Hellenist (Gr. Hellēnistēs), one who adopts Greek customs and language; a name given especially to those among the Jews, and afterwards in the Christian church of Judea, who, either by birth or by residence, and by the adoption of the Greek language, manners, and usages, were regarded as Greeks—in opposition to the Hebrews properly so called, whether of Palestine or of the Dispersion, and to the Hellenes, or Greeks proper. They are called Grecians in the Authorised Version, Grecian Jews in the Revised Version, of the New Testament. They inevitably stood in a relation of rivalry, if not of antagonism to the Hebrews (see Acts, vi. 1, and ix. 29). It was among the Jews settled in Alexandria that the Hellenising tendency found its freest development; and it is to that city that we must refer the formation as well of that peculiar dialect of the Greek language which is known as the Hellenistic, as of that speculative philosophy which exercised so large an influence on those early Christian schools, of which Origen is the most famous exponent (see ALEXANDRIA).
The really characteristic element of the Hellenistic Greek consists in its foreign, and especially its Hebrew and Aramaic words and idioms. Although it was in its origin a purely popular form of the language, yet its being employed in the Alexandrian or Septuagint version of the Old Testament has given to it all the fixedness and definite character of a written language. The Hellenisms of the Septuagint differ in many respects from those of the New Testament, which again present some points of discrepancy with those of the Alexandrian Fathers; but there are certain leading characteristics common to them all.
The influence of the Hellenistic modes of thought on the Alexandrian philosophy will be traced under PHILO, NEOPLATONISM, PLOTINUS, &c.
See Winer, Grammatik des N. T. Sprachidioms (1822; 7th ed. 1867); Alex. Buttmann, Gramm. des N. T. Sprachgebrauchs (1859); S. A. Green, Handbook to the Grammar of the Greek New Testament (1885); W. H. Simcox, On the Language of the New Testament (1889); Dr Hatch, Essays in Biblical Greek (1889). There are dictionaries of New Testament Greek by Schleusner (1792), Robinson (Boston, 1836; New York, 1850), Cremer (1866; Eng. ed. by Urwick), D. Harting (2d ed. Utrecht, 1888); also Grimm's ed. of Wilke's Clavis (1868, and 1877-79; Eng. ed. by Professor Thayer). Concordances of the Greek New Testament are those by R. Young (1884), and Hastings and Hudson, as revised by E. Abbot (Boston, 1885).