I've been curious about how early Christian communities within say the first two centuries of the religion's existence on average came into existence. I understand any answer would probably be speculative, but your thoughts would still be appreciated. It seems to me the religion might have spread through one of two methods, in scenario one, the religion spread mostly through word of mouth by regular people via their pre existing social connections who then formed communities on their own and appointed leaders on their own and later believed their leaders and communities to have been part of a chain of apostolic succession going back to one of the Twelve or Paul ultimately. Scenario two would be that the normative method for the introduction of Christianity would have both through specially appointed traveling missionaries who consecrated or ordained leaders in the communities they founded which is the portrait of how the religion spread in various New Testament documents? I got curious about this issue as from what I understand Judaism prior to about 450 AD the belief was that the Rabbis had to be part of a chain of consecration by laying of hands going all the way back to Moses, considering the similarity of beliefs between that concept and the idea of Apostolic Succession that convinced me that something akin to a belief in a system of Apostolic Succession might go back to the beginning of the religion which might further strengthen the idea that traveling missionaries were more important to the spread of the religion than some scholarly reconstruction of the spread suggest? Honestly, It probably was a mix of both methods, I'm just curious which mechanism was probably the predominate one.