A tragedy of religious intolerance: Agora (2009)...inaccurate in places, but worth watching

Agora is a movie based in 5th century AD Alexandria and the life and death of a female philosopher and mathematician in the city named Hypatia.

Here is a Smithsonian feature of the life of Hypatia and how she was killed by a Christian mob in 415AD.

As a fan of history based movies, I watched this this weekend and felt it was worth watching because it brought up many interesting historical questions about the process of the expansion of the early Christian church--how it interacted with the politics of the Roman Empire, with local pagan beliefs, with Jews in the communities, with female leaders in the those communities, and with scientific pursuits such as the heliocentric theory.

In Agora, the Christians take over Alexandria as their numbers grow among the lower classes and slave. This process includes a number of bouts of religious violence and the gradual increase of political power connected with the Christianization of the Roman Empire. Pagans massacre Christians first, followed by a violent riot led by the Christians that leads to a marginalization of the pagans. Christians harrass Jews, followed by a Jewish attack on a group of Christians, followed by a massacre of Jews and their banishment from the city. Finally, the Christian bishop of Alexandria denounces Hypatia as being a bad influence because she is a woman who speaks her mind and believes in nothing (only philosophy and science) and a group of zealots catch and kill her.

I watched the movie first, and then read the historical accounts available on the Internet. Apparently the movie spins a lot of fictional threads for dramatic effect and there are inaccuracies in terms of how the library of Alexandria of sacked by a Christian mob or how she was killed. In the film, she dies quietly in the arms of a man who used to be her slave (and in love with her) but now is part of a group of violent Christian zealots. He kills her mercifully by choking just before the mob gets to her and the events after that are not shown. It seems that the real way she was killed and paraded through the streets was a lot worse.

Despite the historical inaccuracies and dramatic license taken by the director, the film makes you want to know more about how Christianity grew in influence around the Mediterranean and in Europe in the early centuries of its existence. Hopefully the reality of the expansion was not as brutal and un-Christian as shown in the movie, but at the same time it is probably true that violence accompanied the conversion process when intolerant zealots forgot that they were trying to spread faith in peace, forgiveness, and love, a tragedy that should never occur.