Biblion Bible Commentary
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The Twin Brothers, and brothers at Puteoli
Acts 28:11-16
11 After three months, we set sail in a ship of Alexandria which had wintered in the island, whose figurehead was “The Twin Brothers.” · WEB
The last leg is a coastal cruise on a ship named for two pagan gods, and Paul's courage returns when he sees people walking down the road to meet him.
After three months they sail in another Alexandrian grain ship that had wintered on the island, whose figurehead was "The Twin Brothers." The detail is exact and slightly wry. The twins were the patron deities of sailors, and the apostle who told the men of Lystra to turn from vain things to the living God completes his journey to Rome under their painted image. He books passage on what is available.
The route is easy sailing and is logged as such: Syracuse for three days, a working of the straits to Rhegium, then a south wind and a fast run up to Puteoli , the great harbor where the Egyptian grain fleet unloaded for the capital.
And there, at the docks, we found brothers, and were entreated to stay with them for seven days. Nobody planted this church and no chapter of this book has mentioned it. Believers are already in the port of Rome, and a centurion with an imperial prisoner agrees to a week's delay so that they can be visited — which says something about Julius that the narrative never states outright.
The road from Puteoli runs up to the great highway into the city, and on it comes the finest moment of the chapter. From there the brothers, when they heard of us, came to meet us as far as The Market of Appius and The Three Taverns.
Those are staging posts on the road, roughly forty-three and thirty-three miles out. Christians in Rome heard a prisoner was coming and walked two days down the highway to meet a man most of them had never seen. He had written to them a few years earlier saying he longed to see them and had been prevented; they came out to the milestones.
When Paul saw them, he thanked God and took courage.
That is the most human sentence in the book's last chapters, and it should not be hurried. He had survived a lynching, two years in custody, a fortnight of storm, a shipwreck and a snake, and it is the sight of a group of people on a road that restores him. The courage is not described as arriving by revelation. It arrived on foot.
The arrival itself is understated to the point of anticlimax. When we entered into Rome, the centurion delivered the prisoners to the captain of the guard, but Paul was allowed to stay by himself with the soldier who guarded him. No fanfare, no reflection on the journey, no note that the promise given in a Jerusalem barracks has now been kept.
The terms of the custody are the last gift of a system that has treated him better than his own people did. He lives in his own quarters, chained to a rotating soldier, free to receive whoever comes. It is that arrangement — a prisoner nobody may stop visiting — that the last verses of the book are about.
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