Once was I stoned. — Here the Acts (Acts 14:19) give us the solitary instance at Lystra. The accuracy of the Apostle in referring to this form of suffering, where we can compare it with the history, may fairly be urged as evidence of a like accuracy in his other statements.
Thrice I suffered shipwreck. — Again we have a picture of unrecorded sufferings, which we must refer either to the period of his life between his departure from Jerusalem (Acts 9:30) and his arrival at Antioch (Acts 11:26), or to voyages among the islands of the Ægean Sea during his stay at Corinth or at Ephesus, or to that from Ephesus to Cæsarea in Acts 18:22.
A night and a day I have been in the deep. — Taken in their natural sense the words probably point to one of the shipwrecks just mentioned, in which, either swimming or with the help of a plank (as in Acts 27:44), he had kept himself floating for nearly a whole day, beginning with the night. They have, however, been referred by some writers to a dungeon pit, like that into which Jeremiah was cast (Jeremiah 38:6), in which the Apostle was either thrown or hid himself after the stoning at Lystra. Bede (Qucest. iii. 8) relates, on the authority of Archbishop Theodore of Canterbury — whose evidence, as a native of Tarsus, has here a special interest — that there was such a dungeon known by the name of Bythos (the word used here for “deep”) in his time at Cyzicus, and, if so, it is probable enough that the same use of the word may have prevailed in other cities. So at Athens there was a dungeon known as the barathron — a word used also for a “gulf.” On the whole, however, though the conjecture is interesting enough to deserve mention, there seems no adequate reason for adopting it.