Acts 27
| Acts 27 | |
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Acts 15:22-24 in Latin (left column) and Greek (right column) in Codex Laudianus, written about AD 550.
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| Book | Acts of the Apostles |
| Bible part | New Testament |
| Order in the Bible part | 5 |
| Category | Church history |
Acts 27 is the twenty-seventh chapter of the Acts of the Apostles in the New Testament of the Christian Bible. It records the journey of Paul from Caesarea heading to Rome, but stranded for a time in Malta. The book containing this chapter is anonymous but early Christian tradition uniformly affirmed that Luke composed this book as well as the Gospel of Luke.
The original text is written in Koine Greek and is divided into 44 verses. Some most ancient manuscripts containing this chapter are:
This chapter mentions or alludes to the following places (in order of appearance):
This chapter can be grouped:
The meteorological and nautical evidence demonstrates, and in rather spectacular fashion, that these events must have occurred just as Luke records them. The most important piece of evidence is the exact compass bearing of the gale. This bearing can be established by means of three separate calculations.
These three calculations establish that the direction from which the wind was blowing could not have been more than a point off the designation E.N.E. 1/2 N. As the ship drifted west from Clauda, it would have been pointed due north, because it could not have been pointed directly into the wind without capsizing. In other words, it had to have been pointed north, just off the direction from which the wind was coming. Using this information, with some precision both the direction and rate of the ship’s drift to the west can be calculated.
Ancient records reveal that Egyptian grain ships were the largest vessels of the time, being about the size of an early nineteenth century sailing vessel. This size is implicitly confirmed by Luke’s statement that there were 276 people on board. Since their ship was pointed due north, while the wind was from the northeast, the azimuth, or direction, of the ship’s lateral - or sideways - drift from Clauda would have been approximately west eight degrees north. The island of Malta is not directly west of Clauda. Instead, Malta’s bearing from Clauda is exactly west eight degrees north.
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