To the ends of the earth

On the Mount of Olives Jesus told his disciples of wars, persecution and false prophets to come. In the middle of that dark picture stands a promise.

The verb, kēruchthēsetai, "will be preached", is a future passive. It does not say who will preach; it says that the gospel will be preached. Mark gives the same saying as a necessity: "And the gospel must first be proclaimed to all the nations" (Mark 13:10). The KJV’s "for a witness unto all nations" and the BSB’s "as a testimony" render one Greek phrase: the news is a testimony laid before every people.

The Fathers saw different things in the promise. Chrysostom held that the gospel had been preached everywhere before Jerusalem fell, and pointed to the ground Paul covered alone: "And if one had so large a province, think how much all must have done" Chrysostom. Origen, who knew of many nations in his own day that had not yet heard, read it as a promise still waiting: "When every nation shall have heard the preaching of the Gospel, then shall come the end of the world" Origen.

The way the gospel actually spread looks less like a plan than like footsteps. After Stephen’s death the believers were scattered, and "those who had been scattered preached the word wherever they went" (Acts 8:4). The verb is euangelizomai, "to bring good news"; the LSV keeps it: "proclaiming good news—the word." Peter and John preached the gospel in many Samaritan villages on their way back to Jerusalem (Acts 8:25), and Philip, on a desert road, met an Ethiopian official reading the prophet Isaiah.

In the Greek the good news Philip brought is a single name, Jesus; the KJV has "preached unto him Jesus". Paul draws the same movement out as a chain:

Then, in Isaiah’s words, he sings of the feet of those who bring good news (Isaiah 52:7). Yet the next verse admits, "But not all of them welcomed the good news" (Romans 10:16); the KJV says they "have not all obeyed the gospel". The news is told, not forced. Still, "faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ" (v. 17). The KJV, following other manuscripts, ends "by the word of God".

Around AD 112 Pliny the Younger, governor of Bithynia, wrote to the emperor Trajan that this movement had spread beyond the cities into the villages and the countryside Pliny, Letters 10.96. In Korea in the 1790s Jeong Yak-jong wrote a catechism in the Korean alphabet, so that women and common people could read it Jeong Yak-jong, Jugyo yoji.

Paul’s own aim was "to preach the gospel where Christ was not known" (Romans 15:20). What becomes of those who never hear is taken up in What about those who never heard?