Greece

GREECE

In the Old Testament, is put for the Hebrew word Javan, which is equivalent to Ionia, and seems to include not only Greece but western Asia Minor, and the intervening isles, all settled by the Ionian race, Gen 10:2 . Greece proper, however, is chiefly intended. It is not often mentioned in the Old Testament, Dan 8:21 10:20 11:2 Joe 3:6 Zec 9:13 . See JAVAN.In the New Testament, Greece is called Hellas, a name supposed to have belonged first to a single city, but at length applied to the whole country south of Macedonia. About B. C. 146, the Romans conquered Greece, and afterwards organized two great provinces, namely, Macedonia, including Macedonia proper, Thessaly, Epirus, and Illyricum; and Achaia, including all the country, which lies south of the former province. (See ACHAIA.) In Mal 20:3, Greece is probably to be taken in its widest acceptation, as including the whole of Greece proper and the Peloponnesus. This country was bounded north by Macedonia and Illyricum, from which it was separated by mountains, south by the Mediterranean sea, east by the Aegean sea, and west by the Ionian sea. It was generally known under the three great divisions of Peloponnesus, Hellas, and Northern Greece.Peloponnesus, more anciently called Pelasgia, and Argos, and now the Morea, was the southern peninsula; it included the famous cities, Sparta, Messene, Elis, Corinth, Argos, etc. The division of Hellas, which now constitutes a great part of Livadia, included Thessaly and Epirus, with the cities Larissa, Nicopolis, etc. The large islands of Crete and Euboea belonged to Greece, as well as most of those in the Archipelago and on the west.The Jews and the Greeks appear to have had little intercourse with each other, until after Alexander the Great overran Egypt, Syria, and the East. They then began to come in contact everywhere, for both races were widely dispersed. The Jews extended the name of Greeks to include the people conquered and ruled by Greeks; and the word is thus nearly synonymous in the New Testament with Gentiles, Mar 7:26 Mal 20:21 1Ch 1:16 . The term “Grecian” or Hellenists, on the contrary, denotes a Jew by birth or religion, who spoke Greek. It is used chiefly of foreign Jews and proselytes, in contrast with the Hebrews, that is, those speaking the vernacular Hebrew, or Aramaean, Mal 6:1 9:29. The Greeks were a vivacious, acute, and polished, but superficial people, compared with the Jews. They excelled in all the arts of war and peace; but were worshippers of beauty, not of duty. Their pride of intellect, and their corruption of morals, were almost insurmountable obstacles to their reception of Christianity. Yet it was among the Greek cities and people that chiefly labored, and with great success. Many flourishing churches were, in early times, established among them; and there can be no doubt that they, for a long time, preserved the apostolic customs with much care. At length, however, opinions fluctuated considerably on points of doctrine; schisms and heresies divided the church; and rancor, violence, and even persecution followed in their train. To check these evils, councils were called and various creeds composed. The removal of the seat of government from Rome to Constantinople, gave a preponderance to the Grecian districts of the empire, and the ecclesiastical determinations of the Greek Church were extensively received. In the middle of the eighth century disputes arose, which terminated in a permanent schism between the Greek and Latin churches. The Greek Church has a general resemblance to the Roman-catholic, and embraces a population of not far from fifty millions of souls, in Russia, Greece, Turkey, Syria, etc.

Fuente: American Tract Society Bible Dictionary

Greece

(or Hellas; Lat. Grcia, Gr. )

The southernmost part of what is now called the Balkan Peninsula was the cradle of a race whose ideas contained the germs of our present Western civilization. As the religious life of mankind divides itself into the time before and after the dawn of Christianity, so the rational and political life of mankind divides itself into the time before and after the expansion of Hellenism. The mental activity of the Greeks in the great classical period, culminating in the 5th and 4th centuries b.c., made not only the Hellas of later times but all the world their debtor. The language they spoke, the art and literature they created, the spirit of liberty they fostered, and the philosophical temper in which they faced the problems of life, form essential elements in the finest modern culture. If criticism is, as M. Arnold said, a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world (Essays in Criticism, London, 1895, i. 38), the contribution of Greece can never be neglected.

Like Palestine, the other ancient home of great ideas, Hellas proper was a small country. The Hellenic part of the peninsula (to the south of Macedonia and Thrace), with the isles of Greece, was much the same in extent as the modern Greek kingdom-about 250 miles in greatest length and 180 in greatest breadth. In a large sense, however, Hellas was an ethnological rather than a geographical term, for it embraced every country inhabited by the sea-loving and enterprising Hellenes-all their settlements on the coasts and islands of the Mediterranean, on the coasts of the Hellespont, the Bosporus, and the Euxine Sea. As the west coast of the homeland was mountainous and harbourless, while the east was full of gulfs, bays, and havens, Greece turned her back on Italy and her face to the aegean and Asia Minor, so much so that in the 6th and the beginning of the 5th centuries b.c. the centre of gravity of Hellenic civilization is to be looked for in Ionia rather than in Attica, the moat famous names in science, philosophy, and poetry being at that time associated with the Asiatic coast or the neighbouring Cyclades. But the Ionian Greeks, isolated by the estranging sea and weakened by internal jealousies, were unable to offer a successful resistance to the Persian advance, and the glory of saving European culture is due to the Athenians who fought at Marathon and Salamis.

In the classical period, Greece was an aggregate of self-governing city-States, of which Aristotle surveys no fewer than 158. These States combined for once, with brilliant results, in face of the Asiatic peril, but they never afterwards seemed to be capable of united action. Wasting their strength and resources in fratricidal wars which gave now Athens, now Sparta, now Thebes, a temporary hegemony, they proved in the day of reckoning too feeble to resist the military power either of the Macedonian monarchy or of the Roman republic. The career of Alexander, the pupil of Aristotle, closed the Hellenic and opened the Hellenistic period of history. It created a world-Empire and a world-culture, both of which borrowed their best features from a Greece which was living Greece no more. While the new order reinforced the old Hellenic elements in Asia Minor, it brought into being a vast number of Greek cities-the conqueror himself is said to have founded seventy-in lands hitherto barbarian. It made Greek the language of literature and religion, of commerce and administration, throughout the Nearer East. And when the Romans became the sovereign people, it was Greek rather than Roman ideals that they sought to make effective throughout their Oriental dominions. The desire to become at least internally Hellenised, to become partakers of the manners and the culture, of the art and the science of Hellas, to be-in the footsteps of the great Macedonian-shield and sword of the Greeks of the East, and to be allowed further to civilise this East not after an Italian but after a Hellenic fashion-this desire pervades the later centuries of the Roman republic and the better times of the empire with a power and an ideality which are almost no less tragic than that political toil of the Hellenes failing to attain its goal (T. Mommsen, The Provinces of the Rom. Emp.2, 1909, i. 253).

Neither the Macedonians nor the Romans ever treated the conquered Greeks as ordinary subjects. The sacred land of art and poetry was not ruled like Egypt or Gaul. There was a province of Achaia, but never of Hellas, Such cities as Athena and Sparta were spared the humiliation of being placed under the fasces of a Roman governor and having to pay tribute to Rome. New Corinth, Caesars Roman colony, the least Hellenic of the cities of Greece, became the seat of government. Nevertheless, the free communities had little more than a simulacrum of their ancient power. The Roman governor could always make his voice heard in their councils, and a rescript from him brooked no delay in obedience. The right of bringing a proposal before the Ecclesia no longer belonged to every citizen, but was confined to definite officials, and the conduct of business was placed in the hands of a single . The citizens were always liable to be called to account for their proceedings (cf. Act 19:40), while the sovereign power could at any moment cancel the constitution of a free city, and take the offenders under its own direct administration. At the best, Hellenistic life was now sorely cramped by the limitation of its sphere; high ambition lacked a corresponding aim, and therefore the low and degrading ambition flourished luxuriantly (Mommsen, op. cit. i. 283). Shadowy assemblies still convened, engaged in grave debate, passed solemn resolutions, made appointments, and distributed honours. But political life of a serious kind was a thing of the past. Hellenism as described by such a writer as Plutarch already suggests a gilded halo hovering round decay (Byron, The Giaour). The general effect produced by the many pictures, allusions, references, illustrations which he takes from the Greek world of his times is that romantic adventures, great passions, monstrous crimes, were foreign to the small and shabby gentility of Roman Greece. The highest rewards he can set before the keenest ambitions are no better than if we should now fire our youths imagination with the prospect of becoming parish beadles, vestrymen, or at most town councillors (J. P. Mahaffy, The Silver Age of the, Greek World, 1906, p. 349).

The twenty years civil war, which ended in the transformation of the Roman Republic into an Empire, was calamitous to the Greeks, who seemed fated to be always on the losing side. They preferred Pompey to Caesar, Brutus to Antony, and they were compelled in the end to raise levies for Antonys campaign against Octavian. The three decisive battles of the war-Pharsalus, Philippi, and Actium-were fought on the soil or the coast of Greece, and the contending armies almost bled the poor country to death. Many of its cities fell into decay, vast tracts of arable land were turned into pasture or reverted to the state of Nature, and Greece remained desolate for all time to come (Mommsen, op. cit. i. 268). The dawn of the Christian era saw the nadir of her fortunes, the hour in which she was most neglected and despised. Thinking that an improvement might be effected by a change of administration, the Greeks petitioned Tiberius in a.d. 15 to transfer Achaia from the senatorial proconsul to an Imperial legate. This arrangement was sanctioned, and lasted till a.d. 44, when Claudius restored the province to the senate; whence there was once more a proconsul () in Corinth (Act 18:12). Nero, who posed as a Philhellene, was accorded so flattering a reception during a progress through Greece that he bestowed freedom and exemption from tribute upon all the Greeks; but Vespasian found it necessary to restore the provincial government in order to avoid civil war. Greece received its greatest Imperial benefactions in the beginning of the 2nd century.

As Hadrian created a new Athens, so he created also a new Hellas. Under him the representatives of all the autonomous and non-autonomous towns of the province of Achaia were allowed to constitute themselves in Athens as united Greece, as the Panhellenes. The national union, often dreamed of and never attained in better times, was thereby created, and what youth had wished for old age possessed in imperial fulness. It is true that the new Panhellenion did not obtain political prerogatives; but there was no lack of what imperial favour and imperial gold could give. There arose in Athens the temple of the new Zeus Panhellenios, and brilliant popular festivals and games were connected with this foundation, the carrying out of which pertained to the collegium of the Panhellenes, and primarily to the priest of Hadrian as the living god who founded them (Mommsen, op. cit. i. 266).

Even in the period of greatest depression Hellas still maintained her old pre-eminence in education, though for a time the universities of Rhodes, Alexandria, and Tarsus rivalled that of Athens. The life of studious ease was to be enjoyed in the cities of Greece as nowhere else, and Plutarch cheerfully turned back from the vulgar splendour of Imperial Rome to the quiet refinement of his native Chaeroneia. In all that pertained to good taste and humanity the Hellenes continued to bear the palm. Gladiatorial shows were never popular in Greece, except in the Roman colony of Corinth, and Dio Chrysostom (i. 385) expressed his disgust and horror when these barbarities began on occasion to be seen even in Athens.

In religious rites and ceremonies Greece was remarkably conservative. Pausanias (Description of Greece [ed. J. G. Frazer, 6 vols., London, 1898]) records (passim) that as he went through the country in the 2nd cent. of our era he found the primitive worships faithfully maintained in every city and village by the simple, unquestioning natives. And the great religious festivals-Olympic, Isthmian, Pythian-never failed to attract crowds. It is a familiar fact that religious beliefs which science has discredited may still have a long life before them. Ever since the days of Plato the traditional religion of Greece had been a bankrupt concern (Gilbert Murray, Four Stages of Greek Religion, 1912, p. 107). And among those who not only doubted or denied the existence of the Olympian gods, but turned in weariness and disappointment from Stoic, Epicurean, and Academic systems alike, there was a thirst for some deeper satisfaction of the souls wants. When Alexanders empire extended the bounds of knowledge, attention began to be directed to foreign faiths, and Oriental mysteries gradually came into vogue. Sacrifice and prayer to Hera or Athene were replaced by the orgiastic worship of Cybele or the mystic rites of Isis. The Eleusinian Mysteries-the cult of Demeter and Cora-constitute the one great attempt made by the Hellenic genius to construct for itself a religion that should keep pace with the growth of thought and civilization in Greece (W. M. Ramsay, Encyclopaedia Britannica 9 xvii. [1884] 126). The only native gods of Greece who could hold their own against foreign rivals were the mystery-deities, Dionysus and Hecate. The cult of Isis secured a foothold in the aegean islands, spread to Attica in the 3rd cent. b.c., to Rome in the 1st, and ultimately established itself throughout the wide Roman Empire, as the adoration of the Madonna has done in the Catholic world. The great power of Isis of myriad names was that, transfigured by Greek influences, she appealed to many orders of intellect, and satisfied many religious needs or fancies (S. Dill, Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius, 1904, p. 569). Christianity was preached in some of the leading cities of Greece soon after the middle of the 1st cent. (see Athens and Corinth), but made slow progress throughout the country, where paganism, in one form or another, maintained itself till about a.d. 600.

