Killing Its Mother: the Judeo Christian Destruction of the Library of Alexandria

Depending on who you believe, the Library of Alexandria was destroyed in three stages: first by Julius Caesar, next by Roman emperor Aurelian, and finally by a horde of fervent Christian iconoclasts. Author D.M. Murdock summarizes:

Although according to Plutarch (Caesar 43.6) the library was destroyed in 48 BCE during a battle with Julius Caesar, it appears enough of it remained, or was replenished by the plundering of Marc Anthony of the Pergamum library, to retain its significance in the ancient world, since a few decades later the [Greek] historian Strabo conducted his own research in the museum, which he deemed “the finest library known in antiquity.” The collection remained intact until the destruction by Emperor Aurelian in the last quarter of the 3rd century AD/CE. A portion of the library was said to have been preserved in the Serapeum until its devastation by Christians under Emperor Theodosius (347 - 395 AD/CE), although historian Marcellinus claimed it too had been destroyed by Caesar in 48 BCE.

-D.M. Murdock, Christ in Egypt

One of the most important things to note here is the “apocryphal” quality of Caesar’s destruction of the Library. Latin sources claim that Julius Caesar burned it but Greek sources claim they later studied there! This fits in perfectly well with my previous essay, exploring the possibility that Julius Caesar is a wholly literary figure and not historical at all. Marcellinus’ history blaming Caesar was written in Latin, supposedly before the Christians razed the Serapeum in 392 CE. According to wikipedia, the oldest surviving copy of Marcellinus comes to us from the 9th century. It seems inevitable that like all Latin histories of Rome, Marcinellus’s was a late fraud. The supposed burning of the Library by Caesar is more evidence that Latin pushed real historical events way too far back in time.

So let’s forget about Caesar, and move on to the supposed destruction of the Library by Emperor Aurelian. This occurred in 273 CE, as Rome defeated the rival Palmyrene Empire that had taken hold of Egypt. Whether or not Aurelian then destroyed the main body of the Library, its final destruction by Christians is the most well documented, and it occurred little more than a century later.

Political division before Aurelian conquered Palmyra

According to Catherine Nixey, whose book The Darkening Age documents the doings of Christianity after it became the official religion of the Roman Empire:

Constantine had set the precedent early and emphatically for all of this when he had ordered the works of the heretic Arius to be burned and had condemned to death all who hid the heretic’s books. Works suspected of “heretical” or “magical” practices—whatever those terms meant—went up in smoke in public bonfires.

-Catherine Nixey, The Darkening Age

Nixey describes the origins of the Library:

Almost as soon as there had been a city in that spot, there had been a library; stories about the library, and particularly about its foundation, had started to accumulate. According to one story, Ptolemy II, the ruler of Alexandria, had written a letter to every king and ruler on earth begging them to send his library works by all kinds of authors, “poets and prose-writers, rhetoricians and sophists, doctors and soothsayers, historians and all the others too.” Not just in Greek either, but in every language. Men, too, were sought and experts enlisted from every nation to act as translators. “Each group of scholars was allocated the appropriate texts, and so a Greek translation of every text was made.” […] There were probably 500,000 scrolls by the third century BC.

This is the library in which Judaism and the Hebrew language itself were first born. Legend says that the Ptolemies, Macedonian Greek rulers of Alexander the Great’s Egyptian capital, possessed the inscrutable Hebrew scriptures and had to cajole 70 translators from Jerusalem to render them in Greek. But the undeniable fact is that there is no archaeological evidence of Jewish scriptures that predate their Greek “translation”. In fact the modern Hebrew script was developed at the very same time and place. The oldest examples of Jewish writings in Hebrew are from the Dead Sea Scrolls - all made after the Jewish Bible was first published in Greek in Alexandria.

