Paul and company reach the end of their harrowing voyage. Will they all make it safely to shore as Paul promised? Here's where we find out!
By W. D. Penfield. Originally published on Substack, January 10, 2022.
The Voyagers Reach Their Destination
We’ve come to the last few verses of Acts 27.
The ship of Alexandria, battered and tossed in a storm that pictures the Tribulation, has run aground, and two seas are slamming it from both sides. The forepart of the ship, a picture of the Old Testament, has stuck fast and held together. But the hinder part, a picture of the Alexandrian New Testament, is smashed to pieces by the violence of the waves (verse 41).
What parts of the New Testament will draw such fire, and why?
We can speculate. The Antichrist will be on Earth claiming to be the Messiah (among other things he may claim—Revelation 13:5), and he will have many followers believing it. (He won’t be the only one. Many will claim to be Christ. See Matthew 24:23–24, Mark 13:21–22, 1 John 2:18.)
It’s evident there will be widespread awareness that the last days have come. Conflicts will rage over who is Christ, who will bring in the Kingdom age, how it will be brought in, and who will rule during that age.
The following may be major points of contention:
- The virgin birth of Jesus.
This doctrine is essential to Jesus’ authority to reign as the Son of God, as God Himself incarnate and with us (Matthew 1:23), having conceived the human body He Himself inhabited as the Son (Luke 1:35). Great is the mystery of godliness! (1 Timothy 3:16.) His Divine parentage and His Divinity qualifies Him for the throne of Israel.
That doctrine is less supported in Alexandrian Bibles. For example, Luke 2:33 changes “Joseph and his mother” to “his father and his mother,” suggesting Joseph rather than God was Jesus’ actual father.
Jesus being God in the flesh is also essential to the complete sufficiency and efficacy of His atonement for our sins. As Creator God, having made all things (John 1), and though innocent, He was fully qualified to have the responsibility for all things laid on Him, and to pay the penalty in full with His own death.
- The miracles of Jesus.
His miracles testified who He was, and is. (John 10:25, 38; 14:11)
- The resurrection of Jesus.
Jesus’ resurrection attests to His Divinity, and attests that God fully accepted His atonement for all sin as complete payment. The resurrection also gives believers a powerful example to look to for hope and confidence in the face of death threats. Alexandrian Bibles omit Mark 16:9–20, or discredit it in margin notes. That passage gives details of the resurrected Jesus interacting with His disciples, delivering the Great Commission (“preach the gospel to every creature”) and ascending to heaven and sitting on the right hand of God. That’s some significant doctrine.
- The second coming of Jesus.
In Revelation 11:17 in many Alexandrian Bibles, “art to come” is omitted.
If Jesus is to return and claim the throne, then whoever is claiming it before then does not have the right to it or won’t be able to hold onto it.
The doctrine of the faith is that Jesus is the true Messiah, the literal Son of God, that He has appeared once already, that He provided Himself as the supremely sufficient atonement for all sins—they’re all paid for and believers in Him are free—that He rose again, and that He will return, so whoever claims to be Christ before then is not Him.
So any or all of these things and more may come under attack during the Tribulation.
The list of contended verses in Alexandrian Bibles is so long that it could itself be used to call the reliability of the whole thing into question. That may be one way the assault on the New Testament plays out in the Tribulation.
Returning to the picture in Acts 27, the Tribulation is reaching its crescendo. The return of Jesus is imminent, and things are really, really rough for believers in Him.
The Alexandrian New Testament has been increasingly discredited in the relentless assault. The crew and passengers already turned to “helps”—commentaries and other resources—to hold their ship and their faith together.
And now, on top of these things, in this dire situation with the end approaching, serious official consideration is given to exterminating all believers in Jesus, and to let none of them get away.
This looks to be an attempt to kill believers beforehand to thwart their rescue by Jesus when He returns. This suggests that some, maybe many unbelievers will be aware of and fearful of the possibility of His imminent return. Some will try to sabotage it. On some level they’ll know they are fighting against God Himself. But they’ll do it anyway.
Note that in verse 42 these particular soldiers are not described as on the ship with the believers—just the soldiers, not “the soldiers on the ship.” These are outsider soldiers. Unbelievers.
42 And the soldiers’ counsel was to kill the prisoners, lest any of them should swim out, and escape.
43 But the centurion, willing to save Paul, kept them from their purpose; and commanded that they which could swim should cast themselves first into the sea, and get to land:
44 And the rest, some on boards, and some on broken pieces of the ship. And so it came to pass, that they escaped all safe to land.
