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"One day in AD 391, the Roman-appointed Bishop Theophilus marched from his headquarters in the Brucheion Royal quarter of Alexandria, at the head of a large howling mob, heading west for the Serapeum in the heart of the Egyptian quarter of Rhakotis. The Serapeum, which had been the centre of Egyptian worship for seven centuries, was adorned with extensive columned halls, almost breathing statues, and a great number of other works of art, as well as being the house of the Great Alexandrian library. The frenzied people rushed through the streets along the Canopic way, turning into the short street that led to the temple-area of Serapis, meeting other crowds there, before climbing up the great flight of marble steps, led by Bishop Theophilus. They jumped across the stone platform and into the temple, where the events of the final tragedy took place."
"In their agitated mood, the angry mob took little heed of the gold and silver ornaments, the precious jewels, the priceless bronze and marble statues, the rare murals and tapestries, the carved and painted pillars of granite and many marbles, the ebony and scented woods, the ivory and exotic furniture - all were smashed to pieces with cries of pleasure. But that was not all. Those shouting men, full of demoniac delight, then turned to the library, where hundreds of thousands of papyrus rolls and parchments, inscribed with ancient wisdom and knowledge, were taken off their shelves, torn to pieces and thrown on to bonfires. A few years later the last of the Alexandrian scholars was torn to pieces by a gang of Christian monks. On a Lenten day in March of the year AD 415 they stopped the carriage of Hypatia, who had succeeded her father as Professor of Philosophy in Alexandria, stripped her naked, dragged her into a nearby church, killed her, cut most of her flesh from her body with sharp oyster shells, and burned what remained of her in the street. The charge against Hypatia, who had taught the philosophy of Plato, was heresy."
"As a result of this barbaric killing of Alexandrian scholars and destruction of its library, which contained texts in Greek of all aspects of ancient wisdom and knowledge, the true Egyptian roots of Christianity and of Western civilization have been obscured for nearly 16 centuries." (Ahmed Osman, Out of Egypt, The Roots Of Christianity Revealed, Aarow Books Limited, 1999, prologue).
The above description tells only part of the story; how antisemitic Gentile Christianity altered the earliest Divine Revelations of God on this planet and through "personification" and later "literalization of this Divine Revelation" constructed an entirely new religion that has obscured and altered what the ancients knew best about God and Creation. Simply said the end result is that 2.5 billion people today who are named by the name "Christian" live and worship in idolatry never knowing until they die the tragic consequences of the destruction of the Alexandrian Library by Rome which was undertaken to cover-up their plagiarism, alteration, mutation, and adulteration of the world's oldest Revelation of God given to mankind. The aim of Bet Emet Ministries is to rediscover these roots, with the help of new historical and archaeological evidence and we have done just that in the various websites provided by this ministry.
With the loss of this knowledge collected by the world since the earliest of time mankind was swept into the Dark Ages by the Roman Church.
All of this knowledge was lost when the Alexandria library was razed to the ground by Rome.
Western scholars, whether Christian, Jewish or Atheist, tend to ignore Egyptian views when interpreting the accounts of ancient history. Even Manetho, the great Egyptian scholar responsible for the arrangement of the Alexandrian library, has been dismissed as unqualified to write about scientific matters to the Greeks. Commenting on an account that Manetho wrote in Epitome of Physical Doctrines, W. G. Waddell wrote:
That an Egyptian priest should seek to instruct the Greek-speaking world of his time in the history of Egypt and the religious beliefs of the Egyptians. . . is not at all surprising, hut it seems strange that Manetho should feel called upon, in the third century BC, to compose an Epitome of Physical Doctrines with the apparent object of familiarizing the Greeks with Egyptian science [Manetho, London, 1940, p. xxvii]
In addition, Islamic documents are completely disregarded as a source of ancient tradition, when arguing the history of biblical stories. This cannot be justified, for the stories in the Koran come from the same source as the books of the Bible. Moreover, the Koran accounts agree with those of the Bible in the majority of cases, which makes it more important to examine the reason for various points, of divergence.
The time has come for Egypt's voice to be heard again. If Egypt's voice is heard then Christian theology will be shown to be a fraud and a terrible misrepresentation of the earliest Divine Revelation of God given to mankind which treasured.
