A great number of ancient Greek texts were preserved thanks to christian monks who copied them. But some people believe that the texts were not copied verbatim, but were modified slightly to conform to the christian dogma. Also, those texts that were completely against the christian ideals were deliberately destroyed.
Some examples that support this theory are the references to a single god. They believe that it was “gods” in the original.
A stronger argument is that while there are a lot of preserved books from Aristotle, Plato, the pythagoreans and the orfics (all of them having a worldview similar to that of christianity), books from physical philosophers are very scarce.
Um, we have plenty of preserved classical texts with explicit references to “gods” in the plural, both Greek and Roman.
By “physical philosophers”, do you mean the Ionians (Presocratics)? Remember that the Presocratics were considerably earlier than Aristotle and Plato, so we would naturally expect more of their works to have been lost.
It was my understanding that early Pythagorean writings are just about as scarce as those of the Ionian school. I’m also puzzled as to why the worldview of the Pythagoreans would be considered more similar to Christianity than that of the Ionian school.
A back of the envelope, way too short and not REALLY SDMB-GQ history of the translation of Classical Greek knowledge from 529 when Plato’s Academy was closed until it is all mainstreamed back into the West:
Classical Greek thought including the translations are preserved by excommunicated Nestorian Christian scholars and others, in Iran, in Alexandria and especially in Syria - then a Christian land – Classical Greek thought and science are picked up from these places embraced by Moslems as they begin to rule the Middle East - and the Iberian Peninsula.
And it is from the Moslems in Spain that the West, mainly, rediscovers Plato, Aristotle et al.
Not - as the OP has it - Christian Monks writing and preserving unadulterated Greek thought.
It is all more complex than that - but in a nutshell that is why the OP’s answer is that the Christian world couldn’t have changed things even if it wanted to — they weren’t working with the originals.
Most people who worked with Greek texts were not working with the original.
People interpreting any text have fair licence to corrupt text, accidentally or maliciously, based on what they believe (falsely or not) the person was trying to say.
A change from “gods” to “god” could certainly make sense in several contexts. I am not sure most people believed that the Greeks only worshipped one deity. I have no doubt that some people at various points tried to convey pagan polytheism as manifestations of Christian gods (e.g. Roman Catholicism in Guatemala) but I don’t think this was extremely widespread with regard to Greek translation.
This takes place today in Greece too. The greek orthodox church has made many attempts to spin ancient greek documents and show that the ancients really believed in one god (the god of christianity).
I think it’s pretty safe to say that most alterations in ancient Greek and Latin documents result from copy error or poorly preserved sources - which, as has been said, were almost never the original documents. Positing conspiracy when we have perfectly good evidence of the tenuous life of a manuscript is unnecessary.
For the specific example of ‘gods’ changing to ‘god’, remember this: it can be had to tell one letter from another in these documents - the script was not printed, after all, and the words, e.g. theoi and theos (nom. pl and nom. sg) could actually look very similar.
Also, a Christian copyist, it is reasonable to surmise, would be more likely to think of god in the singular, and so make a careless error when copying a document.
And even in a polytheistic society, sometimes there are good reasons for speaking of a single ‘god’ or a concept of ‘god’ - Plato does this a lot.
There was more than one “library,” more than one collection, more than one fire, more than one destruction.
Julius Caesar almost certainly caused the first major destruction, whether just of a warehouse or of the whole facility.
Alexandria recovered from the invasion and had a long history after that. There was the Mouseion and a secondary library. Some sources insist that only the Daughter Library, inside the Sarapeion, survived.
In Wikipedia you can find the short version of the case against Christians.
The article there concludes that this included a still-extant library.
It’s not fair only to blame the Christians - Julius Caesar did it first (47 BCE) fighting against Cleopatra. He didn’t destroy the whole lot, but he did a good bit of work .
#1) The Christian monks you refer to were well aware they were dealing with documents written before Christ was born. Logically, why would they expect that they wouldn’t vary from the Christian dogma? To them the ancient Greeks were pagans. Of course they wouldn’t follow the Christian dogma.
#2) As mentioned by others, the ancient Greek writings made it to many different cultures. We aren’t dependent on Chistian monks from long ago for the sole knowledge of them.
The christians did destroy many of the old temples (and built their own temples on top of the old ones) and even things like statues that weren’t related to the religion.
Quite. I could also have cited the sacking of Byzantium in 1453. Or the sacking of Rome by Atilla the Hun. Or the destructions of monasteries by Vikings. Or …
.