Quite right Doug, "the world" meant "the known world" back then, not the whole planet. Most people indeed would not have been aware of the spherical nature of the Earth. Conceptually the world was a flat disc with the Roman conquests around the Mediterranean and the peripheral lands such as Scotland, India and the Sahara with the map centered on Rome.
After the Roman state had sanctioned their approved holy texts, mainly in the fourth and fifth centuries CE, they forced the masses to support their fusion theology. The Bible began to take on a privileged role becoming independently sacred. Sacred meant divine and supernatural, the word of God-- and people looked to the Bible and overrated its magic.
The WT society trades on this twist of divine magic and happily quotes from it without reference to its context and original meaning. They and other faiths use it as if it all hangs together in exquisite unity. However, sadly the whole of the Bible is purely human in origin and quite literally full of paganism, absurdities, flaws and contradictions. There is nothing wrong with paganism, which just means folk tales-- but to base your life on "divine" absurdities and contradictions is a big mistake.
One of these errors is that Paul, living in the first century could never have (honestly) said-- Rom 1,8 "all over the world they are telling the story of your faith". Firstly because in the first century when Paul was writing, this was not true even for the Roman world let alone the whole world since there were so very few "Jesus" Christians in the first century. I do not know of know of any text anywhere which supports Jesus as the saviour until the late second century. (The Christ figure back then was merely known as "the Lord" or indeed "the Christ"). It looks very much like an insertion into Paul's text at a much later date and probably from the fourth century when they began writing an official and highly partisan history of Christianity.