Until the destruction of its library in AD 391, Alexandria had remained the most important cultural centre of the ancient world, and the focal point of the mutual influence exercised in the conjunction of Christianity and Hellenism, in spite of four centuries of Rome's political supremacy. Founded by Alexander the Great in 331 BC, it was the first real cosmopolitan city in history, where Macedomans and Greeks lived together with Egyptians and Jews, and scholars flocked from all over the world to do their research. The Essenes would be the dominant force behind this Library and had in this city their own theological university as well. Scholars came from Italy and Greece, from Anatolia and the Levant, from north Africa, Arabia, and even from Persia and India. Not only did they share a common habitation in Alexandria, they all had the same longing for knowledge and the same interest in philosophy and ancient wisdom, as represented in the teaching of Hermes Trismegistus and the worship of Serapis. Thoth, ancient Egyptian god of writing, became identified with the Greek god Hermes. Hermes Trismegistus means 'Hermes the Thrice-greatest'.
As stated before with my comment about the Essenes this city was also the center of Hellenistic Judaism. It was in Alexandria that Philo Judaeus, the first Jewish philosopher, wrote his 38 books in the 1st century AD. The city had, in addition, the only library containing almost all the books of ancient civilizations, including the Greek text of the Old Testament. Hence it is not astonishing that Alexandria rapidly became the main Christian intellectual centre.
The rich collection of ancient written knowledge in the Serapeum proved irresistible for Diodorus Siculus, a Sicilian scholar, when he set out in the first century BC, in the time of Julius Caesar, to research his ambitious Bibliotheca Historica - the "bookshelf of history". The historian Ammanius Marcellinus (c. AD 330-391), who himself visited Alexandria, wrote about this temple: ". . . the Serapeum, which, although no description can do it justice, yet is so adorned with extensive columned halls, with almost breathing statues, and a great number of other works of art, that next to the Capitolium, with which revered Rome elevates herself to eternity, the whole world beholds nothing more magnificent. In this were invaluable libraries . . ." (22: 16, 12-13). Diodorus, who was an enthusiast of the teachings of Hermes Trismegistus (which have survived until today in the teachings of Islamic Sufis, Jewish Qabbalah and Christian Rosicrucians and Freemasons), became convinced of Egypt's importance as a source of knowledge. The Greek and Roman gods, he believed, had been born there, life had originated there, and there the first observations of the stars had been made. Astro-theology was the earliest revelation of God that mankind received. This might sound wrong but not so when such observations of the Heavens and Nature spoke the clearest message about God and His message to mankind. Only later when these observations were personified and then later "literalized" does mankind lose Divine truth. This is explained in great detail on our Essene website and the Essenes are primarily responsible for the loss of such Divine Truth. The last famous scholar associated with the Serapeum before its destruction was Theon, a celebrated mathematician whose recension of Euclid's Element was the only text of this work until the last century, and whose daughter Hypatia was to meet a terrible death at the hands of Theophilus's nephew Bishop Cyril.
Up to the end of the fourth century AD, the time when the Alexandrian library was destroyed, Egypt was regarded as the holy land of the ancient world, the source of wisdom and knowledge where God became known for the first time. Pilgrims then, including Roman emperors, came from all over the world to worship in the temples of Isis and Serapis, as well as at the foot of Mount Sinai.
This situation came to an end, however, in the latter years of the reign of the emperor Theodosius I, who was zealous in his suppression of both paganism - the belief in the many gods of pre-Christianity - and heresy - any opinion contrary to orthodox Roman religious doctrine. Emperor of the East (AD 379-392), and then sole emperor of East and West (AD 392-395), he enforced the Creed of the Council of Nicaea (AD 325) as a universal norm for Christian orthodoxy and directed the convening of the second general council at Constantinople in AD 381 to clarify the formula.
"It is our wish and pleasure that none of our subjects, whether magistrates or private citizens, however exalted or however humble may be their rank or condition, shall presume in any city or in any place to worship an inanimate idol" declared Theodosius in his last edict. Fanatical mobs of the Church then roamed the lands, razing old temples to the ground and plundering their wealth. Ancient tombs were desecrated, walls of monuments scraped clean of names and depictions of deities, statues toppled over and smashed. In Alexandria, Bishop Theophilus was as ambitious as the emperor, Theodosius I, who had appointed him. It was one of his zealous actions that led to the burning of an estimated half a million books stored in the Alexandrian library, described above.
