The central Mediterranean appears to have five contenders for islands (or towns) called Melite or Melita in the Roman era. (A sixth city is Malatya in Turkey).
First, the western island called Gharbi, or even Melitta, in the Kerkennah group off eastern Tunisia. Second, the lotus island called Djerba has its airport at a place called Melitta.
Incidentally, Melitta and Melita are often interchangeable in North Africa. There has been no ancient or modern African or Tunisian claim for St Paul being shipwrecked on any of these islands.
At the centre of the Mediterranean near Gozo lies Malta, ancient Melita Africana, courtesy of the late scholar Paul Guillaumier.
He is supported by translators from the original Greek of St Luke’s Acts of the Apostles, 27-28, who all opt for Malta.
On the island of Cephalonia lies the main town of Argostoli. Lately Dr Warnecke has claimed a place called Melita on this eastern Ionian island. His argument mainly covers snakes, religious processions and some geographical points.
Further north in the middle of the Adriatic lies the island of Mljet or ancient Meleda, which Abate Giorgi claimed in the Byzantine period to be Luke’s Melita.
The pivotal point concerns St Luke’s Acts mention, after the island of Melita, of the ancient main city of Syracuse in Sicily. Why is this seemingly elusive clue geographically so important? Because even today, if one sails vaguely north, with a southerly wind, from Malta, one is almost bound to land at Syracuse.
Malta figures clearly as a regular Roman port of call, on the grain ship route from Alexandria in Egypt. Melitta on Gharbi island in the Kerkennah group and also Djerba island were off the mark. Kefallinia island, north of Corfu, has weak and questionable evidence for Syracuse in the Ionian Sea, in my opinion.
Meleda or Mljet is too far to the north in the Adriatic for sailing to anywhere but chiefly to Taranto, Ancona or Brindisi. Syracuse in Sicily is a credible option for Pozzuoli and Naples in western mainland Italy, which is the route Paul’s ship followed.
It transpires that the ship that had wintered on the island of Melita for some three months had also followed the route from Alexandria, Cyrene, Tripoli, Sabratha or Leptis Magna. It carried the sign of the Twin Brothers, or Twins, meaning the gods Castor and Pollux, known and venerated in temples all over the Roman empire, as protectors of seafarers.
The mention of Syracuse is the chief clue pointing to a departure from the island of Melita, 98 nautical miles to its south. Hence Luke’s Melite or Melita is almost irrefutably Malta.
All ancient and modern translators and scholars of the New Testament are agreed on this important point, and on Malta’s significant claim.