The Shipwreck, a painting by JMW Turner that forms part of the Tate collection in London.

The ceiling for his craft was infinity, and its floor was an age. It provided a buffer, so that the passing of a season or a millennium was all the same. In this way, he could not only travel up and down the corridors of his own history, but diverge into many others. Once at his destination, he would descend upon that world like a single drop of rain.

The sphere shimmered half in and half out of the timespace continuum as it alighted on the shore near Muxnar Reef in ancient Malta. The unmanned probes he had sent back searched across the local decades, and discovered the exact place, date, and time of the storm and the shipwreck. They were struggling in the surf now. It would all be so easy.

The Traveler picked out the Jew among those coming to shore. The exosuit he was wearing would make him seem like an alien, but it gave him five times his normal strength. He pressed a button on his belt and activated the Shalimite field. The would-be refugees began to collapse under the overwhelming compunction to sleep. As the now unconscious Jewish prophet fell, the Traveler seized him and carried him back to land.

It was unfortunate that the others had to drown. Their nervous systems would never recover in time to let them wake up and save themselves, but there must be no witnesses. No one must report that the man known as the Apostle Paul had survived. He would be presumed dead and washed back out to sea.

The Traveler loaded his sopping wet form into the sphere. There was a small cargo area behind the control seat that would house him for the next part of the journey.

Resuming his position and sealing the craft, the pilot worked the instruments and once again vanished into the passageways of time.

“You’ve always wanted to visit Spain. Now you shall. You must not be imprisoned and die in Rome if true Christianity and the good news of the Messiah to both the Jews and Gentiles is to be realized, even into the modern world.”

Moshe Ben Isaiah, a man born in the 21st century, would deliver Shaul to the ekklesia in Spain in what, from the Apostle’s point of view, would be a few years from now. He would be revealed to have miraculously survived the Maltese shipwreck and resume his work among the Goyim. The Traveler couldn’t wait to get back to the present and witness the results of his labors.

I wrote this for Saturday Mix – Same Same But Different, 19 May 2018 hosted at Mindlovemisery’s Menagerie. Today, the idea is to take five words and use their synonyms to craft a poem, short story, or other creative work.

I bolded my synonyms above so you could pick them out. The synonyms and the original words (which I put in brackets) are:

• buffer (cushion)
• age (time)
• ceiling (roof)
• rain (water)
• diverge (fork)

My “pet peeve” with Biblical history is that when the Apostle Paul died, there was no one left to carry his mission to the Gentiles forward in time. If he had lived, perhaps we wouldn’t see this horrible schism between modern Christianity and Judaism, and the good news of Jesus Christ wouldn’t have morphed into an anti-Jewish and anti-Judaism message as seen by both the Church and the Jewish people.

My time traveler is obviously a Jew who is attempting to “correct” this problem.

Oh, I named the Shalimite field after Shalim, the Canaanite god of dusk. Also, you’ll find the chronicle of the actual events around Paul’s shipwreck at Malta in Acts 27 and 28.

By the way, this isn’t the first time I’ve referenced the shipwreck event. Check out Encounter at Muxnar.