Theophilus of Alexandria (AD 385-412) was one of the orthodox leaders who represented the imperial government dispatched from Rome to impose official orthodoxy on the Alexandrian Church. He led a campaign against paganism and heresy in Egypt that included destruction of the Serapeum (the temple of Serapis - originally an ancient Egyptian god of the underworld, subsequently reintroduced as the official deity for Alexandria and Egypt by Ptolemy I [305-284 BC]) where the Alexandrian library was placed. The Serapeum, at the same time as being the centre of worship for the ancient Egyptian trinity of Osiris, Isis and Horns, became a focal point for the emerging Christian Gnostic sects - those Christians who sought to gain spiritual knowledge through mysteries and the attempt to know oneself, interpreting the Scriptures allegorically.
The first Christian emperor, Constantine I (AD 324-337), had made Christianity the official religion of the Empire. He also granted political power to the Church. Bishops were not only recognized as councillors of state but obtained juridical rights: their solutions to civil suits were legally enforced. The bishops used their newly acquired power to spread the word of God and stamp out His enemies, who in this case were not only the pagans but the heretics - and Rome regarded Egyptian Christians as heretics. According to tradition, the Church of Alexandria was founded neither by St Peter nor by St Paul but by St Mark the Evangelist, even before what is said to have been the first Apostolic Council of Jerusalem in c. AD 50 (mentioned in the Book of Acts, 15:28). The first theological school to be established in the world also flourished in Alexandria before the end of the 2nd century AD, and became an influential centre of Christian scholarship. Among its directors were the famous Clement of Alexandria and Origen. Christian monasticism as an institution was initiated principally in Egypt by St Antony the Copt (c. AD 251-356), who fled to the solitude of the western desert from his native village of Coma, not far from Tell al-Amama, in Middle Egypt. Others followed his example and a monastic colony arose around his cave in the Red Sea mountains.
Although Alexandria made an important contribution in developing the first systematic Christian theology, the Alexandrian theologists were strongly influenced by the Neo-Platonists' philosophy. Neo-Platonists were Alexandrian philosophers who followed the same philosophy as the Athenian Plato; Plotinus of the 3rd century AD is the most celebrated. Biblical exegesis at Alexandria was allegorical and mystical, following the same method as Philo Judaeus, who tried to harmonize philosophy and the Bible. From the start, Alexandrian exegesis did not attach to the literal sense of the Bible. Their primary interest was concentrated on the mystery of divine revelation revealed in the historical and literary details of the Old Testament. It was therefore a question of discovering Christ in the older revelation.
The Alexandrian authors sought out in the Old Testament symbols of the New. For early Egyptian Christians, accepting one God was an evolutionary process in which the old system was assimilated into the new, and old deities became angelic beings and mediators between man and the unseen Lord. Idols, for them, did not represent the deities themselves, but were merely a physical form in which the spiritual beings could dwell during prayer. The Gnostic teachers found their followers at Alexandria, and much of the ecclesiastical history of this city was concerned with the heresies that appeared there.
The Serapeum, originally established by the Ptolemies (the Macedonian kings who ruled Egypt after the death of Alexander the Great), later became also a centre for Gnostic communities, both Hermetic (i.e. adhering to the teachings of Hermes Trismegistus) and Christian. Some Gnostic Christian sects grew from within the cult of Serapis, who made no distinction between Christ and Serapis - this, too, will be explained as this book unfolds. The general library at the Serapeum gradually became a focal point for scholars and intellectuals, from all over the Roman Empire, whose views contradicted the teachings of the Church. For this reason it became regarded as heretical and had to be destroyed.
With the destruction of the Serapeum, not only Egyptian knowledge was lost; Mesopotamian, Syrian, Phoenician, Jewish and Greek learning also vanished. The whole scientific achievement of the old civilizations, regarded as heresy by Bishop Theophilus, disappeared in a single day - books on astronomy, anatomy, medicine, geometry, geography, history, philosophy, theology and literature, as well as copies of the early Gnostic gospels of Christ. The result was the beginning of the dark ages, which lasted for more than ten centuries after that. All branches of science, as well as heretical writings which did not adhere to the teaching of the orthodox Church, were forbidden by the state. This left the canonic books of the Scripture as the main source of Western knowledge until the Renaissance in the 15th century.
