A shipwreck, a snakebite, and a healing: the story of Paul’s arrival in Malta belongs to one of the oldest patterns in the history of faith.
There is a recurring figure in Christian hagiography: the saint who arrives on a shore — or a hillside, or a frontier — and renders its serpents harmless. The most famous instance in the Western imagination is Patrick, who according to a twelfth-century tradition drove every snake in Ireland into the sea during a forty-day fast on a mountaintop. Ireland, in fact, has had no native snakes since the last ice age, which is why most scholars read the story as allegory — the serpent standing, as it has since Genesis, for the forces of darkness and paganism that Patrick’s missionary work displaced. In Christianity, snakes and serpents often symbolize either evil or paganism, and the legend may be read as saying that Patrick cast out the old religion and brought in a new one.
But the Maltese version of this story is older, more concrete, and it comes with an eyewitness account. It is in the Acts of the Apostles, written by Luke, who was there.
The wreck
The story begins in Acts 27, one of the most detailed sea-voyage narratives to survive from antiquity. Paul is a prisoner being transported to Rome for trial, traveling under Roman military escort on a grain ship out of Alexandria. The voyage goes badly from the start. Against Paul’s advice the captain puts out from Crete late in the sailing season, and within days the ship is caught in what Luke calls a typhōnikos — a typhoon wind, the Euroquilo, the northeast gale that Mediterranean sailors feared most. For two weeks the crew runs before it blind, throwing cargo and tackle overboard, neither sun nor stars visible, all hope of survival gone.
Then, in the middle of the night, the sailors take soundings and realize they are approaching land. At dawn they spot a bay with a beach and run the ship aground. The bow sticks fast; the stern begins to break up in the surf. The soldiers want to kill the prisoners to prevent escape. The centurion, who has come to trust Paul during the voyage, forbids it. Everyone gets ashore — all 276 of them, some swimming, some on planks from the wreckage — and they find themselves on an island they do not yet know by name.
The fire and the viper
The Maltese people make a fire to warm the survivors, who are cold and wet in the rain. Paul, characteristically, helps — gathering brushwood and laying it on the fire. A viper comes out of the bundle, driven by the heat, and fastens itself on his hand.
When the natives see the creature hanging from his hand, they say to one another: “No doubt this man is a murderer, whom, though he has escaped the sea, Justice has not allowed to live.” The logic is pagan but not unreasonable: two catastrophes in succession — shipwreck and snakebite — must be divine punishment for some hidden crime. The goddess Dike, Justice, is finishing what the sea began.
Paul shakes the snake off into the fire and suffers no ill effects. The people expected him to swell up or suddenly fall dead, but after waiting a long time and seeing nothing unusual happen to him, they changed their minds and said he was a god.
Luke, who writes with characteristic economy, does not describe Paul’s inner state during any of this. He simply notes the gesture — the snake shaken off into the fire — and moves on. There is no prayer recorded, no invocation, no dramatic confrontation. The immunity is quiet, almost casual, which in some ways makes it more striking than a theatrical miracle would be.
Publius and the healing
In that region was an estate belonging to Publius, the leading citizen of the island, who received the survivors and entertained them courteously for three days. The Greek title Luke gives him — prōtos — has been confirmed by archaeology: inscriptions found on Malta use precisely this word as the official title of the island’s governor. Tradition holds that Publius later became the first bishop of Malta.
Publius’s father was in bed suffering from fever and dysentery. Paul went to him, and praying and laying his hands on him, he healed him. After this, the rest of those on the island who had diseases also came and were healed. The pattern is the same as the snakebite: what arrives looking like catastrophe — a shipwreck, a prisoner, a viper — becomes the occasion for grace. Paul spends three months on Malta before sailing on to Rome.
