Snakes, Gods, and Heroes: Greek Myth in Acts 27-28

Out of the dry brush of a Mediterranean island, thousands of years ago, a viper strikes. Bystanders recoil as a respected man, recently arrived on the island, shakes off the snake. Immediately, the bystanders ask those most human of questions: why? And why him? 

For Christian readers, this introduction is clearly a retelling of Acts 28. The Apostle Paul, a prisoner being transported to Rome, is shipwrecked on a sandbar. He and the others manage to swim to safety on the isle of Malta; as Paul predicted, not a single life is lost. They huddle by a bonfire to warm up, only for a venomous snake to emerge and bite Paul on the hand. 

But to someone familiar with classical Greek culture–as Luke, the author of Acts, undoubtedly was–those first sentences also tell the story of the Greek hero Philoctetes. Unlike the more famous figures of the Trojan War, like Odysseus or Achilles, Philoctetes has mostly faded from our cultural memory. This is a pity, especially for Bible readers. We read better when we acknowledge the New Testament as an artifact of the Greco-Roman world from which it emerged. Crucially, modern readers might not recognize the countercultural nature of Acts 27 and  28 unless we know the myths to which those chapters act as a theological corrective. A side-by-side reading of these two snakebite tales reveals that Acts borrows certain classical conventions in order to better confront the pagan world with the Christian vision of an all-loving, all-powerful God.

Sea Journeys and Shipwrecks

Before the snakebite, Luke uses an even more familiar cultural symbol–the sea. People of the ancient Mediterranean world associated the sea with possibility, with danger, and even with corruption. Its geographical centrality in the region contributed to its centrality in the cultural imaginary of the time. Thus, early readers of Acts 27 would be immediately familiar with its genre: that of the seafaring adventure. Tales of the sea naturally take on an epic quality–one they perhaps borrow from that original seafaring yarn, the Odyssey, in which Odysseus and his men must face terrifying monsters, wrathful gods, vicious storms, and a host of other challenges. Despite his vaunted wit, Odysseus is the journey’s only survivor.  

The story of Paul’s own odyssey goes on at length–44 verses of adventure at sea. That Luke spends so much time narrating the journey from Caesarea to Rome indicates just how perilous–yet also fascinating–sea travel was in the ancient world. While Luke’s telling avoids any hint of supernatural sea monsters, it includes several other conventions of the genre, like extended journeys, deadly storms, and catastrophic shipwrecks. 

Despite these similarities, the countercultural Gospel narrative shines forth. Particularly surprising to a Greco-Roman would be how Paul morphs from prisoner to leader during the journey. Paul’s world is not one to valorize the underdog. Their heroes are kings, princes, demigods, or warriors–men more like Julius, the centurion responsible for Paul and his fellow prisoners. However, Luke quickly challenges his culture’s beliefs in noble birth and physical strength as key requirements for heroism. The real hero of this journey is not Julius the centurion but Paul the prisoner. Thus, Luke transfers agency away from the military leader of the voyage, showing Paul astutely assessing the traveling conditions and sharing his assessments without fear. On four occasions in Acts 27, Luke records Paul boldly addressing the centurion, the soldiers, and the prisoners. At one point he “stands up among them” to speak, and Luke even records him “advising” and “urging” them. This is hardly the expected behavior of a prisoner. 

But of course, Paul is more than a prisoner. He is also an evangelist, an apostle, a minister of the gospel. Highlighting Paul’s surprising degree of authority on the ship emphasizes his role as a mouthpiece of God, more powerful than any centurion. The ultimate power and authority of the true God will become even more evident in the next chapter. 

Acts 27 concludes with the chaos of a shipwreck off the coast of Malta, as everyone swims, scrambles, or floats to dry land. As Paul predicted, all survive. But then Paul suffers that snakebite, which seems a cruel twist of fate for someone who has just miraculously survived a shipwreck. Luke, however, has a point to make about fate, and this poses just the right opportunity. Paul shakes off the snake as well as any ill effects of the bite and walks away to make more converts for Christ. Fate has no power over one who is made new in Christ.