While the discovery of some remaining copies of old forbidden manuscripts, especially the Hermetic and NeoPlatonic philosophies, produced the age of the Western renaissance from the 15th century in art, science and technology, history had to wait for modern archaeologists to dig out old remains and inscribed papyrus rolls before we could regain our memory. In his book Archives In The Ancient World, Ernst Posner, the American historian, has said of the achievements of archaeologists during this period that they are ?momentous - comparable in a way to the discovery of America. . . a new dimension of almost two millennia has been added to the history of mankind as it was known in 1850..."Now we can view with profound respect the cultural achievements of the countries surrounding the eastern Mediterranean, and we can begin to assess their interrelations with, and their possible influence on, the cultures of Greece and Rome."
Egypt was the birthplace of our spiritual teachers - from Imhotep, the first pyramid builder of the 27th century BC, to Moses and Akhenaten, who first recognized one God, to the followers of Osiris (Egyptian god of the underworld and judge of the dead), Hermes Trismegistus and of Jesus Christ who looked for spiritual salvation and eternal life. Thanks to modern archaeologists, a new age now appears on the horizon, with Egypt restored to its original place.
It looks like a fulfillment of an old prophecy which predicted that woes will come upon Egypt, but also promised that order would finally be restored again. This prophecy is found in the Hermetic text of Asclepius, discovered among the Nag Hammadi library. Asclepius is a dialogue between the mystagogue Hermes Trismegistus and an initiate, Asclepius. In an apocalyptic section with significant Egyptian and Israelite parallels, the speaker predicts the fall, then rise again, of Egypt:
are you ignorant, 0 Asclepius, that Egypt is (the) image of heaven? Moreover, it is the dwelling place of heaven and all the forces that are in heaven. If it is proper for us to speak the truth, our land is (the) temple of the world. And it is proper for you not to be ignorant that a time will come in it (our land) (when) Egyptians will seem to have served the divinity in vain, and all their activity in their religion will be despised. For all divinity will leave Egypt and will flee upward to heaven. And Egypt will be widowed; it will be abandoned by the gods. For foreigners will come into Egypt, and they will rule it. . . And in that day the country that was more pious than all countries will become impious. No longer will it be full of temples, but it will be full of tombs. .. Egypt, lover of God, and the dwelling place of the gods, school of religion, will become an example of impiousness . . . [Then Egypt will be restored again] And the lords of the earth... will establish themselves in a city that is in a corner of Egypt that will be built toward the setting of the sun.
Isaiah, the Old Testament prophet of the 6th century BC, confirms this prophecy and foretells the appearance of a saviour in Egypt:
The burden of Egypt. Behold, the Lord rideth upon a swift cloud, and shall come into Egypt: and the idols of Egypt shall he moved at his presence, and the heart of Egypt shall melt in the midst of it. And I will set the Egyptians against the Egyptians: and they shall fight every one against his brother, and every one against his neighbour. . . And the spirit of Egypt shall fail in the midst thereof. . . In that day shall there be an altar to the Lord in the midst of the land of Egypt, and a pillar at the border thereof to the Lord. And it shall be for a sign and for a witness unto the Lord of hosts in the land of Egypt. . . and he shall send them a saviour, and a great one, and he shall deliver them. [Isaiah 19:1-3; 19-20]
Helmut Koester, Professor of the History of Ancient Christianity at Harvard University, who was responsible for translating the Nag Hammadi Gospel of Thomas (which includes many previously unknown sayings of Christ) into English, spoke about the need for "a thorough and extensive revaluation of early Christian history". He went on to say: "The task is not limited to fresh reading of the known sources and a close scrutiny of the new texts in order to redefine their appropriate place within the conventional picture of the early Christian history. Rather it is the conventional picture itself that is called into question."
The Library of Alexandria, in reality two or more libraries in the ancient Egyptian capitol, has achieved an almost mythic stature in the study of classics from the time of the Renaissance. The apocryphal burning of the Library during Julius Caesar's occupation of the city has been described as the greatest calamity of the ancient world, wherein the most complete collection of all Greek and Near Eastern literature was lost in one great conflagration. In reality, the Library and its community of scholars not only flourished during the Hellenistic era of the Ptolemies, but continued to survive through the Roman Empire and the incessant turbulence of the Empire's most volatile and valuable city. For valuable indeed was the granary of the empire, which was also a prosperous trade center between east and west, linked to the Mediterranean and, not far to the east, to the Red Sea and Indian traderoutes via a canal. This cosmopolitan city drew Greeks, Egyptians, Romans, and Jews into a unique and not entirely harmonious coexistence. The Alexandrian Museum and Library, then, was an ideal place for scholars from these different cultures to meet and exchange learning, and was a repository for the literature and accounts of the Alexandrian intelligensia and the Roman Empire in general. However, while sources agree on the Museum's uniqueness and value, no surviving account of its activities actually exists, and modern scholarship has largely ignored this poorly-documented portion of history.
