296 The Voyage to Jerusalem. Chap. XIII.
two chances presented themselves : one ship intended to make no break on its voyage, except at Miletus, the other to stop at Ephesus. The latter ship was, for some reason, the slower ; either it was not to sail further south than Ephesus (in which case time might be lost there in finding a passage) ; or it was a slow ship, that intended to stop in several other harbours. The shortness of the time determined Paul to choose the ship that went straight to Miletus, and " to sail past Ephesus " ; and the pointed statement proves that the question had been discussed, and doubtless the Ephesian delegates begged a visit to their city.
To Luke the interest of Pentecost lay not in itself, but in its furnishing the reason why Paul did not go to Ephesus. There, as in so many other touches, we see the Greek, to whom the Jews were little more than " Barbaroi ".
We notice that Paul, having been disappointed in his first intention of spending Passover at Jerusalam, was eager at any rate to celebrate Pentecost there. For the purpose which he had at heart, the formation of a perfect unity between the Jewish and the non-Jewish sections of the Church, it was important to be in Jerusalem to show his respect for one of the great feasts.
Modern discussion of the voyage to Cassareia illus- trates the unnecessary obscurity in which a remarkably accurate narrative has been involved by over-subtlety, want of experience of rough-and-ready travel, and in- attention to the peculiar method of Luke as a narrator. As we have seen, only two numbers are at all doubtful : the length of the stay at Miletus, and the duration of the over-sea voyage to Tyre ; but in each case a day
Sec. 5. The Voyage to Ccesareia. 297
more or less is the utmost permissible variation. We find that Paul had fully thirteen days to spare when he reached Caesareia. Yet many excellent scholars have got so far astray in this simple reckoning of days as to maintain that Paul was too late. Even Weiss, in his edition (in many respects excellent), so lately as 1893, concludes that already in Tyre Paul found that it was impossible to reach Jerusalem in time. Yet, at a pinch, the journey from Tyre to Jerusalem could have been performed in four days.
The farewell speech to the Ephesians, simple, pathetic, and characteristic of Paul as it is, contains little that concerns our special purpose. Paul intimates clearly that this is his farewell before entering on his enterprise in the West : " Ye all shall no longer see my face ". With a characteristic gesture he shows his hands : " these hands ministered unto my necessities ".
Incidentally we notice the ancient custom of reckoning time : the residence in Asia, which can hardly have been more than two years six months at the most, is estimated loosely as " three years ".
The clinging affection which is expressed in the farewell scene, and in the "tearing ourselves away" of XXI 1, makes a very pathetic picture.
Myra is mentioned on this voyage in the Bezan Text, and there can be no doubt that the ship on which the company was embarked either entered the harbour of Myra, or, at least, went close to it before striking across the open sea west of Cyprus to the Syrian coast. The voyage may be taken as typical of the course which hundreds of ships took every year, along a route familiar from time immemorial. It had
298 The Voyage to Jerusalem. Chap. XIII.
been a specially frequented route since the age of the earlier Seleucid and Ptolemaic kings, when, as Canon Hicks remarks, "there must have been daily communi- cation between Cos and Alexandria 'V
The harbour of Myra seems to have been the great port for the direct cross-sea traffic to the coasts of Syria and Egypt It was the seat of the sailors' god, to whom they offered their prayers before starting on the direct long course, and paid their vows on their safe arrival ; this god survived in the Christianised form, St. Nicholas of Myra, the patron-saint of sailors, who held the same position in the maritime world of the Levant as St. Phokas of Sinope did in that of the Black Sea (where he was the Christianised form of Achilles Pontarches, the Ruler of the Pontos).