Triumph in Tragedy

Philoctetes, in similar circumstances, was not so lucky. As we will see, the vagaries of fate and the vengefulness of gods make his story one of misery. Who was Philoctetes? A second-string player in the great game of the Trojan War, Philoctetes inhabits the same mythical world as Odysseus and Heracles. He earns a few lines in numerous classical sources, including Homer and Ovid; one ancient source also mentions now-lost plays about his life by Aeschylus and Euripides. As is common with figures from Greek myth, the extant sources present some contradictory details. These characters, after all, originate in oral tradition, so competing versions of their stories have always existed. Each time an ancient poet or playwright takes up the raw material of told and re-told myth, they bend it further, making it fit their own genre and purpose. 

All this is true with the tale of Philoctetes. Nonetheless, a basic biography follows. A skilled archer and king of the Greek city-state Meliboea, Philoctetes is son of the famed Argonaut, King Poeas. Philoctetes first garners attention for an act of assisted suicide. Heracles, suffering from a poisoned robe, begs to be put out of his misery. Philoctetes–or in some tellings, his father Poeas–constructs a funeral pyre, lights it with a flaming arrow, and helps the tormented Heracles out of this life and into the next. 

For this act Philoctetes earns Heracles’ famed bow and arrows, which, according to prophecy, will be needed to defeat Troy. However, in helping Heracles to escape his fate, Philoctetes also earns the enmity of the gods. This, for the ancients, is always precarious, but especially so when one is setting out on a journey. The Iliad records that Philoctetes leads seven ships of archers from his home across the Aegean towards Troy. As the Roman fabulist Hyginus describes the situation, the ships pause at an island, where Juno (Hera, for the Greeks), furious that Philoctetes aided her enemy Heracles, sends a snake to bite Philoctetes on the foot. Another account, by Apollodorus of Athens, describes the snake emerging from a fire, much like the viper in Acts 28. In this telling, the Greeks en route to Troy pause to make sacrifices to Apollo when the snake crawls from the altar to bite Philoctetes. 

The various retellings all agree that Philoctetes’s wound festers and stinks, so that ultimately Odysseus, one of the leaders of the Trojan expedition, decides to abandon him on the island of Lemnos, in the Aegean Sea. Philoctetes lives alone there for ten years, a castaway who spends his days hunting small game with the bow of Heracles and mourning his ill fortune. 

It is here that the most comprehensive surviving portrayal of Philoctetes picks up: the eponymous play by Sophocles, which won first prize at the Athenian Dionysia in 409 BC. The play’s action begins ten years after the snakebite, as Philoctetes is once more visited by the Greeks who abandoned him a decade before. While early Greek plays featured only a chorus and a single actor in a speaking role, Sophocles expanded this roster in his dramas, using three speaking actors, who could move as needed among roles. This structural innovation works especially well in Philoctetes, with its three central characters: the abandoned Philoctetes; the unscrupulous Odysseus, who schemes to take Philoctetes and his bow to Troy; and the young Neoptolemus, son of the slain Achilles, torn between his pity for Philoctetes and his desire to help Odysseus end the Trojan War. These three figures create the play’s moral tension, which feels surprisingly compelling to modern readers. Odysseus, with his resolve to use any means necessary to bring about a Greek victory, reads like a textbook example of realpolitik. Meanwhile, Philoctetes’ bitterness is understandable, but he has nursed his trauma so that it has outgrown his own personhood.

Philoctetes’ defining trait, in Sophocles’ play, is his suffering. Even from a distance the Greeks observe the former hero’s sad new life: “A wretch hunting wretchedly for game… miserable and alone always, sick from his savage infection…[C]rawling in discomfort…His cry carries far and wide.” Philoctetes’ own assessment of his plight is just as grim: “This is the tenth year that I have been dying here, wretched and hungry, feeding this insatiable wound on my misery.” 

Philoctetes goes from being a leader of men and friend to the greatest of heroes to a pathetic wretch who cries like a sick infant and crawls on the ground like the snake that wounded him. Like his friend Heracles before him, Philoctetes begs for death as a release from suffering. This is the reversal in fortunes that characterizes Greek tragedy; no human, however mighty, is safe from a hammer-blow of fate. Yet in Acts, Luke emphasizes the exact opposite: no human, however lowly, is too wretched to be visited by divine wisdom and power. Thus, Paul the prisoner outranks Julius the centurion, while Philoctetes the hero falls into utter abjection. 

