Philosophers and Bishops

Alexandria's large Jewish community produced Philo, active in the early first century CE, who read the Hebrew scriptures through Platonic philosophy and gave later Christian interpreters a model for allegorical exegesis they would use for centuries. Christian Alexandria built on that habit of reading: its catechetical school, associated with Pantaenus and then with Clement and Origen in the late second and early third centuries, became an influential center for training converts and developing Christian doctrine, and Origen in particular produced a vast body of scriptural commentary before his death around 254 CE.

The city's bishopric carried unusual authority in the wider church, which made its internal disputes matter far beyond Egypt. Around 318 CE, the Alexandrian presbyter Arius began teaching that the Son was created by, and therefore not co-eternal with, the Father, a position Bishop Alexander of Alexandria and his eventual successor Athanasius opposed. The controversy split the wider church and was addressed, though not permanently settled, at the First Council of Nicaea in 325 CE. Alexandria's classical philosophical tradition had its own late figure in Hypatia, a mathematician and Neoplatonist murdered by a Christian mob in 415 CE, an episode often read as marking the effective end of the city's pagan intellectual life. Today Alexandria remains the seat of the Coptic Orthodox Patriarchate.