In the times of Julian, as though with loosened reins, the savagery of the pagans boiled over into every cruelty. From which it came about that at Sebaste, a city of Palestine, with frenzied mind and deadly hands they invaded the sepulchre of John the Baptist, scattered his bones, and gathering them again, burned them with fire, and the holy ashes, mingled with dust, they scattered over the fields and countryside. But by God's providence it came to pass that certain men from Jerusalem, from the monastery of Philip, a man of God, had come thither for the sake of prayer at that very time.
When these men saw so great a wickedness being done indeed by human hands but with a beastly mind, accounting it more welcome to die than to be polluted by such an expiation, mingling among those who were gathering the bones for burning, more diligently—so far as the matter allowed—and more religiously collecting them, they secretly withdrew themselves, while the others were either stupefied or raging, and carried the venerable relics to the religious father Philip. He, deeming it beyond himself to keep so great a treasure under his own watch, sent the relics of the immaculate victim to the then chief Pontiff Athanasius, by his deacon Julian, who was afterwards bishop of a city of Palestine.
He, having received them, enclosed them in the hollowed-out wall of the sanctuary with a few witnesses, and by a prophetic spirit preserved them to be of profit to the coming generation; for whom now, when the traces of idolatry were cast down and overthrown, golden roofs would rise up in the once-profane buildings. But after the fall of Serapis, who had never lived, what shrines of another demon could yet stand? I should say too little if I said that all those that were at Alexandria, the little shrines of some demon or other crammed in along almost every single column, fell down.
But throughout all the cities of Egypt, through the strongholds, through the villages, through all the countryside, along the banks of the river, through the desert too, if any temples or rather tombs could be found, by the insistence of each several bishop they were undermined and levelled to the ground, so that the countryside was once more restored to cultivation, which had been unjustly assigned to the demons.