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In AD 392, the same year Emperor Theodosius outlawed the Mysteries, Bishop Theophilus of Alexandria led a rabid mob into “the most beautiful building in the world” and razed it to the ground.2 It’s unclear if Theophilus (Greek for “beloved of God”) and the Christians he urged on were really after the glimmering statue of the Greco-Egyptian god Serapis, or the vast library collection that was cached in his temple precinct. Either way, Catherine Nixey’s The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World—which framed this investigation in the first chapter—lends exquisite detail to the annihilation of the “world’s first public library” and its “hundreds of thousands of volumes.” The Christians “roared with delight” as a “double-headed axe” split Serapis’s face. The body of the pagan statue was then barbecued in the central amphitheater as a form of “public humiliation”—“burned to ashes before the eyes of the Alexandria which had worshipped him.” Insatiate, the “warlike” mercenaries for Jesus then tore the temple apart stone by stone, “toppling the immense marble columns, causing the walls themselves to collapse.”3 We don’t know exactly what happened to the contents of the Great Library, but they were never seen again. As Nixey concludes,
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Brian C. Muraresku (The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name)