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Act_27:42-44. Now, when the loss of the ship was just as certain, as with the proximity of the land the escape of those prisoners who could swim was easily possible, the soldiers were of a mind to kill them; but the centurion was too much attached to Paul to permit it.[175] Not sharing in the apprehension of his soldiers, he commanded that all in the ship who knew how to swim should swim to land, and then the rest (to whom in this way assistance was ready on shore) were to follow partly on planks and partly on broken pieces of the ship.
βουλὴ ἐγένετο , ἵνα ,] there took place a project (in the design), that, etc.; comp. on Act_27:1, and see Nägelsb. on the Iliad, p. 62, ed. 3, who on such modes of expression appropriately remarks that “the will is conceived as a striving will.”
ἀποῤῥίπτειν , to cast down, intransitive, in the sense of se projicere. See Schaefer, ad Bos Ell. p 127.
καὶ τοὺς λοιπούς ] sc. ἐξιέναι (e mari) ἐπὶ τὴν γῆν .
ἐπὶ σανίσιν ] on planks, which were at hand in the ship.
ἐπί τινων τῶν ἀπὸ τοῦ πλοίου ] on something from the ship, on pieces which had partly broken loose from it by the stranding, so forming wreck ( ναυά γιον , ἐρείπιον ), and were partly torn off by the people themselves for that purpose. ἐπί denotes both times the local being upon, and the change between dative and genitive is to be regarded as merely accidental. See Bernhardy, p. 200 f.; Kühner, § 624, ad Xen. Mem. i. Act_1:20.
In the history of this final rescue, Baumgarten, II. p. 420, has carried to an extreme the arbitrariness of allegorico-spiritual fiction.
[175] In this remark (ver. 43) Zeller conjectures very arbitrarily a later addition to the original narrative, which was designed to illustrate the influence of the apostle upon the Roman.
REMARK 1.
The extraordinarily exact minuteness and vividness in the narrative of this whole voyage justifies the hypothesis that Luke, immediately after its close, during the winter spent in Malta, wrote down this interesting description in the main from fresh recollection, and possibly following notes which he had made for himself even during the voyage—perhaps set down in his diary, and at a later period transferred from it to his history.
REMARK 2.
The transition from the first person—in which he narrates as a companion sharing the voyage and its fortunes—into the third is not to be considered as an accident or an inconsistency, but is founded on the nature of the contents, according to which the sailors specially come into prominence as subject. See Act_27:13; Act_27:17-19; Act_27:21; Act_27:29; Act_27:38-41.
REMARK 3.
If the assumption of the school of Baur as to the set purpose animating the author of the Acts were correct, this narrative of the voyage, with all its collateral circumstances in such detail, would be a meaningless ballast of the book. But it justifies itself in the purely historical destination of the work, and confirms that destination.