Ionia (Javan) was known to the later Hebrew prophets (Eze 27:13, Isa 66:19), and the Jews of the 2nd cent. b.c. came into touch with Greece proper. References to Athenians and Spartans occur in 1 Maccabees 12-14, 2Ma 6:1; 2Ma 9:15; a long list of Greek cities is found in 1Ma 15:23; and, according to 1Ma 12:6, Jonathan the Hasmonaean greeted the Spartans as brethren and sought an alliance with them against Syria. During the Maccabaean conflict the term Greek came to be used by strict Jews as synonymous with anti-Jewish or heathen (2Ma 4:10; 2Ma 4:15; 2Ma 6:9; 2Ma 11:24), and Hellenism as identical with heathenism (4:10). See Hellenism.

Literature.-A. Holm, History of Greece, Eng. translation , London, 1894-98; J. P. Mahaffy, A Survey of Greek Civilisation, do. 1897, Rambles and Studies in Greece3, do. 1897, and Progress of Hellenism in Alexanders Empire, do. 1905; J. G. Frazer, Pausanias and Other Greek Sketches, do. 1900; J. A. Symonds, Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, do, 1898; L. R. Farnell, The Cults of the Greek States, 5 vols., Oxford, 1896-1909, The Higher Aspects of Greek Religion, London, 1912; articles Graecia in Smiths DGRG [Note: GRG Dict. of Greek and Roman Geography.] , Greece in Hasting’s Dictionary of the Bible (5 vols) , Encyclopaedia Biblica , Griechenland in RGG [Note: GG Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart.] .

James Strahan.

Fuente: Dictionary of the Apostolic Church

Greece

Independent republic of southeastern Europe. The country was evangelized by Saint Paul during his second and third missions, when he visited Neapolis, Philippi, where the first Christian Church on European soil was established, Thessalonica, Berooa, Corinth, and Athens, where he converted Dionysius the Areopagite, first Bishop of Athens. The Churches of Athens and Corinth were the most important, the latter being the first center of Christianity in Greece. According to tradition, Saint Andrew preached in Scythia, Thrace, Epirus, Macedonia, and Achaia, and was crucified at Patras; he is claimed by the patriarchs of Constantinople as their first predecessor. Saint Thomas and Saint Matthew also are said to have visited Greece, which formed part of Illyricum and was dependent on the Patriarchate of Rome. With the Eastern Schism, Greece passed to the Patriarchate of Constantinople and became embroiled in the Arian heresy , which reached its height under Michael Crerularius. The first restoration of the Latin Rite was attempted by the Crusaders, who in 1204 occupied Greece and the islands of the Archipelago; they were succeeded by the kings of Aragon (1311-1394) and the dukes of Florence (1394-1458), who tried unsuccessfully to reclaim the schismatics by persecution. The Turkish conquest in the 16th century relieved the schismatics who allied themselves with the invaders. Greece threw off the yoke of Turkey (1821-1829), became an independent kingdom (1830-1923), and in 1924 was established as a republic. The Greek Orthodox is the religion of the state and all activities detrimental to it are forbidden, though freedom of worship is granted to all denominations. The Apostolic delegation of Athens was erected in 1834 by Gregory XVI, and the majority of the Catholics, including many foreigners, such as Maltese, Italians, and Levantines, belong to the Latin Rite.

Fuente: New Catholic Dictionary

Greece

Greece will be treated in this article under the following heads: I. The Land and the People; II. The Church in Greece before the Schism; III. The Orthodox Church in Greece; IV. Constitution of the Church of Greece; V. The Catholic Church in Greece; VI. Protestants and Other Sects; VII. The Church in Enslaved Greece.

I. THE LAND AND THE PEOPLE

The Greeks are a people who appear first in history as separated in various small States, but bound together by a common language, religion and civilization, in the south of the Balkan Peninsula, the islands around, and the coast of Asia Minor opposite. For about three centuries these States attained a perfection in every form of civilization that gives them the first place in the history of Europe. Then the Greek ideal–Hellenism–spread over Asia, Egypt, and westward to Italy. The original race gradually sinks in importance; the States have disappeared. But the power of the Greek language, Greek learning, Greek art is never exhausted; the magic of the old memories still works in every age; while political changes cause the rise and fall of other governments, Hellenism never ceases from its conquests. The great Roman Empire, having become too unwieldy, is divided, and Greece gradually swallows up the eastern half. For nearly ten centuries again Greece reigns from Constantinople. The flood of Islam sweeps over the lands she had moulded; instead of destroying her, this brings her to fresh conquests across the distant West. Last of all, chiefly because of the magic of her name, the land where Hellenism was born has succeeded in shaking off the tyrant and we have again a free Greece. But Hellas means more than this small country. It is that mighty force, undying from Homer to the present Phanar at Constantinople, that, through all changes of government, has been expressed in the same language, has evolved its own ideals, and, unbroken in its continuity for nearly thirty centuries, has moulded to its own likeness nearly every race it met. The barbarous tribes of Asia Minor–Macedonians, Christian Arabs, Egyptians and Slavs, Phoenicians and Italians, Wallachians and even some branches of the great Turkish race–met this ideal in turn, learned to talk Greek and to call themselves Hellenes. And at the knees of this mother all Europe has stood.

It is not the object of this article to tell again the long story of Greece. One or two salient points only will clear the ground for an account of Christianity among this people.

First of all, what is Greece?–The question may easily be answered now. The Conference of London, in 1831, and the Treaty of 1897 have arranged the frontier of the modern kingdom. In the past it is less easy to answer. Greece was not united as one State even in classical times; Alexander’s empire included all manner of nations; under Rome the scattered Greeks gradually learned to call themselves Romans. The only answer that can be given for any period is that Greece is the land where Greeks live; any country, any city where the people in the great majority spoke Greek, were conscious of being Greeks, was at that time at any rate a part of Hellas: Syracuse and Halicarnassus as much as Athens and Corinth. This only removes the question one step, since one now asks: What is a Greek? To demand evidence of pure descent from one of the original Dorian, Ionian, or Aeolian tribes would be hopeless. It has been the special mission of Hellas to impose her language and ideals, even the consciousness of being a Greek, on other races. Of the enormous number of people since Alexander who spoke Greek and called themselves Greeks the great majority were children of Hellenized barbarians. Moreover districts were inhabited by mixed populations. The great towns–Antioch and Alexandria, for instance–were more or less completely Hellenized, while the peasants around kept their original languages.

One must use the names Greek and Greece as comparative ones. Where a certain degree of Greek consciousness (shown most obviously in the use of the language) prevails, there we may call the people Greeks, more or less so according to the measure of their absorption by Hellas. The old Greek States covered about the territory included in the modern kingdom and the islands, with colonies around the coast of Asia Minor, Sicily, Southern Italy, Northern Egypt, even Southern Gaul. Alexander (336-23 B.C.) upset these limits altogether. Himself a Hellenized Macedonian, descended from people whom the old Greeks certainly considered barbarians (though Macedonians seem to have been akin to the Aeolians), his empire spread the Greek ideal and language throughout Asia and Egypt. When Rome conquered Greece (146 B.C.) there was no longer any question of a Greek political nation. But the race goes on, and the language never dies. Constantine (A.D. 324-37) meant his new city to be Roman. But here, too, Hellas gradually absorbed her conquerors. At least from the time of Justinian I (527-65) the Eastern Empire, in spite of its Roman name, must be counted a Greek State. The Byzantine period (roughly from 527 to 1453) is the direct continuation of the older Greek civilization. It is true that Byzantine civilization was influenced from other sides (from Rome and Asia Minor, for instance); but this would apply to the old Greek ideals too, on which Egypt, Persia, and Asia had their influence; it is the normal process of the development of any civilization to absorb foreign influences gradually, without breaking its own continuity. Only, in this period the centre of gravity has moved from Athens to Constantinople. It was a special characteristic of the Turkish conquest that it neither destroyed nor absorbed the races subject to the sultan. The difference of religion, involving in this case an entirely different kind of life and different ideals in everything, prevented absorption; and the subject Christians were too valuable an asset as taxpayers to be wiped out by the Arabs. So, after 1453, except for the loss of independence and the persecution in a more or less acute form that they suffered, the older European races in the Balkans went on as before. No doubt numbers of Greeks did apostatize, learn to speak Turkish and help to build up that artificial confusion of races which we call the Turks. But the enormous majority kept their faith in spite of grievous disabilities. They kept their language, too, and their consciousness of being Greeks. They never called themselves Turks (a word that in the Balkans is still commonly used for Moslem), nor thought of themselves as part of the Turkish State. They were Greeks (which is what their name Hromaioi really meant), their land was Greece still, though unhappily held by a foreign tyrant, for whose removal they never ceased to pray.

The real danger to the ideal of Greater Greece covering all the Balkans was not, is not now, the Turk, who remains always only an unpleasant incident in the history of these lands; it is the presence of other Christian races, Slavs, who dispute the Greek ideal with their languages and national feeling. Were it not for these Slavs we could count Greece as having absorbed Macedonia and Thrace by the time of Alexander, and as covering nearly all the Balkans to the Danube ever since. But the Bulgar, the Serb, the Wallachian–and Albanian too–are there with their languages and nations to oppose the “Great Idea” of which every Greek dreams. So, we must still count Greece as a scattered and relative element among others. Under the Turk Constantinople was still the centre of this element. The oecumenical patriarch took the place of the emperor; his court, the Phanar, was the heart of Hellenism, where the purest Greek was spoken, the memory of the old Greek States most alive.

In the beginning of the nineteenth century the wave of enthusiasm for liberty started by the French Revolution reached the Rayahs, as the Christian subjects of the sultan were called by the Turks. The Rayahs had never ceased to hope for the day when “this so glorious and noble race should no longer have to submit to a godless turban” (Ph. Skuphos in his Deesis pros ton Christon); the Klephts and Armatoles had kept up a ceaseless, if hopeless, rebellion against the pashas and kaimakams. In 1814 the “Hetairia Philike” was founded at Odessa, to work for the freedom of Greece. In the revolution that followed, from 1821 to 1833, Greeks joined equally all over the Turkish Empire, in the islands and coast towns of Asia Minor, in Constantinople and Salonica as much as in Attica and the Peloponnesus. The treaty that finally gave freedom only to the lower part of the peninsula was a bitter disappointment to thousands of Greeks still subject to the Turk. No doubt a more generous concession was impossible; but one must remember that the modern Kingdom of Greece is only a fraction of what has an equal right to the name of Hellas. The merchants of Smyrna and Salonica, the Phanariots of Constantinople, the peasants of Crete, and even of distant Cyprus, hang out the blue and white flag on feast days, talk Greek to their wives, and are just as much conscious of being Greeks as the citizens of Athens. Outside of “free Greece” (he eleuthera Hellas), “captive Greece” (he aichmalote Hellas) waits and hopes. Of this scattered fatherland, considered as one country, whether now free or still captive, the real centre is still the Phanar at Constantinople. It is here, even more than at Athens, that the “Great Idea” of a Greece that shall cover the Balkans is cherished; it is hither, to the Phanar and the patriarch, that the eyes of all Greeks are turned. King George, with his Danish family, takes his stipend and enjoys such slight authority as his turbulent Parliament allows to him, but the head of the nation, as a Greek told Dr. Gelzer in 1898, is not the king at Athens, but the oecumenical patriarch at Constantinople. (Gelzer, “Geistliches und Weltliches aus dem turk.-griech. Orient”, Leipzig, 1900. See Fortescue, “The Orthodox Eastern Church”, 240-244, 273-283.)

Something must be said about the name. The land and the people that we call Greece and Greeks are in their own language Hellas and Hellenes. Greek is a form of the Latin Graecus, which in various modifications (grieche, grec, greco, etc.) is used in all Western languages. Graecus is Graikos, an older name for the people. Graikos was a mythical son of Thessalos. Or, since this should rather be understood as derived inversely (the person as an eponymous myth from the race), various other derivations have been proposed. Graikos (a form Hraikos also exists) is said to have meant originally “shaggy-haired”, or “freeman”, or “dweller in a valley” (W. Pape, “Worterbuch der griechischen Eigennamen”, 3rd ed., Brunswick, 1870, s.v. Graikoi). The first people so called were the people of Dodona in Epirus, then the Greeks in general. After the common use of the other name, Hellene, this one still survived. It occurs occasionally in classical writers; after Alexander it became common, especially among Greeks abroad (in Alexandria, etc.). From them it was adopted into Latin. But in Greek, too, it lasts through the Middle Ages as an alternative name for the Hellenes of classical times (Stephen of Byzantium, about A.D. 400: Graikos, ho Hellen quoted by Sophocles in “Greek Lexicon of the Roman and Byzantine Periods”, New York, 1893, s.v. Graikos). Latins and other foreigners, as well as Greeks writing to such people, use it not seldom for any Greek, as “Graecus” in Latin.

