Section 08: Difficult Legacy
No honest account of St. John Chrysostom can pass over the eight Antioch homilies conventionally titled Adversus Judaeos and the broader problem of a corpus in which the genuine, the doubtful, and the outright spurious have circulated for centuries under one golden name. This section treats both with the methodology’s discipline for contested matters: positions attributed, no polemic and no whitewash. The first file confronts the anti-Jewish homilies — what they are, what they say, the scholarly frame, and their later misuse — without letting context become excuse. The second treats the wider reception problem, including the beloved Paschal Homily that is almost certainly not his.
Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)
Contents
| File | Topic |
|---|---|
| Adversus Judaeos | The eight homilies of 386–387 against Judaizing Christians: the actual rhetorical target, the harsh passages quoted and not softened, the psogos invective frame (Wilken, attributed) without excuse, the medieval and Nazi misuse, and contemporary Orthodox reckoning |
| Reception and Misuse | The enormous spurious corpus (Voicu’s ~1,500 pseudo-Chrysostomic texts); the Paschal Homily’s attribution question yet liturgically his “regardless”; the deathbed-consolation homily flagged spurious; and principles for reading the authentic Chrysostom on opponents with honesty and charity |
How to Use
- Adversus Judaeos treats the single most difficult text in the corpus, presented so that neither the harshness nor the historical context is suppressed.
- Reception and Misuse treats the broader, more constructive problem: how a tradition loves and uses texts — some not even his — and how to read the authentic Chrysostom’s polemic against heretics, Jews, and the rich without flinching or excusing.
A Note on Method
These files follow METHODOLOGY §4 on disputed and sensitive topics: contested judgments attributed to named scholars and bodies rather than asserted, harsh material reported in Chrysostom’s own words rather than paraphrased into softness, and the distinction between explaining a text and excusing it kept explicit throughout. The aim is the one the methodology names — honesty without whitewash, context without alibi.
Cross-References
- Wealth and Almsgiving — the same rhetorical temperament turned to mercy
- Church Fathers — the broader question of authenticity, attribution, and a Father’s authority
References
- See the collection README for principal sources; each content file carries its own full reference list. The governing secondary source for this section is Robert L. Wilken, John Chrysostom and the Jews (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).