Make no mistake. The movie Agora goes a long way towards being an anti-Christian rant, even if portrayed with some sophistication.  Could the director, Amenábar, have made it more so if he tried?

In the history of film, the two biggest of box office hits which went out of their way to portray Christianity in a positive light were Ben Hur and Chariots of Fire.

Countering these was the Jodie Foster science fiction film, Contact, based on the novel by renouned atheist, Carl Sagan, which portays Christians quite hysterically. Perhaps not coincidently, Sagan enjoyed sharing this (false) version of the story of Hypatia on his TV series, Cosmos, 

Another very persuasive film was the 1960 anti-creationist polemic, Inherit the Wind. Covering the legendary Scopes Monkey trial of 1923, this court room drama has helped turn public attitudes against Christianity, portraying Christians as Bible thumping hypocrites. 

In recent times evolutionists have taken a bit of a hit with the Ben Stein documentary, Expelled, which detailed how the rights of scientists who have dared challenge the evolutionary paradigm were being systematically suppressed in academic circles.

Inherit the Wind, however, never claimed to portray history accurately. It was a parable of history. It openly changed the names of the persons involved. Scopes name was changed to Cates. The prosecution lawyer's name changed from Bryan to Brady. Scopes' defense lawyer, Darrow's name, was changed to Drummond. Several events and happenings were clearly changed also.

But the problem with the movie, Agora, is that it is claiming to be an historical drama, with basis in history.            

Below are some of it's historical misgivings. 

'The library of Alexandria was burnt to the ground, not by Christian mobs in the fifth century, but by Julius Caesar's troops, some forty years before Jesus was born.'  

'Hypatia was best known as a neo-Platonist philosopher, a devotee of Plato and Plotinus. Not only were there Christians in Hypatia's classes, not only were Christian bishops among her circle of friends, but Christian theologians – Augustine, Ambrose, and Origen, just to name the most prominent – were enthusiastic advocates of neo-Platonism. Therefore, to portray her as the noble champion of reason over and against mouth-breathing Christian primitives is just ridiculous.'

'Hypatia, sadly enough, found herself caught in the middle of a struggle between two powerful figures in Alexandria, namely, Orestes the civil authority and Cyril the bishop. She was most likely killed in retaliation for the murder of some of Cyril's supporters by agents of Orestes.'

Selections taken from Father Robert Barron,
http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/persecution/pch0251.htm

Barron goes on to explain his perceived anti-Christian motives in Agora's portrayal.

'In one of the most visually arresting scenes in the film, Amenabar brings his camera up to a very high point of vantage overlooking the Alexandria library while it is being ransacked by the Christian mob. From this perspective, the Christians look for all the world like scurrying cockroaches. In another memorable scene, the director shows a group of Christian thugs carting away the mangled corpses of Jews whom they have just put to death, and he composes the shot in such a way that the piled bodies vividly call to mind the bodies of the dead in photographs of Dachau and Auschwitz. The not so subtle implication of all of this is that Christians are dangerous types, threats to civilization, and that they should, like pests, be eliminated.'

The position that Julius Caesar burnt the library and therefore Cyril's mob could not have is pretty silly.

The destruction in the late Republic was of one wing of the library. The serapeum in the film was another wing, and there were also all the extra books written and coped during imperial times. The final destruction came with islamic expansion.

As to neoPlatonism - well, it is at least a logically consistent, if brittle, cosmogeny, based on "all is one", follows from pythagorean mysticism as much as plato's theory of forms, and, I might add, assimilated almost in total by early xtian fathers in an attempt to give xtianity some intellectual basis. Indeed, the film alludes to this kind of thing when the moderate bishop (with the xtian-for-convenience politician) says to hypatia "you are as xtian as we are".

The distance between neoplatonist and xtian is about the same as between today's moderate xtian and a quaker, and less than the difference between gnostic xtianity and today's fundy xtian.

To round out Hypatia not only as an even more admirable polymath to an audience, her murder more obnoxious, explain the quasi-euclidean cosmogeny of neoplatonism to a modern audience would have taken another hour.

There is one nagging annoyance, however: in the film, hypatia walks knowingly to he doom, in reality she was dragged from her chariot on her way home. That the roman military uniforms were a couple of centuries out is a minor quibble only.

Xtians objecting to the film on the basis of historical inaccuracies can be shown to lack a knowledge not only of secular history, but the many source documents (contemporary through to a C10 byzantine encyclopaedia) that are very much pro-Hypatia, as well as a knowledge of the different theological schools of early xtianity.

As in the film, today's monotheisms are not monolithic - for every Rowan Williams there is a George Pell, a firebrand anti-evolution southern baptist. There are the moderate sufis, and taliban. Those antagonistic to the film are probably not only blind to history, but have an unrealistic view of the present.

Balneus,
Why did you speak of the 'fundamentalist bishop' in the movie. The word fundamentalist is a bit out of place in the early centuries, isn't it? The useage of this word is quite modern. Or does it fall into the category of sayings such as: Augustine was a Calvinist (because he believed in God's sovereign election)?   

Can I ask, why do you keep using the word xtian instead of Christian, even when quoting dialogue from the movie?