I need to say something about the religion of Serapis and Sophia. At this time the old gods of Egypt, meanwhile, had not died out, but merely been woven together with the pantheons of newcomers. Strabo's contemporary, Vitruvius, describes a festival of the Muses in Alexandria, almost certainly based at the Museum, so it seems that the religious aspect of the institution continued to play an important part in Imperial Alexandria. By Roman times, the worship of purely Olympian gods had altered as the population had become a Greek-Egyptian mix, and all the gods were now worshipped as their Egyptian counterparts with Greek attributes. Besides the Egyptian Greeks, the Jews accounted for a significant amount of the population, living in their own quarter, governed by an ethnarch, and originally exempted from many of the taxes; their ethnarch was replaced by a Council of Elders under Augustus. An intriguing dialogue between Pagan, Jewish, and, later, Christian thought developed among the scholars of Alexandria, as religious thought was refined and ideas adapted not only from the other theologies common in Alexandria, but from the Zoroasterism of Iran, and even, through the founder of Neoplatonism, Ammonius Buddhism and Hinduism from India. Thus, Jewish theologian Philo could discuss a mother goddess figure, Sophia, spirit of wisdom, the messenger from Jehovah, whose logos or existence would otherwise be incomprehensible to humanity. We see the same religious concept written in the Book of Proverbs:
Prov 1:20-21 20 Wisdom crieth without; she uttereth her voice in the streets: 21 She crieth in the chief place of concourse, in the openings of the gates: in the city she uttereth her words, saying, (KJV)
Understand that this is nothing more than the personification of the wisdom of God expressed in allegory. This is not meant to be LITERAL.
Christian thought was both refined and bizarrely altered during this turbulent era in Alexandria. Introduced by the Alexandrian St. Mark according to tradition, it was initially mistaken by the Emperor Hadrian as a troublesome offshoot of the cult of Serapis. Indeed, the Eucharist, resurrection, and reverence to the Mother were developed in Alexandria during this period, and seem to have echoes in the cult of Serapis, with its Dionsian-style feasting and resurrection, and his consort Isis/Cybele/Demeter. And while the religion had previously been a popular movement of the masses, it was at Alexandria that learned intellectual debate discussed the more philosophical parts of the religion and paved the way for Medieval theological debates. Branches of thought such as Arianism and Gnosticism were to be developed here, and, although later declared heretical, grew side by side with what later became Christian orthodoxy. Gnosticism continues to this day in Egypt; it held that the world was actually a mistake created by the Demiurge, son of the true God and Sophia, who was the Jehovah of the old Testament; God pitied humanity and sent Christ to help humanity reunite with Himself. Some held that Jesus had been a man, and the Christ His spirit after death. The Ophites, an offshoot of the Gnostics with Cretan influences, carried the religion a step further, worshipping snakes and the divine mother Sophia, who had actually sent the serpent of Eden to warn Eve and Adam that Jehovah was the Demiurge and that they should seek wisdom or knowledge to link with the true God. And, lest these heresies seem too wild, it should be remembered that the first patron saint of Alexandria for the orthodox Christians of the 4th century was St. Anthony, "who thought bathing was sinful and was consequently carried across the canals of the delta by an angel".
After a mere twenty years since the abdication of Diocletian, Constantine became Emperor and declared Christianity Rome's official religion. Diocletian's First Edict, as described by Lactantius in his How the Persecutors Died, Chap. 13 Date: February 23/24, 303 A.D., teaches us about the beginning of the "Great Persecution" against Christians which directed that the churches to be leveled, the Scriptures burned, Christians in places of honor to be degraded, and provided the loss of freedom to Christian household servants. It deprived the Christians of all honours and dignities; ordaining also that, without any distinction of rank or degree, they should be subjected to tortures, and that every suit at law should be received against them; while, on the other hand, they were debarred from being plaintiffs in questions of wrong, adultery, or theft; and, finally, that they should neither be capable of freedom, nor have right of suffrage. By 391, the Emperor Theodosius had reversed Diocletian's edict and commanded all paganism to be stamped out, signalling the end of the Museum and ultimately the Library as well.
