[zeek]

One of the early seeds that grew into what became Christianity was Hellenism. According to Acts 6:1 there were hellenists in Jerusalem from the earliest days of the church. That verse says that the hellenists complained against the hebrews because their widows were neglected in the daily distribution. Acts 9: 29 says that after Saul's conversion he disputed against the hellenists in Jerusalem. Apollos who was from Alexandria, the center of Hellenistic philosophy, was probably a hellenist.

The best known Hellenist of the first century was Philo in Alexandria who was the contemporary of Jesus and Paul. He combined Judaism platonism and stoicism. Philo’s allegorization of the Hebrew Bible set a precedent that was followed by Paul who used a similar method of biblical hermeneutics. Philo also promulgated the concept of the logos which of course is used in the prologue of the Gospel of John. The highly symbolic interpretation of the life of Jesus exhibited in The Gospel of John is typical of a Hellenistic philosophical approach.

The Church Father Clement who's also from Alexandria was a hellenist who taught that philosophy was given to the Greeks as their own kind of covenant and foundation for the philosophy of Christ.