Malta and the pauline sea: Saint Publius in a Mediterranean circuit
The serpent beneath the surface
The Patrick parallel is instructive because it is inexact. Patrick’s serpents are legendary and probably allegorical — one of the most popular images the local Druids held was that of a serpent, and some historians believe there was a thriving cult of serpent-worship on the island, making it unsurprising that Christians would attribute to Patrick the expulsion of spiritual serpents and a war against demonic presence. Paul’s viper is actual, reported by a named eyewitness in a document that reads like a ship’s log. Yet both stories draw on the same deep grammar: the arrival of the Gospel in a new place is marked by the rendering harmless of the serpent — the creature that, since the garden, has represented the power that poisons and kills.
In Malta, that grammar is written into the landscape. The bay where tradition places the shipwreck still bears Paul’s name. The grotto where he is said to have stayed during those three months is a place of pilgrimage. And the island that the Maltese called Melita — meaning honey, or refuge — became, on a rainy morning in the first century, exactly that: a place of refuge where a viper’s bite came to nothing, a governor’s father was healed, and the Gospel found one of its earliest Mediterranean homes.
The pilgrim who comes to Malta today walks ground that Luke and Paul walked. The faith that healed Publius’s father is the same faith that fills the island’s churches today — more than 350 of them, in seventeen miles of island. Some things, it turns out, do not wash away with the wreckage.
Walk where Paul walked: The Peregrinatio Sancti Pavli AD 60
The story told in Acts 28 is not only something to read about. In Malta, you can walk it.
The Peregrinatio Sancti Pavli AD 60 was developed by XirCammini — a voluntary, non-profit, non-denominational membership organization — in collaboration with the Malta Tourism Authority and Heritage Malta. Its name is deliberate: this is not a modern hiking trail with a Pauline theme, but an attempt to reconstruct the actual geography of Paul’s three months on the island, moving between the sites tradition and archaeology associate with his arrival, his movements, and his departure.
The route passes through Saint Paul’s Bay, in full view of Saint Paul’s Islets where the shipwreck is held to have occurred; the church of San Pawl tal-Ħġejjeġ in Saint Paul’s Bay; San Pawl Milqi, one of the sites associated with Paul’s meeting with Publius and the healing of his father; the chapels of Naxxar and Mosta; Mdina, the ancient citadel where the Metropolitan Cathedral of Saint Paul stands; and Saint Paul’s Grotto in Rabat, the cave where the Apostle is said to have sheltered and preached during his stay.
One site along the way deserves particular mention. At Għajn Rażul in Saint Paul’s Bay — Rażul being the Semitic word for prophet — tradition holds that Saint Paul drew water from a spring, and the source became known as the Well of the Prophet. It is one of those places where the Semitic roots of the Maltese language surface unexpectedly, folding Christian memory into the ancient texture of the island’s identity.
The pilgrimage can be completed in one day or two. Those with a second day can extend the route into Valletta, visiting the Collegiate Parish Church of Saint Paul’s Shipwreck and the Anglican Pro-Cathedral of Saint Paul — a reminder, as XirCammini notes, that in Malta, Christians of different traditions are united by the same Apostle.
For those who wish to go further still, the Camino Maltés offers a 35-kilometer route beginning at Saint Paul’s Grotto, passing through Żejtun, and concluding at Fort Saint Angelo in Birgu — where pilgrims embark on a journey toward Santiago de Compostela, continuing through Sicily and Sardinia. Malta, in other words, is not only a destination for pilgrimage. It is a point of departure.
Plan your walk
The Peregrinatio Sancti Pavli Apostoli AD 60 is open to all — pilgrims, visitors, and anyone curious about the two-thousand-year-old faith that took root on this island on a rainy morning in Acts 28. XirCammini can accompany individuals or groups and provides guidance on the full route.
For information and to plan your walk: sanctipauli.mt or write to [email protected]. XirCammini is a registered voluntary organization in Malta (VO1646).
For general travel planning and further information on Malta’s pilgrimage routes: visitmalta.com
This content comes to you in collaboration with VisitMalta
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