How Far Did Early Missionaries Travel?

Part 3 - Pytheas Sails North

In 320 B.C.E. the Greek mariner set out on a voyage to discover new lands north of the Mediterranean

By that year Massalia (now the modern French city of Marseilles)  had become a prosperous commercial centre with traders sending Mediterranean wines, oils and bronzeware to countries to the north and importing amber and raw metals, such as tin  from those lands.

According to scholars Massiliote traders commissioned  Pytheas to find a quicker (and  probably safer) sea route to those lands. From the careful account that Pytheas kept of seas, tides, geography as well as the different peoples he encountered and different readings he took of the sun's angle  with a survey device known as gnomon which  showed how far he had traveled,  it appears that after sailing westward from Massalia  he sailed north along the Iberian  Peninsula ( Spain) to Brittany (France) and then northward still farther between Ireland and Britain and even farther north.

 He wrote that he sailed some 6 days north of Britain to  the land called Thule, a land where the sea was frozen and had a midnight sun.

There is some debate about exactly what land this was: Iceland, Norway, the Faroe or Orkney Islands, but Pytheas described it as a land of frozen seas and "the midnight sun" so he obviously had sailed pretty far north before returning home, sailing south through the North Sea back to Brittany and the Atlantic coast and home.

Other Phoenician, Greek, Roman, as well as sailors from other lands followed followed over the years. The world of Paul's day was one of expanding exploration, trade, and travel around the southern tip of Africa as well as far north as the Arctic.

But for most people these new territories were still unknown to most  of the people Paul was writing to and it was not likely that he had these frontier territories in mind when he spoke about the good news being preached, "in all creation that is under heaven."

It  was more likely that he was still referring to Mediterranean lands  such as: Parthia, Elam, Media, Mesopotamia, Arabia, Asia Minor parts of Libya, and Rome. By Paul's day, long after Pentecost of 33C.E.  when many Jewish persons as well as proselytes from these lands accepted Christianity the Christian message had indeed become well known in these areas of Mediterranean.

It's possible that individuals could have begun to carry the Christian message even farther afield into Africa and Europe by Paul's day -- but if so there is apparently no record of it.