculeius Luci Filius, the close friend and comrade-in-arms of Octavian, who awarded him the entire island after the decisive naval victory of Actium (northwestern Greece) over Marc Antony and Cleopatra, and proclaimed himself Emperor Augustus.

Warnecke cites many other reasons against Malta as the “Melite” mentioned in Acts. One is that at the time of Paul’s shipwreck, Malta had not been ruled by a senatorial official for a long time, but had since the rule of Augustus been under the direct supervision of an imperial procurator. But Kefalonia, which formed an independent political unit within the senatorial province of Achaia (Greece), was indeed ruled by a “First Officer.”

Another piece of evidence for Kefalonia and against Malta is that in Acts 28:8 we learn that the father of the island’s governor, Publius, had contracted swamp fever, or malaria, because of the stagnant waters on the island. But there is no record of this malady on the island of Malta, while on Kefalonia a serious swamp fever had often been rampant. Countless occupying officers and their relatives succumbed to it in the course of history. The Norman prince Robert Guiscard, succumbed to swamp fever in Kefalonia during his campaign against Byzantium, and during the Greek struggle of independence the British poet Lord Byron, died of swamp fever that he contracted during his four-month stay on Kefalonia. Today’s tourists are no longer exposed to this danger, as all the Kefalonian swamps were drained in the 20th century, depriving the Anopheles mosquitoes (which transmit the malaria pathogen) of their breeding grounds.

Acts 28:3-6 also mentions the sand viper, which was feared by the islanders, as living on Melite. This snake is the most venomous snake in Europe. Its bite always causes severe blood poisoning and without the help of modern medicine it is often fatal. But there are and never have been venomous snakes in Malta, while sand vipers are well known to exist in Kefalonia.

Interestingly, in the villages of Markopoulo and Arginia, small snakes are venerated every year on the day of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary: the faithful in the Orthodox churches take the otherwise dreaded reptiles in their hands during Mass, put them on their chests and even put their heads in their mouths, as this is believed to bring happiness and health.

Only a few years ago, herpetologists discovered that these “cult vipers” are not the life-threatening sand viper (Vipera ammodytes), but the European cat snake (Telescopus fallax), which appears similar to it, but is in fact harmless, and which even experts did not know existed on Kefalonia. But this zoological knowledge has had little effect on the faithful, who continue to believe the snakes are only “defused” during the service and regain their deadly danger outside the church grounds.

But to what exactly, Warnecke asks, shall we trace this ancient snake cult, which apart from the snake procession in Cucullo, Italy is the only Christian snake cult in Europe? He suggests it may have originated with the experience of Paul, whom the islanders considered a god after he survived the bite of what was almost certainly a sand viper.

Acts tells us that Paul quickly found veneration among the island’s population, as well as in the family of the governor Publius. That is why it is often claimed that Paul consecrated Publius as the first bishop of Malta and converted the Maltese to Christianity. But Malta, like the majority of Roman provinces, was not Christianized in pre-Constantinian times, but only during the middle of the 4th century.

On the other hand, as Clement Alexandrinus (2nd century) states, Kefalonia is one of the oldest Christian communities. Indeed, it was the only one in existence between the Aegean region of Greece and Rome and Puteoli in Italy. Warnecke argues that this is owing to Paul’s  three-month stay on the island following his shipwreck there. He also reminds us that the Kefalonians suffered under the Roman yoke perhaps even more than the Jews under Herod (for example, the city of Same had on its own declared war on Rome and was razed to the ground after a four-month siege); thus, the Apostle to the Gentiles found favorable conditions for the proclamation of the gospel, that is, the “good news” of salvation, among the rebellious island population.

In the beacon of Mount Etna

Further evidence cited by Warnecke for his thesis is the fact that in the earliest Byzantine era there were over 40 churches in western Greece dedicated to St. Nicholas, but only two that bore the name of the Apostle Paul; and both of these were on Kefalonia.  Moreover, the news has survived from Paul’s stay to the modern written tradition of the western Greek islands – a fact that has not yet been taken into account in biblical literature.

Warnecke concludes there can be no real doubt that the Apostle Paul never stayed in Malta, but rather that he spent three months on the Greek island of Kefalonia, making the Kefalonians the last people whom he led to the Christian faith before leaving for Rome, where he was martyred. Paul (and the centurion Julius) did not intend to remain in Kefalonia after the shipwreck, but probably intended to sail north to the port and garrison city of Nikopolis (“victory city”), which was more suitable for wintering and which Emperor Augustus had founded in memory of his great naval victory over Antony and Cleopatra. (Nikopolis lies on the Greek mainland, north of Kefalonia and south of Corfu.)

But Paul did not spend the winter in Nikopolis, which was the most important city in western Greece in his time; instead Acts tells us he sailed in January from Kefalonia on an Alexandrian ship to Syracuse (Sicily) and from there to Rome. The sea route described in the Acts of the Apostles (28:11-13) makes sense, but the January date of departure presents a difficulty, since ancient shipping was almost completely suspended from late October to mid-March, due to rains and storms. But Warnecke says that in the Ionian Sea — between western Greece and southern Italy — there is a short season each January, which the ancient Greeks called “kingfisher days,” during which they would have felt safe in crossing.

At that time the roughly 250-mile trip across the open sea — from western Greece to Italy — was undertaken with a well-established navigational process. Ships departed Kefalonia in the late afternoon or evening, following the setting sun. Using the sunrise behind them the next morning — over the sharp ridge of Mount Aenos on Kefalonia, and visible 154 kilometers away — the sailors were able to correct their course.  At dusk the following evening they would have been guided by the steam column of the volcano Etna, illuminated (in ancient times) by the glow of the lava, off the east coast of Sicily, thus making their way to the port city of Syracuse.

Warnecke’s thesis has been hailed as “groundbreaking” by a number of well-known New Testament scholars not merely because his theory has solved a number of questions regarding the details of the journey itself, but because it answers other questions that have long puzzled biblical scholars. For example, Warnecke’s discovery gives the biblical Epistle to Titus a plausible itinerary.  In fact, it is clear from the letter that Paul left his friend Titus in Crete and may have spent the winter in Nikopolis (Titus 3:12). These personal notes did not fit into the hitherto known accepted accounts of Paul’s journey, which caused many scholars to dismiss the three pastoral letters (one to Titus and two to Timothy), as pseudo-Pauline.

The pastoral letters are theologically vital because they regulate the post-apostolic church structure (definition and hierarchy of ministries). They form the testament of the Apostle Paul, the Apostle to the Gentiles, who traveled from Palestine via Crete and Western Greece to Rome, where he was executed after his trial. However, Paul’s vision, of an ecumenical Christian Church will probably remain unattainable in the foreseeable future, even if, in the future, according to Warnecke’s book, the controversial philological arguments alone are not valid enough to continue to evaluate the pastoral letters as pseudo-Pauline.

Of course any Bible reader today cannot easily verify Warnecke’s powerful argument about Paul’s journey to Rome, because the current English translations of the Acts of the Apostles do not correspond in essential details to the original Greek text. The most notable problem is that they now almost always say “Malta” where the Greek text says “Melite.”

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Agnes Seppelfricke studied theology and philosophy, and received her doctorate on the German writer Lessing.