A Dictionary of All Religions and Religious Denominations/Grecians
*GRECIANS, The ancient Greeks derived their theology and mythology from Egypt or Syria, or perhaps both. Mr. Bryant says, those, who derived their religion from Egypt and the East, misconstrued every thing they borrowed, and added many opinions of their own.[1] Others suppose the Greek mythology a corruption of the scripture history, and much learned ingenuity has been employed to show that the gods of Greece borrowed their history from the Jewish patriarchs. Saturn is supposed to have been Noah; Neptune—Japheth; Apollo—Joshua; Bacchus—Moses; and so of the rest, except Jupiter or Jove, the Supreme God, whose name is derived from Jah, or the incommunicable Jehovah.[2] The probability seems to be that in the first instance most pagan nations worshipped the sun and other heavenly bodies, and afterwards those heroes, or secondary gods, whose history they borrowed from tradition, and improved by poetic fables, till they formed the elegant system of the Greek mythology.