Mike Aqualina is a well-known figure at EWTN. He's host of the Way of the Fathers podcast,

author of many books, including the award-winning, The Church and the Roman Empire,

Constantine, Councils, and the Fall of Rome. His new book is Rabbles, Riots, and Ruins,

12 ancient cities and how they were evangelized. That's our topic today. Welcome, Mr. Aqualina.

Thanks for having me on, Mark.

An interesting statement in your introduction, quote, Christianity begin as a religion associated with cities. What is the history behind that statement?

When we read the New Testament, when we see the Acts of the Apostles, when we read the Book of Revelation, what do we see? We see cities. We find the Apostles going to cities where they can have maximum impact. Now, there are reasons for this, right? Cities give cover, or not even, not cover, really. They make possible the gathering of people who are deviants people who

are different from the norm right and in the cities of the roman empire if you were a deviant of some

sort you could find people who were like yourself you know if you were a jew for example a jew was a

deviant in that milieu,

you could find, you could find 10 men, and together you could have worship, right, because

you could establish a synagogue congregation once you had 10 men. Well, if we read the Acts of

the Apostles, we see that the apostles in their mission tended to go to cities.

There they could reach synagogues.

They could reach groups of Jewish men who could be open to the message.

And so they went there, and they went to the cities.

We find that Christianity often took root first in cities and then went out to the rural areas. I don't want to imply that the rural areas were slow to pick up Christianity. Some historians have said that in the past. I think that's been pretty well refuted by

now. Christianity did have success in rural areas very early on, but the first impact was usually in

cities. Cities were the places where the apostles landed, where the early Christians

came into town, and it's where they found a ready market for the message.

Great. So here we have in this book 12 cities, 12 places where the faith took root.

The introduction ends with, really a blunt question about the first city profile. What made Jerusalem special? So give us the end of, you know, before

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