The other names: Hellas and Hellene are the classical ones. Hellas was a city of Phthiotis in Thessaly. From there the name Hellene spread throughout Thessaly. Herodotus distinguishes in Thessaly “two chief people: the older Pelasgic, the other the Hellenic race”, and tells how the Hellenes invaded that land under Dorus, son of Hellen–another eponymous mythical hero (I, lvi, cf. lviii). The elder Pliny applies the name further: “From the neck of the Isthmus [going north] Hellas begins, which is called by our people Graecia” (“Ab Isthmi angustiis Hellas incipit, nostris Graecia appellata. In ea prima Attice, antiquitus Acte vocata”–Nat. Hist., IV, vii). Long before the New Testament the names were used by every one in our sense of Greece and Greek. So in I Mach., viii, 9 and 18. Hellas occurs once (Acts 20:2), Hellen many times (e.g., Romans 10:12), in the New Testament. In the partitions of the Roman Empire neither Graecia nor Hellas appears. The Peloponnesus and the land up to Thessaly formed the Province of Achaia, then came Thessalia and Epirus, then Macedonia and Thracia. But popular use kept the older name (e.g., Pausanias, VII, xvi); a Greek still called himself Hellen. As Christianity spread Hellene began to suggest pagan–a worshipper of the Hellenic gods. Eventually this evil flavour absorbed the word altogether. In the Greek Fathers it always means simply “a heathen”. St. Athanasius wrote a treatise against the heathen and called it: Logos kath Hellenon, so all the others. Julian, in his hopeless attempt to revive the old gods, always uses it in this sense and makes the most of its honourable sound. But Christianity was stronger than the memory of Hellas, so from this time the name falls into discredit till quite modern times.

All through the Middle Ages Greeks called themselves Hromaioi, meaning citizens of the Roman Empire brought by Constantine to his new capital. This strange adaptation of their conquerors’ name lasted till the nineteenth century. Even now peasants call themselves Hromaioi, and (except in towns and among schoolmasters) the Greek for “Do you speak Greek?” is: Homilete Hromaika; It was during the great revival of political national feeling at the beginning of the nineteenth century that the classical name began to be used again, almost as a war-cry, by the people whose imagination was full of Pericles and Socrates. When the Morea, the islands, and part of the mainland succeeded in throwing off the Turk, the first provisional independent government naturally called its territory neither after the Turkish vilayets nor Roman province, but went back to the glorious name Hellas. And when things were settled by the London Conference, in 1832, the new kingdom was the Basileia tes Hellados, and Otto of Bavaria became (title unknown to history) ho Basileus ton Hellenon

II. THE CHURCH IN GREECE BEFORE THE SCHISM (52-1054)

Greece possesses by the most undisputed right an Apostolic Church. St. Paul, in his second missionary journey (52-53, with Silas and Timothy), while he was at Troas in Mysia, saw the vision (“Pass over into Macedonia, and help us”, Acts 16:9) that brought him for the first time to Europe. At Philippi in Macedonia he founded the first Christian Church on European soil (ibid., 12 sq.). Thence he came to Thessalonica (xvii, 1), Berea (xvii, 10), and, travelling southwards, to Athens (xvii, 15). Here he preached about “the unknown God” on the Areopagus (xvii, 22-31), and went on to Corinth (xviii, 1). At Corinth he was brought before Gallio, “proconsul of Achaia” (xviii, 12); from Cenchrae, the port of Corinth, he sailed back to Ephesus with Priscilla and Aquila (xviii, 18). In the third journey (54-58) he came again to Macedonia (about the year 57 — Acts 20:1), thence “to Greece” (eis ten Hellada, xx, 2), and stayed three months at Corinth (xx, 3), then back to Asia Minor (Troas) by Macedonia (xx, 4, 5). In all these places St. Paul preached, according to his custom, first to the colonies of Jews and then to Gentiles too; in all he left Christian communities from which others in the neighbourhood were formed by his disciples: “I have planted, Apollo watered, but God gave the increase” (1 Corinthians 3:6). So that he could say: “From Jerusalem round about as far as unto Illyricum, I have replenished the gospel of Christ” (Romans 15:19). Among the Pauline Churches of Greece two stand out as the most important–those of Athens and Corinth. This is what one would expect from the Apostle’s general practice of bringing his message first and most completely to the great cities. From these it would spread more easily to the country round. Athens, in St. Paul’s time no longer of first importance politically or economically, still held a great place through her immortal memories. A number of Romans had settled there, such as T. Pomponius Atticus, Cicero’s friend. These are apparently the “foreign dwellers” (oi epidemountes xenoi) of Acts, xvii, 21. There was also a colony of Jews, to whom St. Paul preached first. “He disputed, therefore, in the synagogue with the Jews, and with them that served God [tois sebomenois], and in the market-place, every day with them that were there” (the heathen–Acts 17:17). Of far greater practical importance was Corinth, then one of the chief commercial centres of the empire, the residence of Gallio, Proconsul of Achaia (Acts 18:12). Corinth became the centre of the Apostle’s work, the chief centre of Christianity in Greece. It is supposed that he wrote here his Epistle to the Romans (J. Belser, “Einleitung in das Neue Testament”, Freiburg im Br., 1901, p. 507), both those to the Thessalonians (ibid., 461 and 468), perhaps that to the Galatians (so Zahn). His care for the Church of Corinth is shown in his two Epistles to the Corinthians. For an account of this, the most typical of the Pauline Churches, see Belser, op. cit., V, xl (pp. 476-489).

The alleged mission of other Apostles to Greece rests on a less firm footing. St. Andrew is said to have preached in Scythia, Thrace, Epirus, Macedonia, and Achaia, and to have been crucified (on a cross of the shape to which he has given his name) at Patras, by order of the Proconsul Aegeas. The story of his mission and martyrdom is as old as the second century. It formed part of a work on the Apostles written then by a heretic, Leucius Charinus (Leukios Chareinos.–cf. Epiphanius, “adv. Haer.”, lxi, 1; lxiii, 2). There is an alleged contemporary encyclical letter of the priests and deacons of Achaia which tells the story, including speeches made by the saint in verse:–

O bona crux diu desiderata, Iam concupiscenti animo praeparata, Securus et gaudens venio ad te, Et tu exsultans suscipias me, Discipulum eius qui pependit in te.

The whole text is published by Tischendorf, “Acta Apostolorum apocrypha” (Leipzig, 1851, pp. 105-131), and Lipsius, “Die apokryph. Apostelgeschichten” (1883, I, 543 sq.), where the question of its origin is discussed. The lessons, antiphons, and responses for St. Andrew’s day (30 Nov.) in the Roman Breviary are taken from this document. On account of the tradition that St. Andrew preached in Thrace, the Patriarchs of Constantinople claim him as their first predecessor; the Russians have enlarged his mission in Scythia into the conversion of their country (he came and preached as far as Kiev). St. Thomas and St. Matthew are also said to have visited Greece on missionary journeys.

The Church spread rapidly in Greece. We hear of bishops in various cities during the persecution. Under the Emperor Hadrian (117-38), Publius, Bishop of Athens, was martyred (Euseb., H. E., IV, xxiii). A certain Philip was Bishop of Gortyna (ibid.). Eusebius writes of Dionysius of Corinth and his works (ibid.). Publius at Athens was succeeded by Quadratus the apologist (Bardenhewer, “Altkirchl. Literaturgeschichte, I). Aristides of Athens was also a famous apologist (ibid.).

In this first period in Greece, as everywhere, the bishops of the chief towns have a certain precedence, even jurisdiction, over their fellow-bishops (“Orth. Eastern Church,” pp. 7-8). Heraclea was the ecclesiastical metropolis of Thrace, Thessalonica of Macedonia, Corinth of Achaia. Domitius of Heraclea, under Antoninus Pius (138-61), witnessed the martyrdom of St. Glycera; his successor, Philip, was burnt to death at Adrianople under Diocletian (284-305). Pinytus, Bishop of Crete, corresponded with Dionysius of Corinth (Euseb., H. E., IV, xxiii). After Constantine (324-37) the local Churches were organized more systematically, according to Diocletian’s division of the empire (Orth. Eastern Church, pp. 21-23). Greece became part of the Prefecture of Illyricum, Thrace belonged to the “East” (Praefectura Orientis). The Prefectures of Gaul, Italy, and Illyricum made up the Roman Patriarchate (ibid., p. 21), so that, legally, Greece became part of that patriarchate. Normally it should have used the Roman Rite and belonged to Western Christendom. But Illyricum was an endless source of dispute between East and West, till the Great Schism (ibid., pp. 44-45, Duchesne, “L’Illyricum ecclesiastique”, in “Eglises separees” (Paris, 2nd ed., 1905, pp. 229-79). In Thrace, Constantinople succeeded in displacing the old metropolis, Heraclea, and then in becoming a patriarchate, eventually claiming even the second place after Rome, at the Second and Fourth General Councils (Orth. Eastern Church, pp. 28-47). Since the Council of Ephesus (431) Cyprus has been an autocephalous Church (ibid., 47-50); Crete was part of Illyricum and shared in the disputes about it. In 379, under Gratian and Theodosius, Illyricum was divided politically into Eastern and Western Illyricum. The Western half (Pannonia Prima and Secunda, Pannonia Ripariensis, Dalmatia and Noricum Primum and Secundum) remained joined to the Italian prefecture; the eastern part (Macedonia, Thessalia, old Epirus, Achaia, New Epirus, Crete, Praevalitana–which is now Albania–Dacia Mediterranea, and Dardania–i.e. our Servia) became part of the eastern half of the empire, then of the Eastern Empire. The Patriarchs of Constantinople claimed this Eastern Illyricum as part of their patriarchate, and eventually, in spite of the popes’ protests, succeeded in asserting their jurisdiction over it. Eastern Illyricum then included part of what we call Greece, the rest was occupied by the (civil) diocese of Thrace and Cyprus.

Lequien, in his “Oriens Christianus”, I and II (Paris, 1740), gives lists of the Churches of these lands with their arrangement in provinces and the names of all their bishops, as far as they were known in his time. The Byzantine Patriarchate consisted of the (civil) dioceses of Pontus (I, 351-662), Asia (I, 663-1090), Thrace (I, 1091-1246), Eastern Illyricum (II, 1-26). Of these the diocese of Thrace, to some extent, and the diocese of Eastern Illyricum entirely, cover our Greece.

The diocese of Thrace had seven ecclesiastical provinces: (1) Europe, with Heraclea as metropolis (I, 1101-1154). This province once had twenty, in Lequien’s time only five, sees, Rhedaestus, Parium, Metra-and-Athyra, Tzurloes and Myriophyta. (2) Thrace (as distinct from the diocese) with Philippopolis as metropolis (I, 1155-1170). (3) Haemimontum, metropolis Adrianople (I, 1171-1192). (4) Rhodopes, metropolis Trajanople (I, 1193-1210). (5) Scythia, metropolis Tomi (Tomes or Tomis, now extinct, I, 1211-1216). (6) Moesia (or Mysia) Inferior, Metropolis Marcianople (Preslav Preslaba), I, 1247-1251). (7) Walachia, metropolis Tergovite, is no longer in any sense Greek. Compare with this list the metropolitan sees (74) of the patriarchate, arranged in three classes, according to their place in the synod, in Silbernagl, “Verfassung u. gegenwartiger Bestand samtlicher Kirchen des Orients”, Regensburg, 2nd ed., 1904, pp. 33-35). The title metropolitan is now given to almost every bishop.

In Lequien’s list the second great diocese, Eastern Illyricum, whose capital was Thessalonica (vol. II, 1-318), covers practically all Greece. Before the division of Illyricum its capital was Sirmium. We have seen that Western Illyricum remained part of the Roman patriarchate and was in no sense Greece. The eastern diocese had nine provinces (see above); of these only the first seven can be called Greek, and in many of them the Slav element was very powerful. The Slav invasions of the empire began under Anastasius I (491-518) in 493; various Slav tribes and the non-Aryan Bulgars (who soon adopted a Slav language and became practically Slavs too) pressed southward into Thrace, Macedonia, Thessaly, even Achaia, in increasing numbers, throughout the whole period of the empire at Constantinople; so that always, and still in our own time, they form a rival influence to the Greeks throughout these lands. The old sees of these seven more or less Greek provinces are, according to Lequien: (1) Province of Macedonia (II, 27-102), metropolis Thessalonica, with suffragan sees of Philippi, Berrhoea, Dium (Dion), Stobi (Stoboi), Parthicopolis, Doberus, Cassandria, Edessa, Pydna or Citrum, Heraclea Sintica, Amphipolis, Lemnos (the island), Thassus, Serra, Bargala, Theorium, Campania or Castrium, Poliana, Pogoiana, Zichnae, Drygobitzia, Melanias, Drama, Ardamerium, Rhendina, Deabolis, Hierissus, Lycostomium and Servia. (2) The Province of Thessaly (II, 102-132) had as metropolis, Larissa, as suffragan sees, Demetrias, Zetunium (Zetounion or Zetonion), Caesarea in Thessaly, Gomphi (Gomphoi), Echinus, Pharsalus Lamia, Scopelus, Tricca (Trikke, now Trikala), Hypata (neut. plur.), metropolis, Thebes of Phthiotis, Sciathus, New Patras, Ezerus, Demonicum-and-Elasso, Stagae, Thaumacus, Litza-and-Agraphorum, Pherae, Loedoricium, Marmaritzium, Bezena, Peparethi. (3) Old Epirus (II, 133-154) had for its metropolis Nicopolis, and for suffragan sees, Anchiasmum (or Onchisimus), Phoenices, Dodona, Buthrotus, Adrianople (in Epirus), Photica, Euroea (Euroia), Corcyra (the island, Corfu), Aetus, Ioannina (now Janina), Leucas, Achelous. (4) Hellas (II, 155-239) had as metropolis, Corinth, and for suffragan sees, Cenchreae (Vulg. Cenchrae, Kenchreai, the port of Corinth), Old Patras, Argos, Nauplia, Megalopolis in Arcadia, Lacedaemon, Coronea (Koroneia in Boeotia), Elis, or Elea, in Achaia, Tegea in Arcadia, Messene in the Peloponnesus, Carystus in Euboea, Naupactus, Arta (now Larta, formerly Ambracia), Oreus (Oreos), Porthmus, Marathon, Elatea, Megara (neut. plur.), Opus (Opous), Plataea, Thebes in Boeotia, Thespiae, Tanagra (both fem. sing. and neut. plur.), Scarphia, Chalcis, Monembasia (fem. sing.), Strategis, Pyrgus (or Pyrgium), Troezen, Elis in the Peloponnesus, Aegina (the island), Aulon, or Solon (the old Delphi), Amyclae, Olena, Methone, Scyrus (Skyros, the island), Zacynthus (Zante), Cephalenia, Diaulia, Pylus, Brestene, Andrusa, Mendinitza, Tzernitza, Ceos (the island). (5) New Epirus (II, 240-255) had for metropolis, Dyrrhacium (Dyrrachion), and for suffragan sees, Scampe, Apollonia-and-Bullidis, Amantia, Decatera (neut. plur., in Dalmatia), Aulon (Aulon), Listra (neut. plur.), Dribastus, Stephaniacum. (6) Crete (II, 256-274) had for metropolis Gortyna (of which St. Titus was first bishop), Gnossus, Arcadia, Hiera Petra, Lappa, Phoenix, Hieracleopolis, Subrita, Apollonia, Eleutherae, Chersonesus, Cydonia, Cissamus, Cantani.–The other provinces (Praevalitana, Dacia Mediterranea, and Dardania) do not concern Greece.