The centurion—again, a Roman favorable toward the apostle Paul—kept that from happening. That suggests the Roman church will still have political influence and will have the conscience to intervene. And the centurion’s advice was for the believers to flee and save themselves.
Those who were seasoned and established and strong enough in the faith to swim, to keep their heads above water, made it to land on their own, keeping the faith and reaching the end of the Tribulation—or their lives—and entering into Christ’s Kingdom. The rest made it by clinging to boards and broken pieces of the Alexandrian ship, precious fragments and bits of scripture they clung to even after the Alexandrian New Testament had been battered to pieces.
We can be sure many were terrified. But they persevered, and all made it safely to shore. All the true believers made it to the end and were saved.
And that ends the chapter.
Whew! What a journey! We’ve traveled through over 2,000 years of history—history written centuries before it happened, with some of it yet to happen.
We’ve touched at several ports and on several topics.
We’ve learned that this age is due to end around 2070, having begun around A.D. 70, and that it is to last a full, whole 2,000 years (two thousand-year days in the Biblical prophetic week).
We’ve learned that believers at the end of this age will be swept away in a Translation that will mark the return of open, observable Divine and supernatural activity on Earth, ending this age of night and beginning the next, as daybreak, the return of Jesus, nears.
We’ve learned that the terms of salvation in the Tribulation are different from ours—and are frightening. During the Tribulation, salvation can be lost.
We’ve learned that this age is the time of Fair Havens, and is the best time to get saved, in order to escape the terrible times to come and avoid the risks of losing salvation.
And we have learned what the Bible has to say about the families of texts that underlie our Bibles. Alexandrian Bibles will be the Bibles of the Tribulation. Byzantine Bibles will not be in evidence. And the Alexandrian New Testament will be battered in those stormy times and eventually be broken to pieces. Believers in Jesus will make to the end, and to their salvation, by swimming strong in faith, or by hanging on to their faith by clinging to bits and pieces—precious fragments—of the shattered hinder part of the Alexandrian ship.
And we now know the Byzantine text–based King James Bible won’t be around many more years. It’s such a stabilizing and comforting reassurance to have solid, dependable truth in an increasingly destabilized world, a world saturated in deception and misinformation.
So enjoy the KJV while we have it!
That wraps up this series on Acts 27. Before we conclude, let’s note that the Bible does make another mention of the Alexandrian text family in the very next chapter of Acts (chapter 28). It’s a different story, but once again, Paul finds himself traveling in an Alexandrian vessel.
11 And after three months we departed in a ship of Alexandria, which had wintered in the isle, whose sign was Castor and Pollux.
Castor and Pollux are names of the twins of the Gemini constellation. What could twins have to do with the Alexandrian family of texts?
Earlier in this series I mentioned the two “biggie” manuscripts (codices) of the Alexandrian family, Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus. (Codex simply means book.) They do have many trivial differences, but they’re basically twins in that they reflect and support each other. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be considered part of the same family. There would be separate Bibles translated from each one instead of single Bibles translated from both.
The first one, as the name Vaticanus implies, was found in Rome.
Sinaiticus was found in a Catholic monastery on the Sinai peninsula.
In scholarly notes and writings, Vaticanus is often referred to as “B,” and Sinaiticus as “Aleph.” (Things can get complicated in the field of textual criticism.)
They are the two stars among the four Great Uncial Codices, the more-or-less complete Greek language Alexandrian text Bibles of the Alexandrian text family. And they are the two main texts underlying most every modern English language version of the Bible—the King James Version excepted of course.
Whenever you see in a footnote something like “in the oldest and best manuscripts, the verse reads so-and-so,” they’re often talking about only two manuscripts, Vaticanus and Sinaiticus. One is regarded as the “oldest,” the other as the “best.” And the insinuation is they agree with each other. They’re twins.
So Vaticanus and Sinaiticus are the two big manuscript names associated with the Alexandrian family of texts, as Castor and Pollux are the two big names associated with the one Alexandrian ship.
Thank you for reading this series! I hope you’ve come to appreciate that when we pick up a King James Bible or read the King James text on screen, we’re looking at priceless treasure brought to us in the secure hold of an Adramyttium ship, a Byzantine vessel that sailed around the world and through twenty centuries to deliver it to us!
Here’s a list of bonus articles I’ll post to accompany this series:
Three Offers of the Kingdom, and the Duration of Our Current Age
Adjusting to King James English
On Consulting and Using Other Versions
Some Problems with King James Onlyism
Why We Should Not Update the King James Bible or Change the Text
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