his call was already prefigured in that of the Servant of Deutero-Isaiah (if
this belief was not present already).
The second moment—to return to our point of departure—becomes
apparent in the decision to push on to Rome and then to Spain. This plan
needs to be seen as more than just the next step in a sequence of territo-
rial stages; the land distance between Corinth and Spain is probably twice
that covered up to this point between Antioch and Corinth. There is a
dimension—finality—to the projected journey that requires explanation. My
suggestion is that it is linked to Paul’s brush with death in Ephesus (2 Cor.
1:8–11). Confronted for the first time with the real possibility of his own
death before Christ’s parousia, Paul is made urgently aware of both the
magnitude of the task yet to be accomplished and the limits of his own time.
Hence the pressing desire to push on, as directly as possible, to Rome and
then to the end of the earth.
And so, the plans Paul announced to the Romans are not to be seen as
part of a realistic strategy fully to spread the Gospel “from Illyricum to
Spain,” just as he had already done “from Jerusalem to Illyricum.” Attempts
to account for the pertinent material in Romans 15, i.e., the statement that
the work in the east is complete and the announced travel plans, on the
basis of some putatively coherent territorial strategy, are misguided. Both
elements are to be seen instead as the result of a dialectic between vision
and reality, which is to say, Paul’s attempt to accommodate the grandness
of the vision to the stubborn facts of his own real experience; or, better, by
sheer will and rhetoric, to force the untidy contingencies of reality to fit the
grand pattern of the vision.
CONCLUSION
At the beginning of this chapter, I raised several questions concerning
Paul’s mission. Two of them: whether Paul had a sense of territory assigned
to him, and the extent to which his actual missionary activity was shaped
by an overarching sense of mission, have been sufficiently discussed and
require no further comment. But what about the third question? What can
we say about Paul’s legacy to the Christian movement? What did Paul con-
tribute toward the eventual success of Christianity?
As observed already in the first section of this chapter, Paul was not the
originator, either deliberately or inadvertently, of a missionary movement,
for which he would be the prototype, and which eventually was success-
ful in its project of Christianizing the Roman Empire. After the first cen-
tury, professional itinerant missionaries seem to have played no significant
role in the spread of the movement. This is due, at least in part, to the fact