ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an intense period of evangelical interest in the Greek Church. Initially, it sets it against the emerging geography of Anglo-American missions in the Levant in the 1800s, 1810s, and 1820s. The chapter explores the historical and eschatological underpinnings for engagement with the Greek Church, arguing that evangelicals were motivated less by pragmatism than by providentially infused romanticism. It has often been assumed that evangelical relations with the Christians of the Levant were essentially utilitarian. Missionaries appear frequently in histories of Mediterranean travel and tourism, but usually as narrow-minded Bible- and tract-distributors who despised the cultures they encountered there. Greek cultural revival was in the air long before William Jowett and his ilk ventured into the Mediterranean, and the golden age conjured up by many patriots and philhellenes was not one of faith but of philosophy. Missionaries thus faced an uncomfortable balancing act. In some respects, they shared the progressives’ opinion of what the Greek Church had become.
