ALEXANDRIA

ALEXANDRIA. The city was founded by Alexander the Great just to the west of the Nile Delta in 331 B.C. Under the Ptolemies, Alexandria rose to prominence as capital of Egypt (q.v.) and one of the great cities of the Hellenistic world, indeed as that world’s intellectual center. The Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures (q.v.), dating approximately to the 3rd c. and 2nd c. B.C., and the other Scriptures originally written in Greek, are associated most closely with the Jewish populations of Alexandria and Cyrene. The acceptance of this Septuagint (q.v.) translation by the Greek-speaking Jewish population of Egypt not only constituted a remarkable event in the history of religions, but made possible the later translations of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures into other languages.

Incorporated into the Roman Empire (q.v.), the city remained the intellectual capital of the larger Greco-Roman universe until its conquest by the armies of Islam (q.v.) in 642. Hence, the earlier period of the Christian Church, in particular of Greek-speaking Christianity, from the end of the 2nd c. until the Ecumenical Council (q.v.) of Chalcedon (451) was under the sway of Alexandria. Its great archbishops, Dionysius (q.v.), Athanasius (q.v.), Theophilus, Cyril (q.v.), and Dioscurus succeeded-with the exception of the last-in imposing their theological vision on the Christian oikoumene (q.v.), and were unquestionably the most powerful and influential churchmen outside of Rome (q.v.) itself.

One reason for dominance, outside of the demographic significance of this second largest city of the Empire, lay in the establishment of the Alexandrian School (of exegesis) in the late 2nd c. By no coincidence, in the preceding century Philo of Alexandria laid the foundation for this school with his extensive use of allegory (q.v.), which he employed to explain Jewish religion and Scripture to a Hellenistic world. A succession of remarkable Christian teachers and thinkers, including Clement in the 2nd c., Origen (qq.v.) in the 3rd c., and Didy-mus the Blind in the 4th c., sought to apply the insights of Greek philosophy and the techniques of Greek rhetoric systematically to the elaboration and explication of the Christian Gospel. Significantly, it resulted in the beginnings of Christian Hellenism (q.v.) and opened up the way to the great Church Fathers (q.v.) of later centuries and to the culture of Christian Byzantium (q.v.). This work, particularly in the hands of a series of bishops who were able thinkers in their own right, did much to inform and determine the great debates over the Trinity and Christology (qq.v.) in the 4th c. through 7th c.

Alexandria is still the offical title of a patriarchate (q.v.)-in fact, two of them. Both the Greek and the Coptic church (qq.v.) leaders take their name from this city, though both have been resident in Cairo for many centuries.