Christmas Day
Click here to learn more!
Bible Encyclopedias
Greece
Kitto's Popular Cyclopedia of Biblical Literature
or The relations of the Hebrews with the Greeks were always of a distant kind, until the Macedonian conquest of the East: hence in the Old Testament the mention of the Greeks is naturally rare.
The few dealings of the Greeks with the Hebrews seem to have been rather unfriendly, to judge by the notice in . In , the Tyrians are reproached for selling the children of Judah and Jerusalem to the Grecians: but at what time, and in what circumstances, must depend on the date assigned to the book of Joel [see JOEL]. With the Greeks of Cyprus or Chittim, the Hebrews were naturally better acquainted; and this name, it would seem, might easily have extended itself in their tongue to denote the whole Greek nation. Such at least is the most plausible explanation of its use in .
The Greeks were eminent for their appreciation of beauty in all its varieties: indeed their religious creed owed its shape mainly to this peculiarity of their mind; for their logical acuteness was not exercised on such subjects until quite a later period. The puerile or indecent fables of the old mythology may seem to a modern reader to have been the very soul of their religion; but to the Greek himself these were a mere accident, or a vehicle for some embodiment of beauty. He thought little whether a legend concerning Artemis or Apollo was true, but much whether the dance and music celebrating the divinity were solemn, beautiful, and touching. The worship of Apollo, the god of youth and beauty, has been regarded as characterizing the Hellenic in contrast with the older Pelasgian times; nor is the fact without significance, that the ancient temple and oracle of Jupiter at Dodona fell afterwards into the shade in comparison with that of Apollo at Delphi. Indeed the Dorian Spartans and the Ionian Athenians alike regarded Apollo as their tutelary god. Whatever the other varieties of Greek religious ceremonies, no violent or frenzied exhibitions arose out of the national mind; but all such orgies (as they were called) were imported from the East, and had much difficulty in establishing themselves on Greek soil. Quite at a late period the managers of orgies were evidently regarded as mere jugglers of not a very reputable kind; nor do the Greek States, as such, appear to have patronized them. On the contrary, the solemn religious processions, the sacred games and dances, formed a serious item in the public expenditure; and to be permanently exiled from such spectacles would have been a moral death to the Greeks. Wherever they settled they introduced their native institutions, and reared temples, gymnasia, baths, porticoes, sepulchers, of characteristic simple elegance. The morality and the religion of such a people naturally were alike superficial; nor did the two stand in any close union. Bloody and cruel rites could find no place in their creed, because faith was not earnest enough to endure much self-abandonment. Religion was with them a sentiment and a taste rather than a deep-seated conviction. On the loss of beloved relatives they felt a tender and natural sorrow, but unclouded with a shade of anxiety concerning a future life. Through the whole of their later history, during Christian times, it is evident that they had little power of remorse, and little natural firmness of conscientious principle: and, in fact, at an earlier and critical time, when the intellect of the nation was ripening, an atrocious civil war, that lasted for twenty-seven years, inflicted a political and social demoralization, from the effects of which they could never recover. Besides this, their very admiration of beauty, coupled with the degraded state of the female intellect, proved a frightful source of corruption, such as no philosophy could have adequately checked. From such a nation then, whatever its intellectual pretensions, no healthful influence over its neighbors could flow, until other and higher inspiration was infused into its sentiment.
Among the Greeks the arts of war and peace were carried to greater perfection than among any earlier people. In navigation they were little behind the Tyrians and Carthaginians; in political foresight they equaled them; in military science, both by sea and land, they were decidedly their superiors; while in the power of reconciling subject-foreigners to the conquerors and to their institutions, they perhaps surpassed all nations of the world. Their copious, cultivated, and flexible tongue carried with it no small mental education to all who learned it thoroughly; and so sagacious were the arrangements of the great Alexander throughout his rapidly acquired Asiatic empire, that in the twenty years of dreadful war between his generals which followed his death, no rising of the natives against Greek influence appears to have been thought of. Without any change of population adequate under other circumstances to effect it,' the Greek tongue and Greek feeling spread far and sank deep through the Macedonian dominions. Half of Asia Minor became a new Greece; and the cities of Syria, North Palestine, and Egypt, were deeply imbued with the same influence. Yet the purity of the Hellenic stream varied in various places; and some account of the mixture it underwent will be given in the Article Hellenist.
When a beginning had been made of preaching Christianity to the Gentiles, Greece immediately became a principal sphere for missionary exertion. The vernacular tongue of the Hellenistic Christians was understood over so large an extent of country, as almost of itself to point out in what direction they should exert themselves. The Grecian cities, whether in Europe or Asia, were the peculiar field for the Apostle Paul; for whose labors a superintending Providence had long before been providing, in the large number of devout Greeks who attended the Jewish synagogues. Greece Proper was divided by the Romans into two provinces, of which the northern was called Macedonia, and the southern Achaia (as in , etc.); and we learn incidentally from Acts 18 that the proconsul of the latter resided at Corinth. To determine the exact division between the provinces is difficult; nor is the question of any importance to a Biblical student Achaia, however, had probably very nearly the same frontier as the kingdom of modern Greece, which is limited by a line reaching from the gulf of Volo to that of Arta, in great part along the chain of Mount Othrys. Of the cities celebrated in Greek history, none are prominent in the early Christian times except Corinth. Laconia, and its chief town Sparta, had ceased to be of any importance: Athens was never eminent as a Christian church. In Macedonia were the two great cities of Philippi and Thessalonica (formerly called Therme); yet of these the former was rather recent, being founded by Philip the Great; the latter was not distinguished above the other Grecian cities on the same coast. Nicopolis, on the gulf of Ambracia (or Arta), had been built by Augustus, in memory of his victory at Actium, and was, perhaps, the limit of Achaia on the western coast. It had risen into some importance in St. Paul's days, and, as many suppose, it is to this Nicopolis that he alludes in his epistle to Titus (see further under Achaia and Nicopolis).
Public Domain.
Kitto, John, ed. Entry for 'Greece'. "Kitto's Popular Cyclopedia of Biblical Literature". https://www.studylight.org/encyclopedias/eng/kbe/g/greece.html.
