Searching for Evidence of Paul's Shipwreck on Malta

Aimee Herd : Jul 22, 2011
Chuck Holton - CBN News

"I remember kneeling down and putting my hand on that cold object and thinking that 'I could be now touching history.' For 2,000 years it had belonged to the sea, but now I was touching this object that could have come to us from the pages of the Bible." -Bob Cornuke

In the Book of Acts 27 and 28, there are detailed accounts of how the ship the Apostle Paul was traveling on was caught in a storm and shipwrecked on an island called Malta.

Today, the island contains one of the earliest Christian communities and Europe's most religious nation.

The bay that is traditionally associated with Paul's shipwreck is known as St. Paul's Bay. But recently, that location was called into question by former L.A. crime scene investigator Bob Cornuke who was on a 10-year mission to find any evidence he could of the Apostle's seaborne adventure, some 2,000 years ago.

Cornuke told CBN's Chuck Holton that in his former job, he'd been trained to look for the clues that would tell the real story. In the Biblical account he remembered there was mention of four anchors. He'd asked himself, "Could I take the evidence that exists on the pages of the Bible and actually find these lost anchors that the Bible talks about?"

Cornuke reportedly used four different factors from the Book of Acts as criteria for confirming the true location where Paul's ship had run aground. Those factors were:

1. It was a bay with a beach.
2. There was a reef or a sandbar where two seas met.
3. The seafloor was about 90' of depth.
4. It was a place the sailors would not have recognized.

Cornuke enlisted the help of Maltese fishermen, who knew the waters around Malta the best. With their help it was determined that a different bay, on the other side of the island, seemed to match up with the clues of the story.

Dr. Graham Hunt, an expert on Mediterranean storms noted, "In my opinion…St. Thomas' Bay is a much more likely place."

Then Cornuke discovered that divers back in the late 1960's to early '70's had found four anchors (at about 90' in depth) in St. Thomas Bay along a dangerous sandbar called the Muxnar Reef. The anchors were dug up and then donated to Malta's National Maritime Museum and were eventually dated back to the Roman era of the Apostle Paul's time.

Cornuke went to see the anchors for himself and feels convinced that between them and the fulfillment of the other criteria; St. Thomas Bay and specifically the Muxnar reef is where Paul's ship ran aground two millennia ago.

"We looked down at this glistening anchor," recalled Cornuke, "and I remember kneeling down and putting my hand on that cold object and thinking that 'I could be now touching history.' For 2,000 years it had belonged to the sea, but now I was touching this object that could have come to us from the pages of the Bible."

Watch the full CBN video report of this fascinating find by following the source link provided.