It was the same with Egypt. Egypt plays hardly any part in the apostolic history, and the missionaries seem to have systematically passed it by. Although after the third century it was the scene of such momentous events in religious history, it was at first very backward in Christian progress. Apollos was the only teacher of Christianity who came from the Alexandrian school, and he learned it during his travels.[16.11] The cause of this remarkable fact will be found in the meagreness of the intercourse between the Egyptian and the Palestinian Jews; and above all in the circumstance that Jewish Egypt had a separate religious development in the teachings of Philo and the Therapeutæ, which were its special Christianity, and which indisposed it to lend an attentive ear to any other.[16.12] As to heathen Egypt, her religious institutions were much more tenacious than those of Greco-Roman paganism.[16.13] The Egyptian idolatry was yet in full vigor. It was almost the epoch when the enormous temples of Esneh and Ombos were constructed, and when the hope of finding a last Ptolemy, a national Messiah in the little Cesarion, inspired the building of Dendera and Hermonthis, which will compare with the finest works of the Pharaohs. Christianity planted itself everywhere upon the ruins of national feeling and local worships. The degradation of mind in Egypt also made very rare those religious aspirations which opened so easy a road to Christianity in other regions. A flash of light from Syria, illumining almost at once the three great peninsulas of Asia Minor, Greece, and Italy, and soon followed by a second, which extended over nearly the whole Mediterranean seaboard--such was the first apparition of Christianity. The course of the apostolic vessels was always much the same. The Christian preaching seems to have followed a road already laid out, and which is no other than that of the Jewish emigration. Like a contagion which, having its point of departure at the head of the Mediterranean, appears all at once at a number of separate points on the shore by a secret communication, Christianity had its points in a manner marked in advance. They were nearly all places where there existed colonies of Jews. The synagogue generally preceded the church. It was like a train of powder, or more correctly, an electric cord, along which the new idea ran with almost instantaneous rapidity.