and in neighbouring Vienne. Such details suggest two organized
Christian communities in southern Gaul – but how long they had
been there is impossible to know. In sum, the data for actual
communities yields only a limited picture, but that is one of a
patchy and uneven pattern of Christian expansion.
Missionaries, social networks, and diffusionHow did Christianity come to these various regions? From its
earliest existence, the religion seems to have possessed a strong
missionary impulse. At the beginning of Acts, the risen Jesus, just
before his ascension to heaven, tells the assembled disciples that
the holy spirit would come upon them and that they would bear
witness to his gospel until the ends of the earth (Acts1.8). We
have already seen that similarly vague geographical expressions
characterize early accounts of Christian success, and that precise
references to missionaries are, with the exception of the apostles,
absent. There presumably were missionaries, but our information
on them is vague. The pagan Celsus, as reported by Origen, wrote
in unflattering terms of anonymous preachers roaming the world;
Origen’s response does not provide any more detail (Origen,
Against Celsus3.9). Tertullian wrote, equally vaguely, that Chris-
tians could be found everywhere, on country estates, in camps of
the imperial army, and in tenements in the cities (To the Nations
1.14). Christians produced apologetical literature that aimed to
explain the tenets of their faith to pagans (and Jews), and some
such works, such as Clement of Alexandria’s Exhortation to the
Greeks, sought to persuade them to convert. From the whole
of Christian antiquity before Constantine, however, there is only
one Christian missionary whose strategies are explained and
described: Paul. His letters, and the account of his journeys in
theActs of the Apostles, give a detailed, but incomplete, account
of how one individual, together with a small group of associates,
endeavoured to spread the gospel (Clarke 1996: 851–66).
In terms of missionary goals, Paul seems to have had
in mind a rather ambitious global programme, but in what is
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