In 412 Theophilus' nephew Cyril succeeded him as Patriarch of Christianity. The Patriarch exercised control of Alexandria, and the conflict between secular and religious authority was decided in 415, when the Roman prefect Orestes, officially still in charge of the province, objected to Cyril's order that all Jews be expelled from Alexandria. Cyril's army of monks murdered the prefect and were canonized by him for this deed. For, throughout the fourth century the power of the church grew and it was this army of Gnostic monks that became the main tool of the Patriarch of Alexandria and enforced his will. After the edict of Theodosius, the mob was led by the Patriarch Theophilus to demolish the Serapeum. Cyril, the Archbishop of Alexandria, persuaded himself that Hypatia's good name and talents were giving the cause of Paganism a dangerous prestige, and thereby preventing the progress of the new faith. Upon his orders these same monks, while marauding through the city came across Hypatia, daughter of the Museum's last great mathematician Theon. She was a Neoplatonist philosopher and astronomer whose teachings are partially recorded by one of her admirers and pupils, the Christian Synesius, and she was also one of the last members of the Museum.
It is said of her: "Her beauty did astonish the survey of eyes, Her words all ears took captive" (From: "The martyrdom of Hypatia, or, The death of the classical world." A speech given before the Independent Religious Society at the Majestic Theater in Chicago By Mangasar Magurditch Mangasarian). Her renown as a lecturer on philosophy brought students from Rome and Athens, and all the great cities of the empire, to Alexandria. It was one of the great events of each day to flock to the hall in the academy where Hypatia explained Plato and Aristotle."
Driving home from her own lectures without attendant, this independent woman and scholar who epitomized the glory of the knowledge bestowed upon mankind by God was dragged from her chariot by the mob, stripped, flayed, and finally burned alive in the library of the Caesareum as a witch (as denoted above). Cyril, who was behind this terrible deed, was made a saint. After Hypatia's death Alexandria became steadily less stable and was soon overrun by the monks who evolved into the Copts who incorporated the old Alexandrian prejudices towards foreigners (already expelled the Jews) with the new prejudice towards any scientific or classical knowledge. The Patriarch Cyril was made a saint for his action behind the destruction of the Library. The library itself was ransacked of any gold or silver and then put to the torch by these monks. Too turbulent even to bow to the Emperor, Alexandria eventually revolted against Constantinople, wound up with two factions contending between two Patriarchs, and eventually fell to Arab conquerors, who had the last of the Library burned as fuel in the bath-houses of the city in 686.
The following is an account of the actual destruction of the Alexandrian Library:
Theodosius was at the time, of which we will now speak, the Christian ruler of the Empire. In reply to a request by the Archbishop of Alexandria, he sent a sentence of destruction against the ancient religion of Egypt. Both the Pagans and the Christians had assembled in the public square to hear the reading of the Emperor's letter, and when the Christians learned that they may destroy the gods of the Pagans, a wild shout of joy rent the air. The disappointed Pagans, on the other hand, realizing the danger of their position, silently slipped into their homes through dark alleys and hidden passage-ways. Yet they did not stand aside and see the temples of their gods razed to the ground without first offering a desperate resistance. Under the leadership of a zealot, Olympus, the Pagans fell upon the Christians, maddened with the cry in their ears of their leader, "Let us die with our gods!" Then came the turn of the Christians. Theophilius, the Archbishop of Alexandria, with a cross in his hand, and followed by his monks, marched upon the temple of Serapis, and proceeded to pull its pillars down. When they came to strike at the colossal statue of the god, for centuries worshiped as a deity, even the Christians turned pale with superstitious awe, and held their breath. A soldier armed with a heavy axe, was hesitating to strike the first blow. Will the god tolerate the insult? Will he not crash the roof upon the heads of the sacrilegious vandals? But the soldier struck the thundering blow right in the cheeks of Serapis, who offered no remonstrance whatever. The sun shone as usual, and the laws of nature maintained their even pace. Encouraged by this indifference of the god to defend himself, the Christian rabble rushed upon the statue, and pulling Serapis off his seat, dragged him in pieces through the streets of Alexandria that the Pagans might behold the disgrace into which their great god had fallen. Thousands of Pagans, seeing how helpless their gods were to avenge this insult, deserted Paganism and joined the Christians. As soon as the ground of the temple was sufficiently cleared, a church was erected on the ancient site. The Alexandrian library was the next point of attack. Its shelves were soon cleared, and you and I, and twenty centuries, were most lamentably deprived of the intellectual treasures which our Greek and Roman forefathers had bequeathed unto us.
