It’s not just our roads that are to be given a cosmetic once-over in view of Pope Benedict’s visit next week. Maltese history is also being rewritten, to position the Apostle Paul at the very heart of our national identity. Raphael Vassallo on a case of historical revisionism a la Maltija
Perhaps it was a slip of the tongue, but for a fleeting moment Superintendent of Cultural Heritage Tony Pace seemed to admit that the ongoing exhibition ‘St Paul and Malta’ (on display at Castille until April 18) was intended in part to reinvent Maltese history for the benefit of Pope Benedict XVI.
“With this exhibition, we wanted to create the message of how St Paul inspired Maltese history,” Pace told an online interviewer at the exhibition’s opening last Wednesday – an unfortunate choice of words, which strongly suggests that the ‘message’ in question (widely accepted by Maltese Christians though it may be) is at least partly contrived.
Certainly, this is how some of Malta’s historians feel about initiatives of this nature: not least Prof. Godfrey Wettinger of the University’s History Department, who this week poured cold water on claims of an ‘unbroken tradition’ of Christianity dating all the way back to Paul’s legendary shipwreck in 60AD.
“If I were to write a history of Malta stretching from the earliest origins to today, St Paul would qualify only as a reference in a footnote,” he remarked when asked about the Apostle’s centrality to Maltese cultural heritage.
“There is no direct evidence of Christianity in Malta for at least 300 years after the date when St Paul is believed to have come here. Furthermore it has now been established that artefacts dating back to the first three centuries AD, and which were previously associated with Christian rituals, were in fact pagan...”
But such is St Paul’s hold on the Maltese imagination, that resistance to these ‘controversial’ opinions remains fierce to this day... as even Wettinger is ultimately forced to concede.
“For many Maltese, it is better to have been ‘bad Christians’ than ‘good pagans’,” he points out with a laugh.
And yet, the history professor’s views are paradoxically supported by none other than the St Paul exhibition itself: which is very rich in exhibits from the late medieval to early modern periods, but conspicuously poor when it comes to St Paul’s own lifetime, or the period of early Christianity he is supposed to have left behind him when he went.
Strangely, there is nothing at all dating back to Roman times... the oldest exhibit on offer being a small piece of decorated stone from the San Pawl Milqi site in Burmarrad, dating back to the 6th century AD.
On one side, the chiselled figure of a bearded man can vaguely be discerned; and on the other, the small but very elegant graffito of a ship. This is somewhat unsatisfactorily passed off as a ‘possible reference’ to St Paul’s shipwreck... disregarding the fact the bearded man could just as easily be a representation of some pagan deity, and that the ‘ship’ motif is ubiquitous throughout early Maltese iconography (as one would after all expect, from what was once a maritime centre for Phoenician, Carthaginian, Greek and Roman civilisations respectively.)
Elsewhere, our national sword-wielding patron saint is graphically represented on all manner of artefacts and Church paraphernalia, past and present: anything from marble baptism fonts, to altarpieces and statuettes, to the beautifully illustrated manuscript of the Acts of the Apostles that greets the visitor upon entry... complemented by Mgr Pietru Pawl Saydon’s own handwritten Maltese translation, from the original Greek.
All very fascinating, and well worth the trek to the Auberge de Castille. But nothing in the exhibition – not even a towering (and very impressive) 17th century painting by Mattia Preti, depicting Paul’s miraculous intervention in the failed siege of Mdina in 1428 – can camouflage the fact that virtually all the items on display actually post-date Paul’s legendary visit by 1,400 years at least.
In some cases, the presumed ‘connection’ between Apostle and exhibit is to say the least tenuous. One particular item consists in a glass showcase full of fossilized shark teeth: most likely Charcaradon megaladon, which went extinct around 100,000 years before Paul’s birth.
These ‘glossopietre’, as they were once known, were for centuries mistaken for serpents’ teeth, and as such had been imbibed with magical and therapeutic powers since antiquity. But the connection with St Paul (they were referred to as ‘ilsien ta’ San Pawl’ in the 18th and 19th centuries) is clearly a very recent reinvention of the ancient superstition, inspired in part by the fact that so many were discovered embedded in the saint’s eponymous grotto in Mellieha... and most likely based on the sudden proliferation of a ‘new’ myth in circulation at roughly that time: i.e., that by casting a viper into the bonfire, Paul had symbolically ‘rid’ the Maltese islands of all its venomous snakes.
Far from illustrating an ‘unbroken’ tradition of Christianity dating back to St Paul, the exhibition succeeds in achieving the clean opposite effect. It cements the view, supported by historical evidence, that ‘Paulism’ is actually a recent phenomenon in the context of Malta’s seven-thousand year history – most likely introduced by the Knights of St John upon their arrival in 1530, and even then for purely political purposes.
In historical terms, it is the precise equivalent of the mad scramble to resurface our roads in time for Pope Benedict’s arrival: an artificial veneer to feed a pre-existing delusion, but which ultimately will only fool the misinformed.
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