The remnants of these sees left to the oecumenical patriarch, after Turkish spoliation and the independence of the modern Greek Church, will be seen in Silbernagl’s list.

III. THE ORTHODOX CHURCH IN GREECE

The Patriarchs of Constantinople had succeeded in asserting jurisdiction over all this vast territory, as well as over Asia Minor and the purely Slav lands to the North. After the schism of Caerularius (1054) these metropolitans and bishops followed their patriarch by striking the pope’s name from their diptychs. They, too, like their chief, learned to abhor Latin customs, to look on the Latin Church under the pope as a fallen branch and a synagogue of Satan. There is no trace of independent action in any of these local Greek Churches. They all used the Byzantine Rite and followed the Byzantine Patriarch faithfully. During the short-lived unions of Lyons (1274) and Ferrara-Florence (1439) they became Uniats too. They cared for the union as little as did their leaders at Constantinople and fell away again as easily as they had joined. The Latin conquest of their lands (after the Fourth Crusade, in 1204) brought about a rival Latin hierarchy and something very like persecution for the Greeks. Naturally, they hated and scorned the Latin bishops and groaned under the disabilities they suffered from the Frankish princes and from Venice. The Slavs invaded their lands, destroyed many of their cities, so that Greek dioceses disappear because there are no more Greeks left in great tracts of what they still affect to call Greece; but the remnants that maintain themselves still look to Constantinople for orders and still keep the Byzantine Rite in Greek. The Turkish conquest brought about still greater hardships. Invited in the first instance as allies by the fatal policy of the Emperor John VI (Cantacuzene, 1341-55), the Turks first took hold of European soil by seizing Kallipolis (in the Thracian Cheronese) in 1356. From this time they steadily advanced, taking city after city, ravaging and plundering what they could not keep. In 1361 they took Adrianople and made it their capital in Europe till the fall of Constantinople. Then, moving north, they conquered the remnants of Stephen Dushan’s great Servian Empire (Battle of Kossova, 1389). Lastly, nearly a century after they had first landed in Europe, they finished their work by taking Constantinople (29 May, 1453). From this time till the nineteenth century the Greeks and the Orthodox Church in Greece were subject to a Moslem government. The Sultans applied the usual terms of Moslem law regarding non-Moslem Theists to the Christian population of their empire (Orth. Eastern Church, 233-244). There was to be no active persecution. Christians suffer certain disabilities. They may not serve in the army, and they have to pay a poll-tax; they must dress differently from their masters, may not have as high houses, may put no sign of their faith (crosses) outside their churches, nor ring church bells, nor bear arms, nor ride on horses. Their evidence may not be accepted in a court of law against a Moslem. To convert a Moslem to their faith, seduce a Moslem woman, speak openly against Islam, make any treaty or alliance with people outside the Moslem empire is punished with death. As long as they keep these laws they are not to be molested further, and they are quite free with regard to their religion. Of course any Christian may turn Moslem at any time; if he does so it is death to go back. (During the last century the European Powers have forced the Porte to modify most of these laws.) The Orthodox were organized into a subject community under the name of Roman Nation (rum millet, a strange survival of the name of the old Roman Empire which the Turks had destroyed). Their civil head was the oecumenical patriarch. During the century after the Turkish conquest this patriarch reached the height of his power; then, in 1591, Russia became an independent Church–an example followed later by one branch of the patriarchate after another, till he is now the merest shadow of what his predecessors were. During the centuries between the fall of Constantinople and the beginning of Greek independence the Greek Church (although it was certainly not happy) has no history, unless one counts as such the affairs of the Patriarchate (Cyril Lucaris and the Synod of Jerusalem in 1672, for instance, op. cit., 264-268). The other Greek bishops paid their heavy fees to the patriarch and the government; the parish priests paid their heavy fees to the bishops. The hideous oppression of the Turk overshadowed all their lives. For the Turk has never kept his own fairly tolerant law. The tribute of children for the Janissary guard was levied till 1638. The Christians were always in a state of simmering rebellion and the Turks were always punishing their attempts by wholesale massacre. In Crete 50,000 Christian children, in the year 1670, were torn from their parents, circumcized, and brought up as Moslems; in Asia Minor thousands of Greeks had their tongues torn out for not talking Turkish (op. cit., 237-238). Meanwhile the clergy celebrated the Holy Liturgy on Sundays, worked in the fields, and kept wine-shops on week-days. But for the kamelaukion (or kalemaukion–the tall hat without a brim) there was little to distinguish them from other peasants. But they kept alive faith in Christ and Hellas, prayed for better days, were generally at the bottom of each attempt at resisting the pasha’s abominations, and bore silent but heroic witness for Christ during those dark centuries. And who can reproach them for being poor and ignorant? The schism (not the fault of these poor Papades at any rate) had cut them off from the West. Europe had forgotten them. They had everything in the world to gain by turning Turk; and yet they kept the Christian faith alive among their people, in spite of pashas, and soldiers, and massacres. Their little dark, dirty churches were the centres not only of Christianity but of Hellenism too. And while their wives poured out the strong resinous wine for whispering conspirators, their sons were out on the hills, klephts and armatoloi keeping up the hopeless war for Greece.

The Greek War of Independence brought a great change to the Church of the free kingdom. The clergy had taken a leading part in the revolution. In 1821, at the beginning of the movement, when Alexander Hypsilanti was making his absurd attempt to rouse the Vlachs, Gregory V of Constantinople, forced by the Turkish government, denounced the “Hetairia Philike” and excommunicated the rebels. But the Metropolitan of Patras, Germanos, the Archimandrite Dikaios (Pappa Phlesas), and other leading ecclesiastical persons openly took the side of the Greeks, helped them with their counsels, and in many cases even joined in the fighting. Dikaios made a heroic stand with 3000 men against Ibrahim Pasha’s Egyptians at Maniaki on Mount Malia. In 1822 the Turks began their series of reprisals by barbarously murdering the Patriarch Gregory V in his vestments, after the Liturgy of Easter Day (22 April), although he, so far from being responsible, had obeyed them by excommunicating his fellow-countrymen. Throughout the war the Greek Church showed that the cause of her children was her cause too. But, in spite of Greek enthusiasm for Gregory V (his relics were buried with great honour at Athens in 1871), the court of the patriarch (the Phanar) was too much under the power of the sultan for the free Greeks to submit to its jurisdiction. The example of Russia showed that a national Church could remain Orthodox and keep the communion of the patriarch while being itself independent of his authority. As soon as the affairs of free Greece began to be settled, one of the first acts of the national party was to throw off the jurisdiction of the Phanar. Alexander Koraes wrote at the time: “The clergy of that part of Hellas that is now free cannot submit to the authority of the Patriarch of Constantinople, who is under the power of the Turk; it must rule itself by a Synod of freely elected prelates” (Politikai Paraineseis, quoted by Kyriakos, Ekkl. Historia, Athens, 1898, III, para. 42, p. 154). The first National Assemblies (at Epidaurus and Troezen) in 1822 and 1827, while declaring that the Orthodox faith is the religion of Greece, had pointedly said nothing about the oecumenical patriarch. In July, 1833, the Greek Parliament at Nauplion drew up a constitution for the national Church. Imitating Russia, they declared their Church autocephalous–independent of any foreign authority–and proceeded to set up a “Holy Directing Synod” to govern it. They also suppressed, of the great number of almost deserted monasteries in Greece, all that had less than six monks as inmates. In 1844 the same thing was repeated, and copies of the law were sent to Constantinople and to the other Orthodox Churches. The patriarch was exceedingly indignant at what he, not unnaturally, described as an act of schism. The Greek Government had put off the evil moment of announcing to him its new arrangement as long as it dared. Between 1822 and 1844 the Greek Church considered itself autocephalous, managing its own affairs by its synod, but had sent no notice of the change to the Phanar. So the patriarch affected to ignore the change. But he showed his anger plainly enough in 1841, when he received notice from the Greek Church that she had excommunicated for heresy Theophilos Kaires, the founder of the “Theosebismos” sect, an imitation of French Deism. The patriarch (Anthimos IV) refused to accept, or even to answer, this letter. So also did his successor, Germanos IV, refuse to notice the declaration of their independence that he received from his former subjects in 1844. In 1849 the Greek Synod made another attempt. James Rizos, the Greek minister at Constantinople, had just died and the patriarch buried him with great honour. The Greek Government sent the Archimandrite Misael, then president of the synod, to Constantinople with the new Order of the Holy Saviour and a message of thanks to the patriarch (Anthimos IV restored) from the autocephalous Church of Greece. Anthimos took the order and then said that he knew nothing of an autocephalous Greek Church. The Greek Synod sent another circular to him and to all the other Orthodox Churches, explaining what had been done and proclaiming their independence. At last, in 1850, Anthimos IV summoned his synod to consider the matter. The result of its consultation was the famous Tomos. The Tomos at least acknowledged a certain limited independence of the Greek Holy Synod, but proceeded to lay down a number of rules for its guidance. Any sort of interference of the State is absolutely forbidden, there is to be no royal commissioner in the synod, the patriarch is to be named, as before, in the Holy Liturgy, the chrism is to be procured from him, and all important matters must still be referred to his judgment. The tone of the Tomos is still that of absolute authority; each clause begins with the words: “We command that . . . “

The document produced an uproar in Greece. Afraid of a formal schism, the Synod was at first disposed to accept it. There was also a conservative party led by Oikonomos (d. 1857), who were opposed to any change and inclined to submit to the patriarch in everything. But the feeling of the majority was strongly against any sort of submission. The free Greeks had determined to have nothing more to do with the Phanar at all. Pharmakides (d. 1860), the leader of the Liberal party (with a distinct Protestantizing tendency), answered the Tomos by an indignant protest: “The [patriarchal] Synodical Tomos, or concerning Truth” (ho Synodikos Tomos he peri aletheias, Athens, 1852). And the Parliament (always the last court of appeal for these independent Orthodox Churches) rejected every kind of interference on the part of the patriarch. Eventually the Greek Church admitted two points from the Tomos: that the Metropolitan of Athens should be ex officio President of the Synod; and that the holy chrism should be sent from Constantinople. The first of these points has become a fixed rule; the second obtains so far, but there is in Greece a strong movement in favour of consecrating the chrism at Athens. For the rest the patriarch’s rules were rejected. The royal commissioner sits in the Holy Synod, and the Greek Church is as Erastian as that of Russia. The Holy Synod is named in the Liturgy instead of the patriarch. Forced by Russia, the Phanar had to give in and to acknowledge yet another loss to its patriarchate and another “Sister in Christ”, the “Holy Directing Synod” of the autocephalous Church of Hellas. Since then there has been no more question about this point; the common cause of all Greeks against Slavs in the Balkans has restored very friendly feeling between the free Greeks and their Phanariot brothers. Two political changes further diminished the jurisdiction of the patriarch and enlarged that of the Greek Synod. In 1866 England ceded the Ionian Isles to Greece. True to the now acknowledged principle that the Church must reflect the political situation, the Greek Government at once separated the dioceses of these islands from the patriarchate and joined them to the Church of Greece. The Phanar made an ineffectual protest, and for a short time there was an angry correspondence between Athens and Constantinople. But once more the patriarch had to give in and submit to his loss. In 1881 Thessaly and part of Epirus were added to Greece, and again their dioceses were made subject to the Greek Synod by the government. This time the patriarch did not even trouble to protest.