Thus the Library of Alexandria and the Museum wended its way through the turbulent history of the Empire and outlived it by a short space of time, although paucity of sources makes it difficult to reconstruct an exact chronology of events. Its research probably reflected the foment of the times, and, while Neoplatonist in the main, also attracted other religious scholars, especially Jews, from Hellenistic times onward. Repeatedly rebuilt, modified, and burned, the few facts that can be determined about its long history justify its semi-legendary status. Haven for scholars of all kinds, its purpose as a center for learning was its eventual downfall. Enduring through Hellenistic civil strife, Dynastic war, the transition from kingdom to Roman province, and the abuses and good fortune it received through the sometimes capricious actions of successive emperors, it could not withstand the violent beginnings of Christianity which the city of Alexandria itself largely shaped.
Now, in closing, if you have been a reader of Bet Emet Ministries for any length of time by now you have seen the corruption of the Hebrew Scriptures when translated into Greek by the Hellenized Essenes of Alexandria, Egypt. Whereas the Ancient Egyptians understood the God of the Cosmos and related Eternal concepts and His message to mankind in allegory, symbolism, and myth many who would come later would take these simple truths of Egyptian Religion and "LITERALIZE" them into religious dogmas at Alexandria that blind us to the simple truths that God originally gave mankind. Later Rome will emerge upon the screen of world history with its desire to mix politics and religion and in so doing make sure that all mankind, to the best of their ability, will fall prey to their "brand" of religious thought where these "literalized" religious tenants were to be accepted by all; either through proselytizing or sword. But the task was not easy as first thought knowing as they did that they had to destroy and bury for all time all remnants of the knowledge that existed that betrayed their plagiarism and literalization of these prior allegories and myths. There was no bigger threat to Roman domination of the world than the Library of Alexandria which housed these precious volumes of collected world knowledge (science and religious works) which betrayed not only the Roman theology of the day as false but exposed them for what they truly were: apostates themselves from the original Divine Revelation first given mankind in this world. This Library and storehouse of world knowledge was the greatest threat to the Roman civil-religious agenda and it had to be destroyed and this knowledge kept from the common man. It was been estimated that the library contained more than a half a million volumes before its destruction. This kind of information had to be destroyed and Rome would make sure that it was, and with the later battle for supremacy between Eastern and Western Christianity in which Western Christianity and Constantine would win then the world is plunged into the Dark Ages to which mankind lived blind to these Divine Truths once cherished by the sages of the past who first gave us the revelation of God in the first place.
The Museum of Alexandria was founded at a unique place and time which allowed its scholars to draw on the deductive techniques of Aristotle and Greek thought, in order to apply these methods to the knowledges of Greece, Egypt, Macedonia, Babylonia, and beyond. The location of Alexandria as a center of trade, and in particular as the major exporter of writing material, offered vast opportunities for the amassing of information from different cultures and schools of thought. Its scholars' deliberate efforts to compile and critically analyze the knowledge of their day allowed for the first systematic, long-term research by dedicated specialists in the new fields of science suggested by Aristotle and Callimachus. Whole new disciplines, such as grammar, manuscript preservation, and trigonometry were established. Moreover, the fortuitous collection of documents in an Egyptian city allowed the transmission and translation of vital classical texts into Arabic and Hebrew, where they might be preserved long after copies were lost during the Middle Ages in Europe. Alexandria and its cousins, the Lyceum, Academy, and the younger Pergamon library, were probably the prototypes both for the medieval monastery and universities. While modern scholars often lament the amount of information lost through the centuries since the Museum's fall, an amazing number of Alexandrian discoveries and theories, especially in mathematics and geometry, still provide the groundwork for modern research in these fields. Finally, the methods of research, study, and information storage and organization developed in the Library are much the same as those used today.
Today, several diggings where the library stood, have revealed scientific and historical documents that would have resulted in the industrial revolution having occurred 1500 years earlier. Among the lost documents included the methods used to build the pyramids and the parthenon, alchemy, natural plant medicine and utopian philosophy.
Mankind is yet today struggling to regain the knowledge and ground that Roman Christianity took from mankind. They don't call it the Dark Ages for nothing and there is nothing any more dark than the truth concerning the origins of Christian Dogma!