EPILOGUE 783
threat, except for the unchangeable fact that their Hebrew Bible, though inter-
preted throughout as a prophecy of Christianity, had been appropriated to
stand alone as the Christian Bible. It was odd and surely discomforting that
the one established book of the Christians was still the Book of the Jews,
whether read in Hebrew, in Septuagint Greek, or in the Old Latin translation.
While the Jewish Bible had long been set, New Testament scriptures (written
by Christian Jews, about and for Jews) remained in flux, and a Christian Bible,
containing Old and New Testaments, was still nearly four centuries away.
In response to these many challenges to the church, Christian apologists
forcefully rejected "the abominable writings of the demonic heretics." Ironi-
cally, in the course of angry refutation, the heresiologists imitated the gnostic
philosophers and developed their own Christian exegesis. For its part, gnosti-
cism with immense vitality challenged and widely subverted Christian theol-
ogy—which had its own divisions—and remained Christianity's most serious
rival, even when muted, until the birth of Islam.
THE DESTRUCTION OF RIVAL GNOSTICS
AND CLASSICAL CIVILIZATION
Christianity responded to rivals of their dominion by silencing the gnostics
along with the religious and philosophical remnants of the Greco-Roman
world. As early as the second century, Christian clerics destroyed gnostic texts,
burned meeting places, and went after the pagan arts and philosophers with a
fury. But how did the syncretistic hellenistic ethos disappear in the West? The
classical Greek civilization of Alexandria had given us Euclid and his princi-
ples of geometry, Longinos describing Sappho's religious ecstasy in "On the
Sublime," the philosophers Philo and Plotinos keeping platonism alive, and
the main schools of classical gnosticism. But after this great flowering, the
city's culture was violently shut down. Christians under the command of the
Alexandrian patriarch Theophilos of Alexandria (later saint), with approval
by the Byzantine emperor Theodosios I, leveled the major temple complex of
the Sarapeum in 391. In the Sarapeum was lodged the Mouseion (museum) li-
brary, the greatest library of antiquity, holding about 700,000 rolls. After raz-
ing the buildings, Theophilos used the temple stone to construct Christian
churches. His nephew Bishop Cyril (later saint), attacked Egyptian Christian
and hermetic gnostics as heretics, burned synagogues, and drove the Jews out
of Alexandria. In 415 Cyril ordered a mob of Nitrian monks to stone to death
the woman philosopher, astronomer, and mathematician Hypatia, the last