Posted: Jan 31, 2012 1:36 pm
Blood wrote:angelo wrote:Blood wrote:The silence of Philo (or any historian) is a weak argument. For one thing, it's not like the complete works of Philo (or any historian of antiquity) has survived until now. Philo, or some other unknown historian, could have written about him, but those documents didn't survive. Very, very little from the ancient world has. Just imagine how much more we would have to work with if the Library of Alexandria had survived intact.
Your forgetting that the library was torched by xtians. Had they discovered any mention of this Jesus they would have guarded it with their lives. Obviously there was nothing there that was of any interest to them.
There is no evidence for that.
Here's one version of the story of the Library of Alexandria:
Whom do we blame for the destruction of the library? We like Matthew Battles' summary. He notes that scrolls (like books) erode and fall apart over time, and we're dealing with five or six centuries. If an old scroll were crumbling, a scribe would have to make a new copy by hand. Battles writes:
"Before the flames, before theft and censorship, the fate of books is bound up in the constant shuffling and transformation. Though Alexandria's libraries were universal in scope, their librarians faced hard choices. Manuscript scrolls were costly and time-consuming to produce, and the scribes' precious labor could not often be lavished on minor texts. Naturally, only the major works were copied in any great quantity. The rest--the secondary, the extra-canonical, and the apocryphal--dropped out of view."
Battles suggests that the destruction of the library wasn't due to a single great fire, but on account of "moldering slowly through the centuries as people grew indifferent and even hostile to their contents."
He concludes: "What happened to the books of Alexandria? Many, many centuries happened to them--too many for their inevitable dispersal and disappearance to be staved off, no matter whose mobs rioted in the streets, no matter which emperors set fires."
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/rea ... alexandria
And here's a brief discussion involving the Library on Richard Carrier's blog:
It also sounds like the film (Agora by Alejandro Amenábar) has her [Hypatia of Alexandria] "trapped in the legendary Library of Alexandria" in the midst of Christian riots in the end, which suggests she is burned with the library, when in fact those riots burned the library's annex, the Serapeum. A great loss to the ancient written record to be sure (tens of thousands of books were destroyed), nevertheless the Great Library itself was far larger (hundreds of thousands of books) and probably survived this occasion (in any case, it would have been situated on the other side of the city). I worry the film might perpetuate this slight error, confusing one library for the other. I know there is a tendency to go for the better story rather than the truer one. And though many pagan intellectuals may have been killed in the Serapeum (the Christians destroyed it specifically to crush the cult--burning the books was not their object), Hypatia was not. She was killed far more hideously elsewhere in the city (and decades later). By at least one account she died as a result of a Christian mob "scraping her skin off with tiles and bits of shell." And not in a library, but inside a Christian Church--to which she was dragged naked through the streets.
http://richardcarrier.blogspot.com/2009 ... patia.html