The earliest Christian writings identify travel as a natural expression of faith in Jesus. The sayings tradition presents Jesus as a homeless wanderer (Q 9:58; Gos. Thom. 86) who commissions his followers to emulate his itinerancy: as “workers” assigned “to gather the harvest,” they must move from house to house proclaiming God’s kingdom (Q 10:2-12; Gos. Thom. 73; cf. Gos. Thom. 42). From Paul’s letters a similar zeal for travel emerges (2 Cor 11:25-26; Rom 15:23-24), one that later becomes enshrined in the directive from the resurrected Jesus to preach to all nations (Mt 28:19; Lk 24:47).
Early Christians clearly perceived sojourning as critical for the dissemination of their message, a point developed in second- and third-century fictional accounts of the missionary activity of apostolic travelers. In highlighting this link between travel and knowledge, the authors of Acts, the Apocryphal Acts, and the Pseudo-Clementine literature draw upon a topos that stretched back to story of Odysseus (Od. 1.3) and had become especially prevalent among writers of the Second Sophistic (e.g. Dio Chrysostom, Lucian, Philostratus) who debated the merits of journeying. Those who viewed such movement positively envisioned travel as a form of intellectual and spatial transgression that countered imperial “knowledge” and the empire’s carefully scripted delineations of territory (e.g. Strabo, Pliny). This essay will demonstrate that the early Christian travelogues functioned similarly to construct an alternative body of knowledge available to those willing to journey with the apostles to places both “real” and fictional. Along with their Greek and Roman counterparts, such narratives thus contribute to the construction of new subjectivities that negotiate, resist, and reinscribe imperial formulations of identity and space.
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