Another convention of Greek tragedy is the role of the chorus in commenting on events of the plot. Alan Sommerstein, Emeritus Professor of Greek at Nottingham University, writes that the chorus in classical tragedy was typically composed of “a group of persons who had little power over events (such as women, old men, sailors) but who stood to be deeply affected, for good or ill, by the actions of the principal characters.” Thus, they “comment on and illuminate the action rather than influencing its development.” In this way, they are audience stand-ins, modeling the culturally appropriate response. 

In Philoctetes, the chorus are the sailors who have traveled to the island with Odysseus and Neoptolemus. While Odysseus sees in Philoctetes not a suffering human but a tool he cast aside too soon, the chorus observes with mixed pity and horror that Philoctetes is a “poor wretch,” “miserable and alone.” While Odysseus bluntly declares that he abandoned Philoctetes because his agonized cries disturbed and distracted the other Greek warriors, the chorus gives voice to its culture’s theory of suffering: “This is the work of the gods!” 

What does this mean for Paul? Here we must again jump from Lemnos to Malta. One of the more unique features of Acts 28 is that Luke too creates a sort of chorus out of the islanders of Malta, who observe both the shipwreck and the snakebite. As in Sophocles, this “chorus” provides a commentary on events based in the preconceptions of their pagan Mediterranean culture. Unsurprisingly then, they too interpret the snakebite as a form of divine punishment: “This man must be a murderer; for though he escaped from the sea, the goddess Justice has not allowed him to live” (Acts 28:4). They stand by, watching for the venom’s grim effects, waiting for the outspoken Paul to be diminished into a whimpering wretch like Philoctetes. In other words, Luke’s Maltese chorus starts with the same expectations held by the chorus of Sophocles, but Luke subverts those expectations when Paul not only survives the bite but goes on to heal first the father of the island’s chief administrator, then the rest of the island’s sick. Thus, Paul’s story–and in fact, Luke’s entire account–ends with Paul and his cohort sent off to Rome with great honor.

If Philoctetes suffers a tragic reversal, Paul’s healing and subsequent fame exemplify a reversal of another kind. God steps in, as he has throughout Paul’s missions, to transform tragedy into glory. This is the eucatastrophe, in the words of Tolkien, the “sudden joyous ‘turn’ . . . a sudden and miraculous grace.” As Tolkien acknowledges, the moment of eucatastrophe does not “deny the existence of . . . sorrow and failure.” Paul sails in triumph, but he sails nonetheless towards trial and ultimately execution in Rome. However, the Malta episode shows once more how God writes the end of every story. 

The ‘Deus ex Machina’ Resolution

Unusually for a tragedy, Philoctetes also concludes with a triumphant voyage from an island. Although his stench, his cries, his fits of agony make him an outcast among the civilized Greeks, Philoctetes, with the bow of Heracles, is fated to be present at the fall of Troy. It is to fulfill this prophecy that Odysseus has come to Lemnos. But Philoctetes is not prepared to do anything–not even leave his detested island–to accommodate his arch-enemy Odysseus. He tells Odysseus that accompanying him now would make him Odysseus’s slave; he would rather “throw [him]self from the cliffs and dash this head against the rocks.” Meanwhile, Odysseus threatens to take the bow alone to Troy and leave Philoctetes behind on Lemnos. 

For his fate to be fulfilled, Philoctetes must somehow be reconciled with Odysseus, with the Greeks, and with the gods. This reconciliation appears impossible until the play’s final moments. Then, taking a massive swing at a plot resolution, Sophocles calls in the “deus ex machina.”  

Using a special crane meant for dramatic flying entrances, Sophocles brings a now-deified Heracles down from heaven, who introduces his mission in Christ-like terms: “It is for your sake I have come, leaving my seat in heaven, to proclaim Zeus’s plans for you.” Heracles is the deified Friend, returning to promise a form of salvation for Philoctetes if only he will accept his fate. Heracles uses his own life story as inspiration: “I endured much, passed through a sequence of labours, and now I have attained divine glory, as you can see. Know that a like experience awaits you: in exchange for your labours, a life of fame.” 