IV. CONSTITUTION OF THE CHURCH OF GREECE

The laws that fix the establishment, organization, and regulations of the Greek Church are those of 1852, in which the parliament, having finally rejected the patriarch’s Tomos, repeated and codified the arrangements made by various governments since 1822:–

“The dominant religion in Hellas is the Eastern Orthodox Church of Christ. Every other known religion may be practised without hindrance and shall enjoy the protection of the laws, only Proselytism and all other attacks on the dominant Religion are forbidden.”

“The Orthodox Church of Hellas acknowledges as her Head our Lord Jesus Christ. She is indissolubly united in faith with the Church of Constantinople and every other Christian Church of the same persuasion [as Constantinople]. She is autocephalous, uses her sovereign rights independently of any other Church, and is ruled by the members of the Holy Synod” (Arts. 1 and 2 of the Constitution of 1864).

There are now 32 sees in Greece of which the first is Athens, which includes the Nomos (political department) of Attica; further, (2) Corinth, (3) Patras, (4) Larissa, Pharsalus and Platamon, (5) Monembasia and Lacedaemonia, (6) Arta, (7) Corfu (Kerkyra), (8) Cephallenia, (9) Thebes and Livadia, (10) Demetrias, (11) Syros, Tenos and Andros, (12) Mantinia and Cynuria, (13) Chalcis and Carystia (for the island of Euboea), (14) Zante (Zakynthos), (15) Argolis, (16) Akarnania and Naupaktos, (17) Photis, (18) Tricala (Tricca, or Trikke) and Stagai, (19) Messenia, (20) Leucas and Ithaca, (21) Triphylia and Olympia, (22) Gytheios and Oitylos, (23) Phokis, (24) Ilia, (25) Phanarios and Thessaliotis, (26) Ercytania, (27) Kalabrytai and Aigialia, (28) Gortys and Megalopolis, (29) Kytherai, (30) Hydra and Spetzai, (31) Thera, (32) Paronaxia. Hitherto the bishops of all these sees have borne the quite meaningless title Metropolitan. The Government has declared that as the present incumbents die out their successors shall be called simply bishops; only Athens is to be a permanent metropolitical see.

The Holy Synod, to which all bishops are subject, meets at Athens. The Metropolitan of Athens is always president for life. Four other bishops are chosen by the Government as members from the hierarchy, in turn, according to the dates of their consecrations. They sit for one year, from the 1st of September, then return to their dioceses. But the Government may keep not more than two as members for a longer time. If the president is prevented from attending, the bishop next in seniority is to take his place. All members of the Synod must take an oath of fidelity to the king at their appointment. Besides these five bishops, the Synod is attended by a royal commissioner (a layman appointed by Government). He has no vote, but no act is valid unless he is present and signs the document. The Synod has two secretaries, two writers, and a servant, all appointed by Government. The secretaries and writers are clerks in Holy Orders. All affairs of the Synod with foreign Churches are controlled by the Government’s Minister for Foreign Affairs. In questions that are not purely religious (ecclesiastical seminaries, marriage, divorce, etc.) the consent of the Government is required. The President of the Synod receives 3600 drachmai ($720), the other bishops 2400 drachmai ($480) yearly besides their episcopal salaries. The first secretary has 4800 drachmai, the second 2800 drachmai a year, the first writer 120 drachmai a month, the second 90 drachmai a month. The royal commissioner receives 6000 drachmai a year. The acts of the Synod are sealed with its official seal bearing a cross (practically the arms of the kingdom: Azure a cross couped argent) and the inscription: Hagia Synodos tes ekklesias Hellados. Its jurisdiction is described as extending over questions of faith (only, of course, in the sense of preserving the Orthodox Faith of the Seven Councils), rites and canon law, religious instruction, duties of clerks in Holy orders, ecclesiastical discipline, examinations for ordination, consecration of churches, celebration of feasts and services. The Synod can appeal to the Government to put down heretics and refractory clergy (there have been cases of imprisonment for heresy among the Orthodox clergy), and dangerous books against faith or morals. Other matters, such as public processions, building of seminaries, extraordinary feasts on weekdays (involving public holidays), and all the points mentioned above that are described as “mixed” (ecclesiastical and political), must be arranged by the united action of the Synod and Government. In all services in the kingdom the Holy Synod is prayed for after the king and queen (instead of the patriarch). But when the Metropolitan of Athens celebrates in Synod, all the patriarchs are prayed for. The royal commissioner is of course an imitation of the Russian “Procurator of the Holy Synod”. The manner of appointing members to the Synod, the need of the Commissioner’s signature for its acts, its dependence on the Government generally, as well as the way of appointing bishops and deciding all really important matters, show that, in spite of Diomedes Kyriakos’s indignant protest (Ekkl. Historia, III, 155-156), the Greek Church is quite hopelessly Erastian.

Bishops are appointed by the king (advised, of course, by his ministers). The Synod presents three names, of which he chooses one. A bishop must be thirty-five years old, a doctor of theology, and must have taught theology or preached for some time. Before consecration he takes an oath of obedience (and of his episcopal duties) to the Synod, after it an oath of allegiance to the king. He can only be deposed by the Synod with the royal consent. The Metropolitan of Athens receives an income of 6000 drachmai ($1200), all other bishops 4000 drachmai. Besides this there are various stole-fees (see sub-title ALTARAGE, Vol. I, p. 359). Each bishop has a curia of eight members, namely, his oikonomos (who is responsible for property and financial questions), sakellarios (who looks after the monasteries), chartophylax (to take care of archives), protekdikos (lawyer), skeuophylax (Sacristan), sakellion (responsible for the manners of the clergy), hypomnematographos (secretary), and hieromemnon (master of ceremonies). These persons, who are all priests, form an advising council. All are paid by Government. When a see is vacant the Holy Synod recommends, and the State appoints, one of them to administer the diocese (vicar capitular) till the successor is appointed. A bishop who has resigned from old age or infirmity receives a pension of 200 drachmai a month. Parishes are divided officially into those of cities, small towns, and villages. Each group of from 25 to 70 families makes up a village parish, towns of 151 to 200 families form a parish of the second class, and those of 301 to 1000 families one of the first class. Parishes of the first and second class have at least one deacon and one parish priest. Larger areas are subdivided. The people elect, and the bishops appoint, the clergy. The priests have only their stole-fees as income, so that in the villages they nearly always have a trade or keep an inn as well. The last religious census, made in 1897, is published by Kophiniotos (He Ekklesia en Helladi, Athens, 1897). At that time there were 4025 parishes, with 5423 married and 242 unmarried priests. For their education there are four elementary seminaries: at Athens, Tripolis, Corfu, and Larissa. These satisfy the not very high demands of the village clergy, and 4116 priests had received only this amount of education, according to the census of 1897. A smattering of classical Greek, a little general education, knowledge of the catechism (it can hardly be called theology), and enough liturgical knowledge to perform their functions is all that any one expects of the village priests. They have no books except their service-books and perhaps a New Testament. What they read is one of the endless number of newspapers, and what they care about is the change of ministry and the wretched local politics that excite the passionate interest of all Greeks.

In 1856 the Government established higher schools for the clergy at Syros, Chalcis and Tripolis, in 1875 a fourth was begun at Corfu. It appears that all these institutions came to an end for want of students (Kyriakos, op. cit., III, sec. 50). Still higher in the scale is the Athenian seminary called the Rhizarion (founded by the brothers Rhizares in 1843) whose students attend lectures at the university besides those of their own institution. This is the only seminary that in any way comes up to our standard. Its students form the aristocracy of the clergy and become archimandrites, professors, and bishops.

There are a great many monasteries in Greece. In spite of the suppression, in 1833, of the small ones, 80 remained. There are now 250, with 1322 choir monks and 545 lay brothers, also 9 convents, with 152 nuns and 68 novices (census of 1897). The head of each monastery is the archimandrite, or hegumenos (abbot), elected by the monks and confirmed by the bishop of the diocese. He must be a priest-monk (hieromonachos). He is assisted by two counsellors, also elected by the community from among the monks who made their religious profession not less than six years ago. There is a new election of counsellors every five years. Over each convent an oikonomos is placed, a priest not less than sixty years old, chosen by the Synod; he is the real superior of the convent, keeps its keys, and is responsible for its state. Under his presidency the nuns elect an abbess (hegoumenissa). All monasteries and convents have endowments controlled and administered by consent of the Synod and Government. Monasteries whose revenues exceed 5000 drachmai a year have to spend part of it on the support of schools and preachers. Some monasteries are very rich. The first, the laura of the Falling Asleep of the Mother of God, at Pentelis, in the Diocese of Athens, has an income of 166,085 drachmai. A full list of monasteries and convents is given by Silbernagl, “Verfassung u. gegenw. Bestand,” 2nd ed., pp. 78-85.

The political census of 1895 was destroyed in the war of 1897. The former one of 1889 counted 2,172,148 Orthodox Greeks out of a total population of 2,217,000. Though this number is certainly very much exaggerated (the Catholics alone claim more than the difference between the two figures), the Orthodox are the overwhelming majority. Their Church does much, according to its own ideas, for the better instruction and moral improvement of the laity. In 1875, the professors of the theological faculty at Athens formed a society called the “Brotherhood of the Friends of Christ” (Adelphotes ton philochriston) for this purpose. Other societies of the same kind are the “Society of St. Paul”, “The Holy Union” (ho hieros Syndesmos) and “The Reform” (he Anaplasis). They publish popular works of religious instruction, prayer-books, and cheap editions of the Liturgy in great numbers, books of controversy, religious newspapers; and they hold meetings with free lectures and instructions. Almost every publisher in Greece (where every bookseller is a publisher) produces such little books of religious knowledge, accounts of Church History, anti-Roman controversy, and so on. And every Greek has read some little pamphlet of 32 pages against the pope or the Bulgars, so as to garnish his conversation with very loose references to the Byzantine Empire, Photius, and Pope Joan. One of the best popular compendiums is Nicholas Ch. Ambrazes: He Orthodoxos Ekklesia (constantly reprinted, e.g., Athens, 1906, etc.). Demetrios S. Balanos (Mpalanos), He Ekklesia mas pou, tpos kai pote latreuetai ho Theos, (Athens 1907), in the series “Useful Books”, gives a good popular account of the Liturgy and Church Service generally.

Among the almost infinite number of Greek newspapers a great number are religious periodicals. The “Reform” society publishes a monthly with the same title: He Anaplasis (edited by M. Galanos). Some of the best known are the Euaggelike Ealpigx, Euaggelikos Keryx, Hieromnemon, Orthodox Epitheoresis, Threskeutike phone, Echo tes Orthodoxias, Sion, Soter, Agape, philanthropia, Christianike, etc.

For the more prominent theologians and writers of the Greek Church since its foundation see Kyriakos, op. cit., III, secs. 51, 52. The most important are the conservative Oikonomos (d. 1857) and the Liberal Theoklitos Pharmakides (d. 1860).

