U-M Professor of History and 2018-19 Institute for the Humanities John Rich Faculty Fellow Kenneth Mills gives a 30-minute talk followed by Q & A.

Combing scripture and classical authorities was all well and good. And there were the Church fathers, the erudite humanists, and the observations of itinerant chroniclers to consider too. Yet all this learning ultimately fell short, suggesting rather than proving that in the first century a wing-footed apostle of Jesus had preached the gospel as far afield as Asia and the Americas. After a certain point -- for sixteenth- and seventeenth-century thinkers who embraced notions of divine omniscience, a salvific vision for all humanity, and thus of pristine evangelisation beyond the circum-Mediterranean -- a different kind of search was on, indeed critical. The search for physical evidence, for oral evidence, and for the material traces and signs of an apostle. How would any such “new world” findings and sacred adventures be told?