Using Sources
Using Sources
Ancient historians and biographers exercised considerable literary liberties, as we have seen, yet they were hardly free to invent events, at least without encountering significant criticism from other historians. The same principle should have held true among early Christians who respected the apostles; Gospels and historical Jesus scholars often underestimate the networking of early Christians, a mistake Pauline scholars (dealing with more concrete information on the matter) cannot so easily repeat.
As we noted more extensively in a previous chapter, the early churches throughout the Empire were already informally networked long before the writing of the Gospels. Probably before any of our extant Gospels were written, urban Christians traveled (1 Cor 16:10, 12, 17; Phil 2:30; 4:18); relocated to other places (Rom 16:3, 5); sent greetings to other churches (Rom 16:21-23; 1 Cor 16:19; Phil 4:22; Col 4:10-15); and so forth. While different locations might have their own struggles or theological emphases, the idea that the early Christian communities were isolated from one another is a modern academic inference that conflicts with all our actual evidence.