With these words, Heracles encourages his old friend to work with the Greeks to defeat Troy. The divine intervention works: immediately Philoctetes, Odysseus, and Neoptolemus put aside their differences and agree to travel together to Troy. And Heracles makes one final promise: on the plains before Troy, Asclepius, the god of medicine, will finally heal Philoctetes’ festering wound. Thus, like Paul, Philoctetes can be healed by divine intervention. But while Paul’s miracle leads to the miraculous healing of many others, Philoctetes can only be cured by bringing death and destruction to Troy. 

A momentary intervention by a god, arriving to promise his friend healing and power, may appear to be a parallel to Paul’s miraculous survival at the opening of Acts 28. However, the deus ex machina ending oversimplifies the much richer biblical understanding of the miraculous. 

In Greek tragedy, the deus ex machina arrives as an unexpected, external force. In fact, for this very reason, Aristotle denounces the plot device in his Poetics: 

As in the structure of the plot, so too in the portraiture of character, the poet should always aim either at the necessary or the probable. Thus a person of a given character should speak or act in a given way, by the rule either of necessity or of probability; just as this event should follow that by necessary or probable sequence. It is therefore evident that the unraveling of the plot, no less than the complication, must arise out of the plot itself, it must not be brought about by the 'Deus ex Machina'—as in the Medea, or in the Return of the Greeks in the Iliad. The 'Deus ex Machina' should be employed only for events external to the drama,—for antecedent or subsequent events, which lie beyond the range of human knowledge, and which require to be reported or foretold; for to the gods we ascribe the power of seeing all things. Within the action there must be nothing irrational. If the irrational cannot be excluded, it should be outside the scope of the tragedy.

The word here translated as “unraveling” is luseis, which more literally could be translated as a loosening or unfastening. Like a zipper, which must operate on the same track as it opens and closes, the denouement of a work should follow along the same logical path as the rest of its plot. Thus, Aristotle might condemn Sophocles’ introduction of Heracles in the play’s final pages as something “irrational” and entirely improbable. For a truly satisfying resolution, Odysseus and Philoctetes should be persuaded to a reconciliation by some force or argument already existing within the play. (One should note, however, that Heracles does foretell miraculous Philoctetes’ healing on the plain of Troy–a promise “beyond the range of human knowledge,” which Aristotle concedes as a proper use of the deus ex machina.)   

Ironically, Aristotle’s vision of the ideal resolution is better matched not by Sophocles’ tragedy but by the book of Acts. God’s miraculous rescue of Paul does indeed “arise out of the plot itself,” because God’s intervention in Paul’s life is not confined to a few inspiring pages at the end of his otherwise tragic biography. Philoctetes ekes out his survival for ten years on Lemnos, abandoned by gods and men, before his supposed friend Heracles finally arrives to proclaim his salvation. But Paul has spent more than twenty years of missionary work with God ever by his side. 

God does not emerge in a surprise cameo. He does not swing in on ropes in the closing moments. He has walked with Paul ever since the road to Damascus. The central truth of the Bible is that God is embedded in human history. God is the weaver of the plot, not its unraveler; He is not the “deus ex machina” but the ultimate Playwright, who has been preparing the stage for Paul’s scenes on Malta since Genesis. 

In a recent analysis of the narrative overlap between Philoctetes and Acts 28, scholar M. David Litwa argues that the author of Acts was almost certainly familiar with the tale of Philoctetes and in fact modeled Acts 28 after the myth. He does this, Litwa argues, as part of a “sophisticated game of one-upmanship” meant to show Paul to be the “far superior hero.” After all, Paul suffers no apparent pain at his snakebite. In fact, rather than ten years of agony and humiliation, Paul shows no sign that the bite impacted him at all. 

Perhaps, though, the real one-upmanship is not between heroes, but between theologies. Sophocles cannot rectify the tragic suffering of his hero without imagining a savior who momentarily intervenes. For Luke’s narrative in Acts, the Savior is already central to the plot.