<p>11:25 <em>Three times I was beaten with rods, once was I stoned, three times I suffered shipwreck, a night and a day have I been adrift at sea- </em>Only one beating with rods is recorded (Acts 16:22 s.w.), but Acts records only a fraction of Paul's sufferings. Beating with rods was forbidden to Roman citizens by the <em>Lex Porcia</em>, but Paul kept quiet about his Roman citizenship in order to receive it (Acts 16:37). He so wished to identify as a Jew in order to save the Jews; all he had to do was utter the words <em>Civis Romanus sum </em>and he could have avoided these beatings with rods, which often caused the death of the victim. We must ask to what extent we are willing to suffer in order to achieve identity with those we seek to save by our witness. The shipwrecks were prior to that on the journey to Rome; the Acts record of Paul's travels says nothing of them and we wonder how many other dramas were not recorded.</p><p>Paul endured one of the most traumatic lives ever lived- beaten with rods, shipwrecked, sleepless, cold, naked, betrayed, robbed, beaten, and so much of this isn&rsquo;t recorded (e.g. the three shipwrecks and two of the beatings with rods he speaks of in 2 Cor. 11 aren&rsquo;t mentioned in Acts). And yet he implies that even more than all that, he felt the pressure of care for his brethren in the churches. His heart so bled for them&hellip; Paul lived a traumatic life, lived with weakness, fear, trembling, tears, distress, dying daily, burdened beyond measure, despairing of life, having the sentence of death, sleeplessness&hellip; and all this would have had quite some effect upon him nervously. Almost certainly it would have lead him to be depressive, and this may explain some of these flashes of anger. Yet these flecks of pride and anger reflect something of Paul's former self. He is described as fuming out hatred against the Christians like an animal; he was driven by hate and anger. Stephen's death sentence was against Pharisaic principles; and it was a studied rejection of the more gentle, tolerant attitude taught by Gamaliel, Paul's early mentor (&quot;though I distribute all my belonging to feed the poor...&quot; is Paul virtually quoting Gamaliel- he clearly was aware of his stance). People like Paul who come from strict, authoritarian backgrounds can have a tendency to anger, and yet in Paul there seems also to have operated an inferiority complex, a longing for power, and a repressed inner guilt. Although Paul changed from an angry man to one dominated by love, to the extent that he could write hymns of love such as 1 Cor. 13, there were times when under provocation the old bitterness and anger flashed back. We too have these moments, and yet in the fact that Paul too experienced them even in spiritual maturity, we have some measure of comfort. &nbsp;</p>