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It was the Greeks who first welcomed Christianity, and there cannot be a more striking contrast than between the eagerness with which they received the truth of God manifest in the flesh, and the difficulty which even the Jewish Christians had in realizing its full significance. It was in the Greek tongue that it first addressed its Divine message to the world. It was in the cities and homes of the Greeks that it first displayed its wonderful power of assimilating and transforming all the elements of life, and manifested what it should afterwards become in human society. The gods of Hellas were the first to fall down before the ark of the Son of God; and when He died, it is touchingly said a wailing voice was heard through all the hills and forests of Greece crying, "Great Pan is dead." It is indeed difficult to conceive what form Christianity might have assumed had not Greek faith first illustrated its saving truths; or how it would have prospered had not the Greeks of earlier days spread their language and philosophy through all lands. What the world owes to the Greeks no tongue can sufficiently tell. From them we have received the sublime poems and splendid treatises on science and philosophy which have educated all the higher minds of the human race. From them we have received the matchless sculptures, paintings, and architectural glories which have filled men's souls with visions of ideal beauty. From them we have received the inestimable legacy of our Greek New Testament, which is the light of our feet and the lamp of our path to immortality. It is to them we owe the boon for which we should never cease to be thankful, that the sacred Scriptures passed from the calm lonely lethargic scenes of nature in the East, associated with the infancy and early youth of our race, to the busy stimulating scenes of the West, associated with its manhood; that the lofty, vague Hebrew language, the very language of the loneliness and grandeur of nature, has been translated into the quick, precise, many-mooded Greek, the very language of business and active human life; that the stately oracles of prophets living in deserts, addressing men afar off and from pedestals high above them, have become the familiar epistles, of apostles coming constantly into personal contact with the sins, sorrows, and wants of humanity. From them we have received the noble works of the early Greek fathers of the Church, Justin, , Gregory, , , Basil, , and , which have proved such invaluable helps in expounding the sacred Scriptures. From them we have received the grand liturgies, the inspiring hymns, the glorious triumph of martyrs, and the devoted lives of saints, which have stimulated the piety and fired the enthusiasm of all Christian churches ever since. The Greeks gathered together, as it were, all that was grandest and most enduring in the world, and, holding it up in their arms for the baptism of Christianity, handed it on thus purified for the blessing of all after ages.

(H. Macmillan, D. D.)

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KJV: And there were certain Greeks among them that came up to worship at the feast:

WEB: Now there were certain Greeks among those that went up to worship at the feast.