The earliest Christians were eager to embrace and exploit recent advances in travel and literature to aid and multiply their efforts to spread the good news of Jesus with new people.

Under the rule of Rome, inter-city travel became possible and safe in ways it had not been before Paul’s day or even decades after. The Romans are well-known for their advances in road-building. Their crowned roads enabled rain to drain off and away from the roads. Some of the roads built during the Roman Empire still exist today. The sheer size of the Roman army provided an even layer of protection over the entirety of the Roman Empire, thus making it possible to travel with less threat of being victimized by bandits or murderers.

The early Christians loved to travel it seems. It wasn’t just Paul, Barnabas, Silas and John Mark who were sent out from a local church to go on a preaching mission to another town. Acts and other early Christian literature (the Didache) make mention of small groups of traveling short-term missionaries.

Literature was very expensive in the first century. The most common form of literature for the Hebrews was a scroll, but these were bulky and not easily transported. The Greeks used codexes, which more closely resembled the books we have today, but the pages were made of vellum, from animal skins, which were expensive. The early Christians used codexes made of papyrus leaves for their publications. These were easy to read, to mark one’s place in and easier to hide. Best of all, they were much less expensive to produce.

Michael Green suggests that Mark may have been the inventor of this type of codex. Certainly, he was one of the first to use it and its popularity among Christians provided literature Christians could use for worship and witness.

Mark was one of the earliest writers of a new literary genre: the “Gospel,” and may have been its inventor, suggests Michael Green. Mark took elements of oral tradition and written sources and wove them together into a seamless narrative. His “Gospel” was not so much a biography – Mark was highly selective of what he chose to include. His purpose is clear: to present stories from the life of Jesus which show how Jesus transformed the lives of those with whom he associated.

Michael Green, Evangelism Then and Now, 125