"And he said unto them, Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature" (Mark 16:15). You know, this was a tall order for the apostles to carry out. Have you ever wondered how they actually did this? Of course, the New Testament confirms they did in Colossians 1:23, "..the gospel, which ye have heard, and which was preached to every creature which is under heaven." We can only conclude from this, that from the time Jesus spoke the words of the Great Commission in the mid-thirties AD, to about 66-67AD when Paul wrote the letter to the Colossians, a span of time of just over thirty years transpired. Could it really be possible that in this period of time or less, that mere men in primitive times with no knowledge of the extent of the actual size of the world had traversed the entire globe? Some have sought to explain that this could not be, but must have meant "in the known world" or the world which was dominated by the Roman Empire of the 1st Century AD. Let us stop for a moment and reason this out to see if it is such an impossibility or a stretch of reality for this to have been done as the Lord required of His apostles.

Remember that the continents of Europe, Africa, and Asia are all connected to the Middle East, and that travel was constant between these great land masses that constitute the majority of the "terra firma" of our planet. We know that disciplined Roman soldiers commonly marched in great numbers at the rate of thirty miles per day. It has been suggested that in music, "four-four" time is the same rate at which these soldiers marched, covering a ground eating, one mile every fifteen minutes or four miles per hour. The farthest regions of Europe could be reached by these solider on foot in only weeks at such rates of travel. They marched to war and maintained the unity and peace of the "pax romana" in this way. So, we can conclude that highly motivated servants of the Lord could travel like this, too, though no doubt, with great hardships involved, to achieve this great goal in the allotted time. But what about the New World, the island continent of Australia, and all the other nearly countless islands of the seas? How could these have been reached in such primitive times to make Colossians 1:23 be true?

In recent years it has been documented, and evidence unearthed that the ancients far back before the time of the apostles, thousands of years in fact, had ocean-going craft, which were apparently capable of reaching any shore on earth. In 1968, at Hull, England, a long, low style of boat, a pre-cursor to the Viking ships, was dug up from ancient river mud to reveal that it was about 4,500 years old. Thor Heyerdahl's many transoceanic journeys utilizing ancient styles of sea craft proved, for the most part, it was at least possible for people to travel from one continent to another across vast stretches of ocean to people Micronesia, Australia, and the whole Pacfic rim. Artifacts found in the U. S., like Roman coins found in Indian burial mounds and stone structures not made by Indians but made with seeming European skills in stone masonry, and so like many found in Europe of very old origins, would tend to make a fairly substantial case that our shores were not just visited, but could have even been settled from distant diverse places. The book, "The Farfarers," documents the travels of ancient Europeans, particularly Basques and Celts, to New Foundland and Labrador, and depicts a large stone cross and stone foundations which could be close to 1,900 years old and legends told by Norse sailors about "Christian-like" people living in that part of the New World long ago.