V. THE CATHOLIC CHURCH IN GREECE

With the exception of a very few scattered Uniat congregations, all Catholics in Greece are Latins. This is explained partly historically and also by the strictly legal position. After the Great Schism the first restoration of the Catholic Faith was made by the crusaders, the Frankish princes who ruled as their successors, and Venice. None of these authorities cared at all about the Byzantine Church or its rights. Wherever their power extended they set up Latin bishops, just as at home, and tried to persuade the people to turn Latin by harassing disabilities that often became real persecution. Whatever native Catholic communities now exist are the successors of those set up by the Franks and Venetians. They are strengthened by foreigners (French and Italian merchants, etc.) who are naturally Latins too. The legal justification of what seems an anomalous situation is that Greece is part of Illyricum, and Illyricum, according to the ancient right never abandoned by the popes, belongs to the Roman patriarchate. According to the general (but by no means quite universal) principle, that rite follows patriarchate, all Greeks should be not only Catholics but also Latins. On the other hand, there is no doubt that this circumstance is a great hindrance to the conversion of Greece. It would be much easier to persuade Greeks simply to return to the old allegiance of the first see, as Uniats have done elsewhere, than to make them go through so radical an upsetting of their lives as is involved in turning Latin. Throughout the East people are abnormally attached to their rites, the obvious visible things that they see mean much more to them than remote questions of jurisdiction and the actual names that may occur (whether pope, or patriarch, or synod) in the intercessory prayers. The foreign character of all Catholic missions in Greece is the great difficulty always; the authorities of these missions are nearly always not only Latins but foreigners–Italians. Undoubtedly the institution of a native Uniat hierarchy using the Byzantine Rite would be the first step towards converting Greece. Nor is the technical objection a really serious one. The Italo-Greeks show that people can use the Byzantine Rite in the Roman patriarchate. Or why not waive the whole question of Illyricum, as Rome eventually waived her objection to the rank of Constantinople, and set up a Uniat Byzantine Patriarch of Constantinople with jurisdiction all over the Balkans and Asia Minor? It was said that Leo XIII contemplated such a step before he died. The first great revival of Catholicity in the Levant was after the Fourth Crusade (1204). It is well known that the crusaders established not only a Latin emperor but a Latin patriarch and Latin bishops all over their empire. When the legitimate line of emperors took the city back (1261) the Latin patriarch fled. But the Latin bishops went on under the protection of the Frankish States that lasted till the Turkish conquest. A complete and most satisfactory history of these Frankish States has now been written by Mr. William Miller (The Latins in the Levant, London, 1908). A mere glance at the maps of this volume will show the fluctuations of the various little principalities. In 1214 (p. 81) there were a principality of Achaia, a lordship of Athens, three baronies of Euboea, a duchy of the Archipelago and a county palatinate of Cephalonia. Venice held Modon in the Peloponnesus, and Chalcis in Euboea. By 1278 the Greeks have got back Euboea, Venice has Crete. In 1388 part of the Peloponnesus has returned to the emperor; Venice has taken part of Euboea. In 1462 the Turks have nearly all the mainland, the pope holds Monembasia, Venice keeps Crete, all Euboea (as a vassal state), and some islands of the Archipelago. In all these lands, then, there were Latin bishops; and parts of the population (notably in Syros and the Ionian Isles) had become Latin. Innocent III (1198-1216) established a Latin Archbishopric of Athens with eleven suffragan sees. Of these, three–Andros, Chios and Syros–remained, the others soon become titular sees. Till 1834 Catholics in the Peloponnesus were subject to the Bishop of Zante, all others to the patriarchal vicar at Constantinople. Gregory XVI, in 1834, established Aloysius M. Blancis, Bishop of Syros, as “Apostolic Delegate for the Kingdom of Greece”. He had jurisdiction over all the kingdom, including parts of Thessaly added in 1882. The Turks gave the same toleration to the “Latin Nation” as to the “Roman [Orthodox] Nation”. Since the independence of Greece Latin missionaries, especially Jesuits and Sisters of Charity, have opened schools all over the kingdom. Corfu forms a kind of basis, since here the population is very considerably Italianized and Catholic. Other schools are at Athens, Syros, Tenos, Naxos, etc. In 1890 the Latin Bishop of Athens opened a secondary school for boys that has had a great influence. The Italian Government has also founded schools in many of the chief towns. In 1869 and 1870 there were violent debates in the Greek Parliament about these schools. Many members wanted to close them and forbid all Catholic schools in the kingdom. Eventually the Government insisted that an Orthodox catechist should be appointed in all schools where there were any Orthodox children.

There are a number of laws in Greece made to hamper the work of Catholic missionaries. In 1830 the Parliament declared that the toleration granted to all religions does not involve allowing any damage to the state Church–a vague statement that opens the way to forbidding any proselytizing. In 1833 a law was passed requiring all papal Bulls, Briefs, etc., to be submitted to the Minister for Foreign Affairs before their publication. Five Catholic bishops (of Syros, Tenos and Mykonos, Naxos, Thera, and Corfu) are recognized by the Government; no other sees may be erected without its consent. The Latin Archbishop of Athens is not recognized by the State.

The present Catholic hierarchy is: (1) Archdiocese of Athens, established in 1875, when Bishop Marankos of Syros took up his seat there, in spite of the protest of the Government. By this act the metropolitan jurisdiction of Syros was practically transferred to Athens. In this diocese are 14 parishes, 13 priests, and about 18,000 Catholics. (2) Archdiocese of Corfu (Corcyra, Kerkyra), with 7 churches, 10 priests, and 4000 Catholics. (3) Zante (Zakynthos) and Cephalonia united (suffragan of Corfu), including the islands of Zante, Cephalonia, S. Maura, Ithaca, Cerigo, with 3 parishes, 7 priests, 1000 Catholics. (4) Archdiocese of Naxos with 1 parish, 6 priests, 350 Catholics. (5) Andros (suffragan of Naxos), administered by the Bishop of Tenos and Mykonos. (6) Santorin (Thera), suffragan of Naxos, with which is united the administration of Melos, 1 parish, 8 priests, 460 Catholics. (7) Chios (suffragan of Naxos), 3 churches, 8 priests, 300 Catholics. (8) Syros (now suffragan of Naxos), 6 parishes, 25 priests, 7000 Catholics. (9) Tenos and Mykonos (suffragan of Naxos), 26 churches, 26 priests and 5000 Catholics (Werner, “Orbis Terrarum Catholicus”, Freiburg im Br., 1890, pp. 131-133).

These figures give a Catholic population of 36,110. Another census (quoted by W. Gotz, “Griechenland, Kirchliche Statistik”, in “Realencykl. fur prot. Theologie”, 3rd ed., Leipzig, 1899, VII, 168) gives 50,000 Catholics. On the other hand we have seen that the Government, in 1889, admitted only 14,687 other (not Orthodox) Christians altogether. A few congregations of Byzantine Uniats in the kingdom, served by priests of their own rite, depend on the Latin bishops (Echos d’Orient, 1906, p. 336).

VI. PROTESTANTS AND OTHER SECTS

There are a few small communities of Greeks who have left the Orthodox Church, either converted by Protestant missionaries or following some new protestantizing or rationalizing leader of their own. English and American missionaries have been at work here, disseminating bibles and holding prayer-meetings, since 1810. Protestant schools were opened by a certain Hildner in Syros in 1827, by King and Hill at Athens in 1832. At first the Orthodox seem to have watched their movements without suspicion. The British and Foreign Bible Society had even arranged with the Patriarch of Constantinople for the sale of their bibles. But these were found to exclude the deuterocanonical books and to be done into Modern Greek from the Massoretic text without reference to the Septuagint, the official text of the Orthodox Church. The missionaries also, not content with selling their bibles, held prayer-meetings in opposition to the liturgical services and preached against sacraments and ceremonies. So the Orthodox, led by the great conservative Oikonomos, became suspicious of them; they were denounced as disturbers of the public peace, and in some places their schools and conventicles were closed. King was expelled from Athens in 1852, but he soon came back and went on with his work. He formed a number of native Greek preachers and missionaries to propagate his ideas (Kalopathakes, Sakellarios, Konstantinos, and so on), and died in 1869. The end of this disturbance about the missionaries was that the Government granted entire toleration, but the Orthodox Church formally excommunicated them and their adherents. At first it had been a question of selling bibles and preaching to the Orthodox rather than of forming a new sect. Now the issue is quite clear; the Orthodox are forbidden to attend the missionaries’ meetings, so these have built up regular congregations with ministers. People who join these leave the established Church and become Protestants. The first church of these Greek Protestants was opened at Athens in 1874. They call themselves Euaggelikoi and Diamartyromenoi. The church at Athens has about 100 attendants. In 1880 an attempt to build one at the Piraeus ended in a riot in which the building was destroyed. A few scattered Greek Protestants attend foreign Protestant churches. At Athens there is a Lutheran church founded by King George to satisfy his religious needs and those of his Danish attendants. Its pastor (now a German, Hofprediger v. Schierstadt) preaches to about 200 Danes, Germans, and Swiss. There is an Anglican church with about 100 English and American attendants and another little meeting-house of an American sect nearly opposite Hadrian’s Arch; also a Salvationist meeting-house. The number of Greeks attracted by all these people put together is infinitesimal.

There are also a few small sects that have arisen out of the Orthodox Church without the help of foreign Protestants. Theophilos Kaires, a priest, founded a kind of Deism on the lines of the French Encyclopedists which he called “God-worship” (theosebismos). In 1849 he published his Gospel, which he called Gnostike. He was considerably persecuted for a time, and twice put in prison, where he died in 1853. Andrew Laskaratos and one or two other writers made a desultory campaign against the established Church in favour of what they considered to be primitive Christianity. A. Papadiamantopulos started a Positivist movement. The question of Darwinism brought about friction between the Holy Synod and the Government on one side, and certain university professors at Athens on the other. Plato Drakules wrote an amazing mystification of a Gnostic and Cabbalistic kind that he called “Light from within” (Phos ek ton endon). Except that of Kaires, these movements did not form organized sects. In the other direction a monk, Christopher Papulakis, and a layman, Makrakis, excited the people against the Holy Synod, the Government, and the university, in the name of the old faith. Papulakis (1852) was put into a monastery; Makrakis, after a long career of opposition, was excommunicated by the Holy Synod (1879) and imprisoned for two years by the Government. He had opened a church served by priests of his way of thinking; this was shut up. As soon as he came out of prison he began again a propaganda that now produced a formal sect, was again tried for heresy and sedition, and imprisoned. He has since his second release continued to form his sect and to lead a campaign of extreme opposition against the “apostate” State Church. His followers number about 5000; they follow lines very like those of the Russian Raskolniks–the official Church has fallen, her priests have lost all power of administering sacraments, her rites are schismatical; they, the Makrakists, alone are the really orthodox.

There are about 6000 Sephardim Jews in Greece, and in 1889 the census counted 24,165 Moslems, living chiefly in Thessaly. It is to the credit of the Government that these Moslems have always been treated with perfect toleration. They are excused from serving in the army under a flag marked with the cross. They have their mosques wherever they want them, and the muezzin still cries from the minaret, as loudly as when the sultan reigned here, that Mohammed is the prophet of God. Nevertheless, great numbers of Moslems crossed the frontier into Turkey when Greece became free; the addition of more territory in 1881 led to another great emigration, and the Moslem population of Greece is still steadily diminishing. Naturally, they find the changed conditions humiliating. At Larissa and thereabouts one finds Turkish quarters with their mosque, as across the frontier, but many more such villages are now deserted, and their mosques in ruins.

VII. THE CHURCH IN ENSLAVED GREECE

Greeks outside the kingdom are practically all Orthodox. They form a great part of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, the aristocracy of the Patriarchates of Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem, and the whole Orthodox population of Cyprus. In all these parts except Cyprus the same evolution is taking place. For many centuries the Greeks had it all their own way. All the important offices–those of patriarchs, metropolitans, archimandrites–were never given to the native Orthodox Christians, but were kept in the hands of a little group of Greeks generally sent out by the Phanar. In each case the awakening of national sentiment during the nineteenth century has produced this result: the natives (Slavs, or Wallachians, or Arabs) are making tremendous, and now always successful, efforts to throw off the yoke of these Greeks and to have bishops of their own races, the Liturgy in their own tongues. And everywhere the Greeks are waging a hopeless war in the name of Conservatism to keep their predominance. Russia steps in everywhere, always on the side of the natives; so each year the Greek element has to retire, and the Greeks get more and more angry. This has produced the appalling combination of schisms and the degrading wrangles that rend the Orthodox Church.

In the Patriarchate of Constantinople the Bulgars have made a formal schism since 1872. They have an exarch at Constantinople, and his exarchist bishops dispute the jurisdiction of the Greek (patriarchist) hierarchy all over Macedonia. There are now exarchist bishops at Ochrida, Uskub, Monastir, Nevrokop, Veles, Strumitza, Debra. In all the other dioceses, save five, they have priests and churches. This is the greatest schism. The Greek does not like Latins or Protestants; but he hates the Bulgarian schismatics far the most of all. For this question see R. von Mach, “Der Machtbereich des bulgarischen Exarchats in der Turkei” (Leipzig, 1906); D. M. Branco, “La Macedoine et sa population chretienne” (Paris, 1905); Fortescue, “Orth. Eastern Church”, pp. 316-323. At Alexandria things are better. The Orthodox patriarch, Photios, is of course a Greek (he has had a stormy career–“Orth. East. Church”, 285-286); but he has taken the trouble to learn Arabic and allows the Liturgy to be celebrated in Arabic to some extent; also he hates the Phanar and is unceasingly engaged in quarrels with his brother of Constantinople. So his subjects are fairly content. There is a schism at Antioch. After a long line of Phanariot patriarchs, the Arabs at last succeeded in getting an Arab patriarch, Meletios, in 1899. He was at once excommunicated by Constantinople, apparently for not being a Greek. He died in 1906 and again, in spite of frantic efforts of the Greeks, another Arab, Gregory Hadad, succeeded him. Gregory is excommunicate, too, for the same reason; and the See of Antioch, to the infinite scandal of all respectable Orthodox Christians, is still in schism with Constantinople (“Orth. E. Church”, 287-288). The trouble at Jerusalem may be read in all the newspapers. The Patriarch Damianos is a Greek; he has always been disliked by the Arabs, now he has begun to try to conciliate them, so his Greek Synod has deposed him for being civil to Arabs, and the Arabs will not have him because he is a Greek. The latest reports say that he is still in the palace, guarded by Turkish soldiers; and his monks and Synod consider him no longer patriarch (op. cit., 289-290). In Cyprus, though they are all Greeks, they have a schism too. Since 1900 the quarrel of the two pretenders to the archiepiscopal see, Cyril of Cyrenia and Cyril of Kition, has disturbed the whole Orthodox world. There are endless ramifications of this quarrel. For eight years every Cypriote newspaper has had a daily leader about To ekklesiastikon Zetema; the ludicrous scandal gets worse every month, and is likely to last so long as both the claimants survive.

