"Leaving his beloved teacher Origen behind in Caesarea Maritimma about the year 240, bound for his distant home in the province of Pontus, Gregory of Neocaesarea (Niskar) turned to a catastrophic flight of rhetoric: I may be going to prosecute no safe journey, as it sometimes fares with one who quits some safe and peaceful city; and it is indeed but too likely that, in journeying, I may fall into the hands of robbers, and be taken prisoner, and be stripped and wounded with many strokes, and be cast forth to lie half-dead somewhere. Many miles of road lay ahead of him. Edward Gibbon would say of the Roman roads of the Antonine age that they 'united the subjects of the most distant provinces by an easy and familiar intercourse'; but however 'easy and familiar' these roads supposedly were, cities were much safer. For the modern historians of the early churches cities have had a similar appeal. Christianity, Thomas A. Robinson notes, 'was, supposedly an urban religion'. Noting how widespread this view is ('almost every recent scholar of the early church' had held it), Robinson cites powerful names - Ramsay MacMullen and W.H.C. Frend - before naming Wayne A. Meeks (in The First Urban Christians) as the historian 'primarily responsible for the now near-universal assumptions of the urban character of early Christianity'."