When dealing with history, fact and fantasy are like Siamese twins conjoined at the head. It’s not always possible to know where one ends and the other begins. Sometimes they can be safely separated; other times they can only survive by staying entangled. In the wake of the publication of the Jewish Bible, Alexandria became a predominantly Jewish city. All evidence suggests that Alexandria was the birthplace of Judaism, a religion cobbled together from Sumerian and other texts. This is why Judaism emphasizes that the indigenous people of Canaan and Jerusalem must serve their Semitic masters! Because Judaism actually originated in Egypt.

D.M. Murdock explains that gospel Christianity was also born in a library. Those interested in the composition of Christianity should read my magnum opus showing that Mark is explicitly based on Josephus, and my essay showing that Mark probably meant Nazirite when he wrote about the Nazarene.

Much of the information about the Jews found in the NT [New Testament] was derived from the study of the OT and other Jewish books, such as Josephus’s histories, as opposed to from the experience of the writers themselves. These inaccuracies serve as evidence that the gospel writers were simply sitting around with books, studying and copying passages, and throwing in an original phrase or two to link them all together.”

-D.M. Murdock (as Acharya S), The Christ Conspiracy

Here we have the perfect motive for the Christian destruction of Alexandria: both Christianity and its antecedent Jewish religion were works of historical fiction and not historical fact. When Christianity became state history, all evidence of its true origin had to be erased. At this rhetorical juncture, we might conclude that the secular destruction of the Library by Aurelian is a myth as well, and that the Library’s enemies were all motivated by religion. Catherine Nixey describes the Library of Alexandria as it still existed in the temple of Serapis in the year 392 CE:

The library’s collection was now stored here [the Serapeum], within the temple precinct, for safekeeping. This had been the world’s first public library, and its holdings had, at its height, been staggering, running into hundreds of thousand of volumes. Like the city itself, the collection had taken several knocks over the years, but extensive collections remained. The spirit of the original institution remained here too and anyone in the city who wished to could come and read these books. Excavations in the 1940s uncovered nineteen uniform rooms where, it is thought, the books were shelved: thousands of volumes, on every topic from religion to mathematics, were sitting on those shelves as the year 392 [CE] opened.

-Catherine Nixey, The Darkening Age

Then the Christians destroyed the Serapeum in Alexandria, and with it the last possible vestige of the once incomparable library:

The tens of thousands of books, the remnants of the greatest library in the world, were all lost, never to reappear. Perhaps they were burned. As the modern scholar Luciano Canfora observed: “The burning of books was part of the advent and imposition of Christianity”. […] Edward Gibbon raged at the waste: “The appearance of the empty shelves excited the regret and indignation of every spectator, whose mind was not wholly darkened with religious prejudice.”

-Catherine Nixey, The Darkening Age

The syncretic Alexandrian sun god Serapis, one of several Jesus doppelgangers who were plowed under by Christian iconoclasts.

Of course, we cannot blame the Christians for their actions without also blaming the Jewish Bible from which they took their example. These Christians were doing no less than fulfilling the will of YHWH: destroying “false” idols, such as math, and history, and philosophy, and poetry, and science. We should also entertain the possibility that the Library was not burned but was secretly relocated. Nixey continues:

It was said that many Alexandrians, seeing what had happened to the temple, converted to Christianity instantly. This was a terrifying act of aggression. Philosophers and poets fled the city in horror. The sky had not, as the old superstition had threatened, fallen in. But something had gone. A terrible melancholy settled among those intellectuals who dared to remain. As one Greek professor wrote in despair: “The dead used to leave the city alive behind them; but we living now carry the city to her grave.”

-Catherine Nixey, The Darkening Age

Unfortunately, the iconoclastic fervor of many Christians and Jews continues to this day. They have a vested interest in passing off their propaganda booklets as history.

[Note: this essay was written in response to a comment by new reader “Anne C”. The history of the Alexandrian Library is the history of Judeo Christianity itself. Thank you Anne C for prodding me to write this essay and fill in gaps in my own understanding, which is ultimately why I write in the first place.]