HELLENISTS(jVλλpvtστal') was the name usually applied by those who called themselves Greeks (Hellenes) to all Graecizing and more especially to all Greek-speaking foreigners,—a class which, after the conquests of Alexander the Great, formed a large and important element in almost every community throughout the civilized world. More particularly the word is applied in the New Testament (Acts vi. 1; ix. 29; and, according to the textus receptus, also xi. 20, where, however, the best MSS. and critical editions read "Eλλψms) to Greek-speaking or “Grecian” Jews, who, besides being very numerous in the various countries of the dispersion, had also many synagogues in Jerusalem, and were remarkable there for their zeal. Indeed their presence in the capital of Judaism at all may safely be taken to have implied on their part a more than ordinary interest in the affairs of the ideal theocratic kingdom; their attitude therefore to Christianity, when that new system first came to be promulgated, could not fail to be very pronounced on the one side or on the other. The early records show that the apostles made many converts among the Hellenists of the city; and it is interesting to note that, if the names can be taken as a safe indication, all the seven deacons mentioned in Acts vi. 5 belonged to the “Hellenistic” and not to the “Hebrew” party within the primitive church. Saul of Tarsus also was a Hellenist; but whether he belonged to the synagogue of the “Libertines” or to that of “those of Cilicia” is a question which our data do not enable us to decide. In the Vulgate, which translates 'Eλλψuσταi by the word “Graeci,” the distinction so consistently preserved in our authorized version between “Grecians” and “Greeks” is made to ...

On this appellation, Dr. Jennings observes, There is a very remarkable appellation which the Apostle Paul, after glorying in his being “of the stock of Israel, and of the tribe of Benjamin,” applies to himself, namely, that he was “a Hebrew of the Hebrews,” Phil. iii, 5. By this expression Godwin understands a Hebrew both by father’s and mother’s side. But if this be all that the phrase imports, there seems to be very little occasion for the Apostle’s using it immediately after having declared, that he was “of the stock of Israel, and the tribe of Benjamin;” which, on Godwin’s supposition, is the same as a Hebrew of the Hebrews; for the Jews were not allowed to marry out of their own nation; or if they sometimes married proselytes, yet their number was comparatively so small among them, especially while they were under oppression, as they were at that time by the Romans, that methinks Paul would hardly have mentioned it as a distinguishing privilege and honour, that neither of his parents were proselytes. It is therefore a much more probable sense, that a Hebrew of the Hebrews signifies a Hebrew both by nation and language, which multitudes of Abraham’s posterity, in those days, were not; or one of the Hebrew Jews, who performed their public worship in the Hebrew tongue; for such were reckoned more honourable than the Hellenistic Jews, who in their dispersion having, in a manner, lost the Hebrew, used the Greek language _in sacris_, and read the Scripture out of the Septuagint version. We meet with this distinction among the converted Jews, in the Acts of the Apostles: “In those days, when the number of the disciples was multiplied, there arose a murmuring of the Grecians or Hellenists against the Hebrews,” Acts vi, 1. This is what St. Paul ...