In 2010 Malta celebrated the 1,950th anniversary of St Paul's shipwreck on the shores of Malta. It was also the year of the visit by Pope Benedict XVI also celebrating the shipwreck anniversary.

To commemorate these two events the government of the time held an exhibition at the Auberge de Castille. This lavishly illustrated book is the catalogue of this exhibition.

To my mind it is still not clear why the exhibition had to be organised by the prime minister and held at his office, the Auberge de Castille. I remember the previous exhibition, which was held at the Catholic Institute in 1960 during the Pauline Centenary celebration.

This commemorative book obviously includes articles by the people you would expect to find - from the prime minister of the time, Lawrence Gonzi, the two editors, the late Dun Gwann Azzopardi and Anthony Pace, the late Peter Serracino Inglott, the late poet Oliver Friggieri (who wrote about the oratorio he wrote about St Paul), Keith Sciberras, Sarah M. Borg and Timmy Gambin.

Unfortunately, the book is without a Table of Contents. There is one other glaring omission. It includes a very good catalogue of the exhibition but for some reason omitted the great polyptych, which used to be in the Medina Cathedral and is now in the adjoining museum. This panel is probably of Spanish origin and has been associated with the circle of Luis Borassa (1360-1426).

The best contribution in the whole book, in my opinion, is that by Stanley Fiorini who lists a series of proofs why St Paul did come to Malta as is written in Chapters 27 and 28 of the Acts of the Apostles.

As author Thomas Freller writes, the abbot of the Benedictine abbey in Veliko Jezera near Dubrovnik on the Dalmatian island of Mljet, Ignjat Djurdevic, provoked a storm with his thesis that Paul was shipwrecked at Mljet, not Malta.

Today, however, there is little doubt among scholars that Paul was shipwrecked in Malta. The next port of call after leaving Malta was Syracuse, just across the sea from Malta.

A north-easterly gale could hardly have blown the vessel onto an island hugging the Dalmatian coastline on its eastern side.

Then there is a general lack of convincing evidence for a Pauline tradition in Mljet in sharp contrast to a vigorously constant testimony in Malta.

As early as in the fourth century AD Christian burials in catacombs started to appear alongside Jewish and Roman burials.

There is a letter by Pope Innocent I to Decentius, bishop of Gubbio, dated 416 that unambiguously stated that the faith in the islands between Sicily and Africa is of apostolic origin.

According to Fiorini, when the Aghlabids launched an all-out attack on the Maltese islands in 869-870 whereas Malta with its own bishop resisted the onslaught and was practically annihilated, Gozo capitulated and survived. When Count Roger II came in 1127 he found a surviving Christian community together with its bishop who came out to welcome him and began turning mosques into churches served by priests who had remained steadfast.

One of the earliest churches to be rehabilitated after the Norman conquest was San Pawl Milqi in Burmarrad.