In conclusion, it is just to say a word about the state of Greece now, compared with what it was under the Turk. Western Europeans are disappointed with the kingdom. They seem to have expected it to leap to our level at once. The muddled, and not always honest, finances of the Government, the ludicrous internal politics, a widespread and not altogether unjust suspicion of Greek honesty and the odious type of Levantine Greek that one meets, have produced a strong reaction since the burst of Philhellenism at the time of the War of Independence. Much of this is no doubt deserved. If one lands in Greece from Europe one will notice many things that excite one’s indignation or laughter. But let anyone go to Greece after spending some time under the sultan’s government; in spite of all Greek faults, the difference is simply enormous. Coming back from Asia or European Turkey, the traveller in Greece feels that he is in Europe. However unsatisfactory things may still be, he has crossed the chasm that separates Europe and Christendom from Asia and Islam. Greece may be a long way behind France or England, in the same class of country; she is simply part of another world compared with Turkey.

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ADRIAN FORTESCUE Transcribed by M.E. Smith

The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume VICopyright © 1909 by Robert Appleton CompanyOnline Edition Copyright © 2003 by K. KnightNihil Obstat, September 1, 1909. Remy Lafort, CensorImprimatur. +John M. Farley, Archbishop of New York

Fuente: Catholic Encyclopedia

Greece

( ), properly the country in Europe inhabited by the Greek race (1Ma 1:1); but in Act 20:2, apparently designating only that part of it comprising the -Roman province of MACEDONIA SEE MACEDONIA (q.v.). See Wetstein, Nov. Test. 2:590; Kruse, Hellas, 1:557. SEE ACHAIA.

1. Greece is sometimes described as a country containing the four provinces of Macedonia, Epirus, Achaia or Hellas, and Peloponnesus, but more commonly the two latter alone are understood to be comprised in it. We will consider it as composed of Hellas and Peloponnesus, though there seems to be no question that the four provinces were originally Inhabited by people of similar language and origin, and whose relilion and manners were alike. Except upon its northern boundary it is surrounded on all sides by the sea, which intersects it in every direction and naturally gives to its population seafaring habits. It is also a very mountainous country, abounding in eminences of great height, which branch out and intersect the lands from its northern to its southern extremity, and form the natural limits of many of the provinces into which it is divided. At the isthmus of Corinth it is separated into its two great divisions, of which the northern was called Graeca intra Peloponnesum, and the southern the Peloponnesus, now called the Morea. The mountain and sea are thus the grand natural characteristics of Greece, and had a very considerable influence on the character of its inhabitants, as is evidenced in the religion, poetry, history, sand manners of the people. The country has always been famous for the temperature of its climate, the salubrity of its air, and the fertility of its soil.

The Greek nation had a broad division into two races, Dorians and Ionians, of whom the former seem to have long lain hid in continental parts, or aon the western side of the country, and had a temperament and institutions more approaching the Italic. The Ionians, on the contrary, retained many Asiatic usages and tendencies, witnessing that they had never been so thoroughly cut off as the Dorians from Oriental connection. When afterwards the Ionic colonies in Asia Minor rose to eminence, the Ionian race, in spite of the competition of the half Doric Aolians, continued to at tract most attention in Asia.

Of the history of Greece before the first recorded Olympiad, B.C. 77,6, little that can be depended upon is known. There is no doubt, that from very remote periods of antiquity, long prior to this date, the country had been inhabited, but facts are so intermingled with legend and fable in the traditions which have come down to us of these ancient times, that it is impossible with certainty to distinguish the false from the true (Grote, Hist. of Greece, pref. to volume 1). After its conquest by the Romans, B.C. 146, Greece continued for one thousand three hundred and fifty years the either really or nominally a portion of the Roman empire. Literature and the arts, long on the decline were at length destroyed by Justinian, who closed the schools of Athens. Alaric the Goth invaded the country in the year 400, followed by Genseric and Zabei Khan in the sixth and seventh, and by the Normana in the eleventh century. After the Latin conquest of Constantinople in 1204, Greece was divided into feuda principalities, and governed by a variety of Roman Venetian, and Frankish nobles; but in 1261, was the exception of the dukedoms of Athens and Nauplia, and some portions of the Archipelago, it was reunited to the Constantinopolitan empire by Michael Palaeogus. In 1438 it was invaded by the Turks, who conmpleted its conquest in 1481. The Venetians, however, were not disposed to allow its new masters quiet possession, and the country during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was the theater of obstinate wars, which continued till the treaty of Passarovitz in 1718 confirmed the Turks in their conquest with the exception of Msaina, the whole country remained under their despotic sway till 1821, when the Greeks once more aroused from their lethargy, and asserted their claim to a national existence. The revolutionary struggle was continued with varied success and much bloodshed till the great European powers interfered, and the battle of Navarino, in 1827, secured the independence of Greece, which was reluctantly acknowledged by the Porte in 1829. In 1831 Greece was erected into an independent monarchy it retains its classic name, and nearly its ancient limits, comprehending the Morea, or ancient Peloponnenus, south of the Gulf of Corinth, now Gulf of Lepanto, and the province of Livadia. or the ancient Graecia principia, with part of Thessaly and Epirus, north of that gulf; besides the island of Negropont, the ancient Eubsea, and other smaller islands in the Archipelago. The Republic of the Ionian lslands, Cephalonia, Zante, Corfu, and others on the western coast of Greece, is under the protection of Great Britain.

2. 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. SEE JAVAN. It is possible that Moses may have derived some geographical outlines from the Egyptians, but he does not use them in Gen 10:2-5, where he mentions the descendants of Javas as peopling the isles of the Gentiles. This is merely the vaguest possible indication of a geographical, locality and yet it is not improbable that his Egyptian teachers were almost equally in the dark as to the position of a country which had not at that time arrived at a unity sufficiently imposing to arrest the attention of its neighbors. The amount aned precision of the information possessed by Moses must be measured by the nature of the relation which we can conceive as existing in his time between Greece and Egypt. Now it appears from Herodotus that prior to the Trojan War the current of tradition, sacred and mythological, set from Egypt towards Greece; and the first quasi-historical event which awakened the curiosity and stimulated the imagination of the Egyptian priests was the story of Paris and Helen. (Herodotus, 2:43, 1:52, and 112). At the time of the Exodus, therefore. it is not likely that Greece had entered into any definite relation whatever with Egypt. Withdraws from the sea-coast, and only gradually fighting their way to it during the period of the Judges, the Hebrews could have had no opportunity of forming connections with the Greeks. From the time of Moses to that of Joel we have no notice of the Greeks in the Hebrew writings, except that which was contained in the word Javan (Gen 10:2); and it does not seem probable that during this period of the words had any peculiar significance for a Jew, except in so far as it was associated with the idea of islanders. When, indeed, they came into contact with the Ionians of Asia Minor, and recognized them as the long-lost islanders of the Western migration, it was natural that they should mark the similarity of sound between = and ones, and the application of that name to the Asiatic Greeks would tend to satisfy in some measure a longing to realize the Mosaic ethnography.

Accordingly, the O.T. word, which in the A.Vers. is Greece, Greeks, etc., is in Hebrew , Joavan (Joe 3:6; Dan 8:21): the Hebrew, however, is sometimes retained (Isa 66:19; Eze 27:13). In Gen 10:2 the Sept. has , with which Rosenmller compares Herod. 1:56-58, and professes to discover the two elements of the Greek race. From he gets the Ionian or Pelagian, from (for which he supposes the Heb. Original ) the Hellenic element. This is excessively fanciful. SEE ELISHAH.

The Greeks and Hebrews met for the first time in the slave-market. The medium of communication seems to have been the Tyrian slave-merchant. About B.C. 800 Joel speaks of the Tyrians as selling the children of Judah to the Grecians (Joe 3:6); and in Eze 27:13 the Greeks are mentioned as bartering their brazen vessels for slaves. On the other hand, Bochart says that the Greek slaves were highly valued throughout the-East (Geogr. Sac. part 1, lib. 3, c. 3, page 175); and it is probable that the Tyrians took advantage of the calamities Which befell either nation to sell them as slaves to the other. Abundant opportunities would be afforded by the attacks of the Lydian monarchy on the one people, and the Syrian on the other; and it is certain that Tyre would let slip no occasion of replenishing her slave-market. SEE TYRE.

Prophetical notice of Greece occurs in Dan 8:21, etc., where the history of Alexander and his successors is rapidly sketched. SEE GOAT. Zechariah (Zec 9:13) foretells the triumphs of the Maccabees against the Graeco-Syrian empire, while Isaiah looks forward to the conversion of the Greeks, among other Gentiles, through the instrumentality of Jewish missionaries (Isa 66:19). For the connection between the Jews and the quasi-Greek kingdoms which sprang out of the divided empire of Alexander, SEE ANTIOCHUS; SEE PTOLEMY.

The presence of Alexander (q.v.) himself at Jerusalem, and his respectful demeanor, are described by Josephus (Ant. 11:8, 3); and some Jews are even said to have joined him in his expedition against Persia (Hecat. ap. Joseph. c. Apion, 2:4), as the Samaritans had already done in the siege of Tyre (Josephus, Ant. 11:8, 4-6). In 1Ma 12:5-23 (about B.C. 180), and Josephus, Ant. 12:4, 10, we have an account of an embassy and letter sent by the Lacedaemonians to the Jews. The most remarkable feature in the transaction is the claim which the Lacedaemonians prefer to kindred with the Jews, and which Areus professes to establish by reference to a book. It is by no means unlikely that two declining nations, the one crouching beneath a Graeco-Syrian invader, and the other beneath a Roman yoke, should draw together in face of the common calamity; or we may with Jahn (Heb. Comm. 9:91, note) regard the affair as a piece of pompous trifling or idle curiosity, at a period when “all nations were curious to ascertain their origin, and their relationship to other nations.” SEE ONIAS.

The notices of the Jewish people which occur in Greek writers have been collected by Josephus (contra Apion, 1:22). The chief are Pythagoras, Herodotus, Choerilus, Aristotle, Theophrastus, and Hecatseus. The main drift of the argument of Josephus is to show that the Greek authors derived their materials from Jewish: sources, or with more or less distinctness referred to Jewish history. For Pythagoras, he cites Hermippus’s life; for Aristotle, Clearchus; but it should be remembered that the Neo-Platonism of these authorities makes them comparatively worthless; that Hermippus, in particular, belongs to that Alexandrian school which made it its business to fuse the Hebrew traditions with the philosophy of Greece, and propitiate the genius of Orientalism by denying the merit of originality to the great and independent thinkers of the West. This style of thought was further developed by Iamblichus; and a very good specimen of it may be seen in Le Clerc’s notes on Grotius, De Verit. lit has been ably and vehemently assailed by Ritter, Hist. Philippians b. 1, c. 3. Herodotus mentions the Syrians of Palestine as confessing that they derived the rite of circumcision from the Egyptians (2:104). Bahr, however, does not think it likely that Herodotus visited the interior of Palestine, though he was acquainted with the sea-coast. (On the other hand, see Dahlman, pages 55, 56, Engl. transl.) It is almost impossible to suppose that Herodotus could have visited Jerusalemn without giving us some more detailed account of .it than the merely incidental notices in 2:159, and 3:5, not to mention that the site of , or Cadytis, is still a disputed question. The victory of Pharaoh Necho over Josiah at Megiddo is recorded by Herodotus (comp. Herod. 2:159 with 2Ki 23:29 sq.; 2Ch 35:20 sq.). It is singular that Josephus should have omitted these references, and cited Herodotus only as mentioning the rite of circumcision. The work of Theophrastus cited is not extant; he enumerates among other oaths that of Corban. Chcerilus is supposed by Josephus to describe the Jews in a by no means flattering portrait of a people who accompanied Xerxes in his expedition against Greece. The chief points of identification are their speaking the Phoenician language, and dwelling in the Solymean mountains, near a broad lake, which, according to Josephus, was the Dead Sea. The Hecataeus of Josephus is Hecataeus of Abdera, a contemporary of Alexander the Great, and of Ptolemy son of Lagus. The authenticity of the History of the Jews attributed to him by Josephus has been called in question by Origen and others.

After the complete subjugation of the Greeks by the Romans, and the absorption into the Roman empire of the. kingdoms which were formed out of the dominions of Alexander, the political connection between the Greeks and Jews as two independent nations no longer existed. Smith, s.v.

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 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 2Co 9:2, 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 (Tacitus, Annal. 2:53). It had risen into some importance in Paul’s days, and, as many suppose, it is to this Nicopolis that he alludes in his epistle to Titus. SEE NICOPOLIS.

3. 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 other 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. SEE GREEK LANGUAGE.

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. 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. At quite a late period the managers of orgies were evidently regarded as mere jugglers of not a very reputable kind (see Demosthenes, De Corona, 79, page 313); 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 bathse, porticoes, sepulchers, of characteristic simphe 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 would 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, inflieted 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 a philosophy could have adequately checked. (Works expressly on Grecian mythology have been written by Le Clerc,1787; Kanne, 1805; Limmer, 1806; Hug, 1812; Vlcker, 1824; Buttmann, 1828; Studer, 1830; Krische, 1840; Stuhr, 1838; Limburg-Brouwer, 1833.) SEE GREEK.

