Book Review: The Voyage And Shipwreck Of St. Paul
One of the best books I’ve read in a long time comes to us as a reprint of an 1880 revision of a book first published in 1848.
Smith, James. The Voyage and Shipwreck of St. Paul: With Dissertations on the Life and Writings of St. Luke, and the Ships and Navigation of the Ancients. Edited by Walter Edward Smith. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2001.1
I am currently preaching through the book of Acts. As I came to chapter 27, I noticed that almost every one of my commentaries (I’m reading seven or eight of them) referred to a work by James Smith on the events of the chapter. Here is how F. F. Bruce introduced it:
An indispensable aid to the study of this chapter is The Voyage and Shipwreck of St. Paul, by James Smith. Smith, an experienced yachtsman and a man of no mean classical scholarship, made a careful study of Luke’s narrative in relation to the route which it maps out—a part of the Mediterranean with which he himself was acquainted—and formed the most favorable estimate of the accuracy of Luke’s account of each stage of the voyage. For the seafaring technicalities of this chapter we shall lean heavily on Smith’s work: although it is more than a century since Smith produced the last edition of it, it remains unsurpassed, and indeed unequalled for its purpose.2
As author after author referenced Smith, I thought I would search for it online to see what I could find. There are electronic editions available (see the link in the footnotes), but I also found a reprint by Wipf and Stock, link above. I decided to order the book and have a look at it myself.
Most of the book is Smith’s “Narrative of the Voyage,” where he goes through each leg of the journey, describing the details based on his own knowledge of the sea, ancient documents describing sea voyages in ancient times, and contemporary publications of his own day, where sailors and travelers described the same waters and locations visited by Luke and the apostle on this voyage. Smith sailed some of these seas himself, personally visiting many of the sites mentioned in Acts 27.
Smith shows exactly how the shipwreck came about and how the ancient sailors tried to deal with it. He explains why they preferred not to winter at Fair Havens, instead trying for a place called Phoenix, just about 35 miles further along the Cretan coast. He explains the meaning of Euraquilo3 (the violent wind that brought the storm), showing how it must drive the ship, the rate at which their drift must take and their remarkable landing on Malta in exactly fourteen days from the time the storm took them. Along the way, the reader gleans insight into ancient sailing practices and much that is unfamiliar to us in Acts 27 comes alive.
The “Narrative of the Voyage” occupies 99 pages of the text, the book with appendices is 285 pages long. Some of the additional material also deserves mention. Opening with a “Dissertation on the Life and Writings of St. Luke,” Smith offers interesting biographical supplements. He thinks Luke is familiar with the sea, but no sailor, and gives good reasoning for that opinion. He also makes an attempt at solving the “Synoptic Problem” or the puzzle of determining which of Matthew, Mark, and Luke wrote first, and if one or more of them borrowed from each other. I don’t agree with his solutions to the problem, but the section gives insight into Smith’s reasoning and handling of ancient documents. I think most of his methods are sound, and there are some helpful things here as well.
Further dissertations close out the book: “On the Wind Euroclydon,” “On the Island of Melita,” “On the Ships of the Ancients,” and “On the Geographical Changes in St. Paul’s Bay.” These vary in value, but they all make a contribution to our understanding of the shipwreck and give us good understanding of ancillary issues as well. “On the Wind of Euroclydon” touches on textual criticism and is worth reading. “On the Ships of the Ancients” tells us more than we might ever want to know about ancient ships in general, but it does help us better understand the kinds of ships involved in Luke’s account. “On the Geographical Changes in St. Paul’s Bay” makes an excellent argument that the traditional place of landing on Malta is almost certainly correct.
I found the book extremely helpful and enlightening. Smith thoroughly demonstrates Luke’s accuracy. His first edition was published in 1848. The volume was reissued several times, but the quality of the work has meant that no one I am aware of has contradicted Smith’s findings, and all the commentaries (including the one I have that leans liberal) commend it to their readers. I recommend it to anyone studying Acts, but also to those who are interested in the ancient world and how people acted and reacted in a world with technology far different from ours. And for someone who wants an apologetic for the accuracy of our Bible, you will find a friend in this book.
Don Johnson is the pastor of Grace Baptist Church of Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada.
Smith’s book is excellent, and probably could not be reproduced today. The man was an experienced sailor of wooden sailing vessels and consulted with seasoned men on methods and tactics he himself was unfamiliar with. The fact that a book more than a century and a half old is still constantly cited is a testimony to the fact that his information is almost impossible to find elsewhere.
Thanks for sharing this. I have the book now on my shelf. I look forward to exploring it soon. The book of Acts is one of my favorites to read in the Scriptures. It thrills my soul reading about the start of the church in those opening decades.