that the movement had been planted, already by the end of the first cen-
turyCE, in significant centres throughout much of the empire (at least on
the northern shore of the Mediterranean; information on Egypt and North
Africa is harder to come by) from which it could spread through more
spontaneous, informal, or ordinary means.
Paul’s contribution to this spread is not to be underestimated. The
major centres of Pauline Christianity (Ephesus, Philippi, Thessalonica,
Corinth) continued to be important into the second century CEand beyond.
Still, the facts (1) that the Christian movement was able to take root in
Rome without any apparent apostolic initiative, and (2) that what was
pushing Paul westward, at least in part, was the increasing activity of other
missionaries in the east, suggests that sooner or later the movement would
have arrived in these cities as well. Instead, Paul’s most significant contri-
bution to the spread and ultimate success of the Christian movement was
undoubtedly the letters that he wrote, with the vision contained therein of
a gospel “bearing fruit and growing in the whole world” (Col. 1:6; also 2
Cor. 2:14) and of the church as a trans-local fellowship spreading out into
theoikoumenê(1 Thess. 1:8; 1 Cor. 1:2; 4:17; 7:17; 11:16; Rom. 1:8), thereby
constituting a third race (“to Jews or to Greeks or to the church of God,”
1 Cor. 10:32). There is a certain irony in this, of course, in that what pro-
duced these letters in the first place was precisely those backwards-look-
ing circumstances of church maintenance that slowed down Paul’s
missionary advance. Still, the greatest of these letters arose out of Paul’s
compulsion to move forward: to push on to Spain, and thus to complete his
mission to the end of the earth.
“The Field God Has Assigned” 137