Fuente: Cyclopedia of Biblical, Theological and Ecclesiastical Literature

Greece

orginally consisted of the four provinces of Macedonia, Epirus, Achaia, and Peleponnesus. In Acts 20:2 it designates only the Roman province of Macedonia. Greece was conquered by the Romans B.C. 146. After passing through various changes it was erected into an independent monarchy in 1831.

Moses makes mention of Greece under the name of Javan (Gen. 10:2-5); and this name does not again occur in the Old Testament till the time of Joel (3:6). Then the Greeks and Hebrews first came into contact in the Tyrian slave-market. Prophetic notice is taken of Greece in Dan. 8:21.

The cities of Greece were the special scenes of the labours of the apostle Paul.

Fuente: Easton’s Bible Dictionary

Greece

(See GRECIANS.)

Fuente: Fausset’s Bible Dictionary

GREECE

Only occasionally does the Bible mention Greece by that name, though it frequently mentions parts of Greece. The ancient land of Javan, for instance, was possibly part of Greece (Gen 10:4; Isa 66:19; Eze 27:13). In local language, Greece was Hellas, and Greeks were Hellenes.

Greeces influence on the world of the New Testament came through events resulting from the conquests of Alexander the Great in the fourth century BC. Yet, though there was a Greek Empire, there was no official Greek nation. The country known today as Greece consisted in those times of various separate states. The most important of these was the northern state of Macedonia, which was the centre of the Greek Empire (Act 16:12; 2Co 8:1; see MACEDONIA). In New Testament times the region referred to as Greece was the southern part of the Greek peninsular known as Achaia (Act 19:21; Act 20:1-2; see ACHAIA).

The Greek Empire

The rise of Greek power in the pre-Christian era was rapid and spectacular. Alexander the Great, having come to power in Macedonia in 336 BC, rapidly overran what remained of the Persian Empire, and within a few years ruled a region that stretched from Greece to India (Dan 8:5-7; Dan 8:20-21; Dan 11:2-3).

Wherever they went, the Greeks established their rich culture. The Greek language became the most widely spoken language throughout the Empire, Greek architecture spread through the building of magnificent cities, and Greek philosophy changed the thinking of people everywhere (1Co 1:20-22). The Greeks brought progress to those they governed, and provided a standard of education, entertainment, sport and social welfare that their subjects had not known previously. Those who accepted this Greek culture were regarded as civilized; all others were regarded as barbarians (Rom 1:14).

Alexander, however, died while at the height of his power (323 BC), and within a short time his vast empire was divided among his generals (Dan 8:8; Dan 8:22; Dan 11:4). By 301 BC the main divisions were a western sector based on Greece, and two eastern sectors based respectively on Syria to the north and Egypt to the south.

At first Israel fell within the Egyptian sector and enjoyed a period of relative peace. During that time a group of seventy Jewish scholars translated the Hebrew Bible into Greek. This translation is known as the Septuagint (after the number of translators) and is usually referred to by the symbol LXX. In New Testament times both Jews and Christians used the Septuagint as well as the Hebrew Old Testament (see SEPTUAGINT).

Greek rulers in the Egyptian sector gave themselves the name Ptolemy. Some of the later Ptolemies became hostile to the Jews, but conditions worsened further when the Syrian sector conquered Egypt and brought Israel under its control (198 BC; Dan 11:14-16). Greek rulers in the Syrian sector were known as the Seleucids, after the name of the king who founded the dynasty. Most of the kings gave themselves the name Antiochus, after Antioch, the capital of the Seleucid kingdom that the founder of the dynasty built in 300 BC (Act 11:20; Act 13:1; see ANTIOCH IN SYRIA).

Greek influence in Israel

After more than a century of Greek rule, Israel was feeling the heavy influence of Greek customs and ideas on the traditional Jewish way of life. Divisions began to appear among the Jewish people. Some Jews welcomed this Greek influence, even in their religion, because in this way they were able to win political favours from the Greek rulers and so gain important positions in the Jewish religious system. Other Jews firmly opposed all Greek influence, particularly Greek political influence in Jewish religious affairs.

When fighting broke out in Jerusalem between rival Jewish factions, the Seleucid king (Antiochus IV Epiphanes) welcomed the opportunity to deal with the Jews. He invaded Jerusalem, slaughtered all Jews who resisted, made others slaves, burnt the Jewish Scriptures, forced Jews to eat forbidden food and compelled them to work on the Sabbath day. Worse still, he set up a Greek altar in the Jewish temple, then took animals that the Jews considered unclean and sacrificed them to the Greek gods. To the Jews this was the awful horror (GNB), the abomination that makes desolate (RSV) (Dan 11:31). But Antiochus failed to realize that the Jews would not stand idly by and allow him to destroy their religion.

Resistance to Greek domination

The Jews fight for religious freedom began through the zeal of an aged priest named Mattathias. He and his five sons (known as the Maccabees, after Judas Maccabeus, his son and the groups leader) escaped from Jerusalem, prepared a small army, and after about three years overthrew the pro-Greek party of priests. They then cleansed and rededicated the temple, restoring it to their people for traditional Jewish worship (165 BC). From that time on the Jews celebrated the event in the annual Feast of Dedication (Joh 10:22).

Such an astonishing victory encouraged the Maccabees (also known as the Hasmoneans, after their old family name) to keep fighting till they had won political freedom as well. But the religiously strict Jews, who opposed Greek political interference in the Jewish religion, likewise opposed the Maccabees drive for political power. Eventually these opposing viewpoints produced two parties that divided the Jewish people, the Sadducees and the Pharisees. The Sadducees wanted political power, but the Pharisees were content with religious freedom (see PHARISEES; SADDUCEES).

In spite of this opposition, the Maccabees carried on the war and after twenty years won political independence (143 BC). However, the Jews were now clearly divided. On one side were the pro-political priests and leaders, who were rich, powerful and favoured by the Hasmonean rulers. On the other side were the anti-political traditionalists, who were poor, powerless and favoured by the common people. The Jews were free of Greek rule, but they were weakened by internal divisions and within eighty years they fell to Rome (63 BC).

New Testament times

Though the Romans had succeeded the Greeks as rulers of the region, Greek was still the most widely spoken language. It was the common language of the Roman Empire as it had been of the Greek Empire (Joh 19:20; Act 21:37; Rev 9:11; see HELLENIST). Because one language was spoken everywhere, Christianity could spread more quickly (Act 14:1; Act 19:10).

Greek was also a rich language, able to express fine differences of thought and meaning. It was well suited to be the language of the New Testament, through which God revealed and preserved the teachings of the Christian gospel.

The New Testament records that many people of Greek origin became believers in Jesus and were active in Christian service. As early as the time of Jesus, certain Greeks had become interested in the new teaching that Jesus brought (Joh 12:20). In the period covered by the book of Acts, Greeks in different places responded to the preaching of the apostles (Act 14:1; Act 17:4; Act 17:12; Act 17:34; Act 18:4) and churches were established throughout Greece itself, both in Macedonia and in Achaia (Act 16:12; Act 17:1-4; Act 17:10-12; Act 18:1-4; see ATHENS; BEREA; CORINTH; PHILIPPI; THESSALONICA). Sometimes the name Greek was used as another name for Gentiles in general (Mar 7:26; Act 19:17; Rom 1:16; Rom 10:12; Gal 3:28).

Fuente: Bridgeway Bible Dictionary

Greece

GREECE represents in English the Latin word Grscia, which is derived from Grci. This name Grci properly belonged only to a small tribe of Greeks, who lived in the north-west of Greece; but as this tribe was apparently the first to attract the attention of Rome, dwelling as it did on the other side of the Adriatic from Italy, the name came to be applied by the Romans to the whole race. The term Grcia, when used by Romans, is equivalent to the Greek name Hellas, which is still used by the Greeks to describe their own country. In ancient times Hellas was frequently used in a wide sense to include not only Greece proper, but every settlement of Greeks outside their own country as well. Thus a portion of the Crimea, much of the west coast of Asia Minor, settlements in Cyrene, Sicily, Gaul, and Spain, and above all the southern half of Italy, were parts of Hellas in this wide sense. Southern Italy was so studded with Greek settlements that it became known as Magna Grcia. After the conquests of Alexander the Great, who died 323 b.c., all the territory annexed by him, such as the greater part of Asia Minor, as well as Syria and Egypt, could he regarded as in a sense Hellas. Alexander was the chief agent in the spread of the Greek civilization, manners, language, and culture over these countries. The dynasties founded by his generals, the Seleucids and Ptolemys for example, continued his work, and when Rome began to interfere in Eastern politics about the beginning of the 2nd cent. b.c., the Greek language was already firmly established in the East. When, about three centuries after Alexanders death, practically all his former dominions had become Roman provinces, Greek was the one language which could carry the traveller from the Euphrates to Spain. The Empire had two official languages, Latin for Italy and all provinces north, south-west, and west of it; Greek for all east and south-east of Italy. The Romans wisely made no attempt to force Latin on the Eastern peoples, and were content to let Greek remain in undisputed sway there. All their officials understood and spoke it. Thus it came about that Christianity was preached in Greek, that our NT books were written in Greek, and that the language of the Church, according to all the available evidence, remained Greek till about the middle of the 2nd cent. a.d.

As Galilee was thickly planted with Greek towns, there can be little doubt that Jesus knew the language, and spoke it when necessary, though it is probable that He commonly used Aramaic, as He came first to the lost tribes of Israel. With St. Paul the case was different. Most of the Jews of the Dispersion were probably unable to speak Aramaic, and used the OT in the Greek translation. These would naturally be addressed in Greek. It is true that he spoke Aramaic on one occasion (Act 21:40) at least, but this occasion was exceptional. It was a piece of tact on his part, to secure the respectful attention of his audience. Probably only the inhabitants of the villages in the Eastern Roman provinces were unable to speak Greek, and even they could doubtless understand it when spoken. The Jews were amongst the chief spreaders of the language. Some of the successors of Alexander esteemed them highly as colonists, and they were to be found in large numbers over the Roman Empire, speaking in the first instance Greek (cf. Act 2:9). When they wrote books, they wrote them in Greek: Philo and Josephus are examples. It is not meant that Greek killed the native languages of the provinces: these had their purpose and subsisted.

The name Hellas occurs only once in the NT (Act 20:2). There it is used in a narrow sense of the Greek peninsula, exclusive even of Macedonia: it is in fact used in the sense of Achaia (wh. see).

A. Souter.

Fuente: Hastings’ Dictionary of the Bible

Greece

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 Zec 9:13. In Joe 3:6, 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 1Ma 1:1.

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 2Co 9:2, 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).

Fuente: Popular Cyclopedia Biblical Literature

Greece

Inhabitants of:

– Called Gentiles

Mar 7:26; Joh 7:35; Rom 2:10; Rom 3:9; 1Co 10:32; 1Co 12:13

– Desire to see Jesus

Joh 12:20-23

– Marry among the Jews

Act 16:1

– Accept the Messiah

Act 17:2-4; Act 17:12; Act 17:34

– Persecute the early Christians

Act 6:9-14; Act 9:29; Act 18:17

– Gentiles called Greeks

Rom 10:12; Gal 3:28; Col 3:11

Schools of philosophy in Athens

Act 19:9

Philosophy of

1Co 1:22-23

Poets of

Act 17:28

Prophecies concerning

Dan 10:20; Zec 9:13 Athens; Epicureans; Stoicism

Fuente: Nave’s Topical Bible

Greece

Greece (greee), or Hellas (hel’las). The well-known country in the southeast of Europe. It is named four times in the Old Testament as Greece or Grecia, Zec 9:13; Dan 8:21; Dan 10:20; Dan 11:2, and once in the New Testament, Act 20:2. It or its people are referred to in Hebrew history as Javan, Isa 66:19; Eze 27:13; Eze 27:19, and in apostolic history as Achaia. Its cities noticed in Scripture are Athens, Corinth, and Cenchrea.

Fuente: People’s Dictionary of the Bible

Greece

Greece. The histories of Greece and Palestine are little connected with each other. In Gen 10:2-5, Moses mentions the descendants of Javan as peopling the isles of the Gentiles; and when the Hebrews came into contact with the Ionians of Asia Minor, and recognized them as the long-lost islanders of the western migration, it was natural that they should mark the similarity of sound between Javan and Iones. Accordingly the Old Testament word which is Grecia, in Authorized Versions Greece, Greeks, etc., is in Javan, Dan 8:21; Joe 3:6, the Hebrew, however, is sometimes regained. Isa 66:19; Eze 27:13.

The Greeks and Hebrews met for the first time in the slave-market. The medium of communication seems to have been the Tyrian slave-merchants. About B.C. 800, Joel speaks of the Tyrians as, selling the children of Judah to the Grecians, Joe 3:6 and in Eze 27:13, the Greeks are mentioned as bartering their brazen vessels for slaves. Prophetical notice of Greece occurs in Dan 8:21, etc., where the history of Alexander and his successors is rapidly sketched. Zechariah, Zec 9:13, foretells the triumphs of the Maccabees against the Greco-Syrian empire, while Isaiah looks forward to the conversion of the Greeks, amongst other Gentiles, through the instrumentality of Jewish missionaries. Isa 66:19. The name of the country, Greece occurs once in the New Testament, Act 20:2, as opposed to Macedonia. See Gentiles.

Fuente: Smith’s Bible Dictionary