HELLENIST (hellen-Ist), (Gr. 'EXxnyorr4s, hel lay-nis-tace., one who talks Greek).
This word is derived from the Greek verb AXnvtru.,, hel-lay-nid'zo, which in Aristotle means 'to talk (good) Greek' (Rhetoric, iii:5,1; 12:1); but, according to the analogy of other verbs in —qv, it might mean 'to favor the Greeks,' or 'to imitate Greek manners.' In the New Testament it seems to be appropriated as the name of those persons who, being of Jewish extraction, nevertheless talked Greek as their mother-tongue ; which was the case generally with the Jews in Egypt, Syria, Asia Minor, and Greece ; and in fact, through the influence of the Greek citics in northern Palestine (Decapolis), it would appear that the Galileans from their childhood learned nearly as much Greek as Hebrew. The appellation Hellenist is opposed to that of Hebrew in Acts vi :1 ; in Acts ix:29 the reading is not so certain, yet probably it should there also be 'Hellenists,' meaning uncon verted Jews.
The fact that so large a portion of the Jew ish nation was Hellenistic was destined to work great results on the Christian cause. Indeed, in some sense, Christianity itself may be said to have had its human birth among Hellenists, since Jesus himself and the majority of his disciples were reared in Galilee, and were probably nearly as familiar with the Greek as with the Hebrew tongue. Nevertheless, during the early times which followed the day of Pentecost, no striking result appears from this, except that it must have facilitated communication with the Jews of the dispersion. The important part which the Hel lenists were to sustain, was first indicated by the. preaching of Stephen ; who discerned the lower place which must be assigned to the national law of Moses in the kingdom of Messiah. Stephen, indeed, was abruptly cut off by the odium which his principles caused; but the same were soon after adopted, and yet more efficiently inculcated, by his persecutor Saul, to whom the high office was allotted of establishing the peculiar system of doctrine which thenceforward distinguished the Gentile from the Jewish church.
The Epistle of James (whether written, as Neander thinks, before the development of the Pauline views or not) exhibits to us undoubtedly the state of Christian doctrine in the mother church of Jerusalem. We see in it the higher
spirit of Christ struggling to put down the law into its right place, but having by no means as yet brought out into their full clearness the dis tinguishing doctrines of the gospel. All of these were preached and established by Paul in his own churches, founded among Gentile proselytes to Hellenistic Judaism, and from them in no long time were imbibed by all Gentile Christen dom. But, simultaneously, the struggle began within the church itself between the Hebraic and the Hellenistic spirit.
The (so-called) first council at Jerusalem (Acts xv) decided, for the time at least, that the Mosaic law was not to be enforced upon the Gentiles, but it did not lessen the importance of it to Jewish Christians ; and it would appear that the Hebrew spirit became afterwards even stronger still within the Jerusalem church, if we may interpret literally the words of James (Acts xxi :2o) : seest, brother, how many thou sands of Jews there are which believe, and they are all zealous of the law.' At any rate it ap pears certain that the resistance to the Pauline doctrine continued intense in the great body of the Hebrew Christians ; for they show themselves in ecclesiastical history only under the names of Nazarenes and Ebionites, and are always re garded as (more or less) heretical by the Gentile churches, since they held only the bare rudi mental creed on which the original Pentecostal church was founded ; and pertinaciously rejected the distinguishing tenets of Paul, which were con firmed by Pcter, and perhaps extended by John. This first and greatest of controversies ended in the extinction of the Hebrew churches, which had refused to grow with the growth of the Christian spirit in its highest and most favored leaders. But long before that event the Hellen istic Jews had been swallowed up in the mass of Gentile believers ; and to follow the further devel opment of the Grecian mind within the bosom of Christianity. belongs, not to this article, but to a history of Gentile Christendom. F. W. N.