plete, once he had evangelized all the way to Spain. One is that, in both Jew-
ish and Greco-Roman contexts, Spain was commonly considered to be the
“ends of the earth.” The other is based on Isaiah 66:18–19, the only escha-
tological pilgrimage text to contemplate a mission going out to the nations.
This passage lists several nations in particular, including Tarshish, which Aus
takes to be a reference to Spain (Tartessos). In his view, when Paul can pres-
ent Gentile converts from “Tarshish,” the most distant of the nations listed
in Isaiah 66:19, the full number of the nations can be said to be complete
(Aus 1979; see also Jewett 1992).
Isaiah 66:18–19 figures prominently in two other detailed hypotheses
concerning Paul’s geographical strategy. The more precise of the two is that
of Rainer Riesner (1994, 213–25), who argues that this passage provided Paul
not only with the ultimate goal of Spain (referred to by “the coastlands far
away,” and not by “Tarshish,” which Riesner links with Tarsus), but also
with Paul’s complete missionary itinerary (Tarshish=Tarsus, Put=Cilicia,
Lud=Lydia in Asia Minor, Javan=Greece, and so on). While Riesner allows
for other, more mundane factors also to play a role—indeed, he provides
highly detailed treatments of road systems, sea travel, wintering practices,
etc.—he nevertheless attempts to account for a whole range of detail con-
cerning Paul’s travels, in both Acts and the Epistles, on the basis of Isaiah
66:18–19 (Riesner 1994, 234–36, 261, 264, 271).
The same passage from Isaiah (66:18–19) plays a role, albeit not nearly
as central a role, in one other interpretation of Paul’s geo-missionary ideas
and strategies. Building on a thorough study of Jewish conceptions of
geography and ethnography, James M. Scott (1994; 1995) argues that the
“table of nations” tradition developing from the lists of the descendants of
Noah’s three sons in Genesis 10—a tradition including Isaiah 66:18–19—
provided the framework within which Paul and other Jewish Christian
missionaries viewed the world. In this ethnogeographical conception, the
world was divided, often with Jerusalem located at the centre, into three
broad areas corresponding to the three sons of Noah: Judea, Mesopotamia
and Arabia (Shem); Egypt and North Africa (Ham); northern and western
lands, including Asia Minor and Europe (Japheth). J.M. Scott’s argument
is that Paul saw his missionary territory as comprising the lands tradition-
ally associated with the descendants of Japheth, and his task as “preach-
ing the gospel to a representative number of [each] Japhethite nation”
(1995, 144).
Many scholars, then, are prepared to take Romans 15:19–24 more or less
at face value, and to understand Paul’s missionary travels to this point not
as “sporadic, random skirmishes into gentile lands” (Hultgren 1985, 133)
“The Field God Has Assigned” 117