Biblion Bible Commentary
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Handed to a centurion, coasting north
Acts 27:1-8
1 When it was determined that we should sail for Italy, they delivered Paul and certain other prisoners to a centurion named Julius, of the Augustan band. · WEB
The voyage to Rome begins under a kind officer and a contrary wind, and the log is written by someone who was aboard.
When it was determined that we should sail for Italy — the first person returns after a two-year gap, and it will run unbroken to the end of the book. The writer has been somewhere in Caesarea through the imprisonment, and he now boards a ship.
The traveling party is small. Paul, other prisoners, and Aristarchus, a Macedonian of Thessalonica, who was one of the two men dragged into the theater at Ephesus and one of the delegation carrying the collection. Two friends have arranged to accompany a prisoner across the Mediterranean in winter, and there was no obligation on either of them.
The officer is named: a centurion named Julius, of the Augustan band. He is one of several centurions in this book, and, like Cornelius and like the man at the cross, he is treated well by the narrative. At the first port he treated Paul kindly and gave him permission to go to his friends and refresh himself — shore leave, on the second day, for a man under appeal to the emperor.
What the account gives from here is a sailor's log, and its accuracy is one of the reasons the book has been trusted on matters it could have been careless about. The first ship is a coaster from Adramyttium, working the ports of Asia. They sail under the lee of Cyprus, because the winds were contrary — north of the island, using it as a shield, which is what a captain does when the prevailing westerlies are against him.
At Myra they transfer to a ship of Alexandria sailing for Italy. That is a grain freighter on the run that fed Rome, a large vessel — this one is carrying wheat and two hundred and seventy-six people. The Egyptian grain fleet often worked north to the Lycian coast before turning west for the same reason the coaster hugged Cyprus.
Then the difficulties accumulate in a series of phrases that all say the same thing. They sailed slowly many days, came with difficulty opposite Cnidus, found the wind not allowing us further, ran under the lee of Crete, and with difficulty sailing along it reached a place called Fair Havens .
The repetition is not literary. It is the record of a ship losing the season. Every one of those phrases is a delay, and by the time they anchor in a small bay on the south coast the year has moved on further than anyone intended. The name of the anchorage is pleasant and, as the next paragraph will establish, the place itself is not — a haven unsuitable for wintering, which is why a decision has to be made that would have been unnecessary a month earlier.
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