Adversus Judaeos

The eight homilies conventionally titled Adversus Judaeos, preached at Antioch in 386–387, are the most painful texts in the Chrysostom corpus and the hardest to handle honestly. Their immediate target was Judaizing Christians — baptized members of his own congregation drawn to the synagogue and its festivals — but the language Chrysostom deployed against Judaism itself is so violent that it cannot be read today without distress, and was put to monstrous use in the twentieth century. This file states plainly what the homilies are and what they say, names the scholarly frame (the psogos of invective; Wilken) without letting it become an excuse, documents the later misuse, and records the contemporary reckoning.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

What They Actually Are

The eight homilies (Greek Kata Ioudaiōn, Latin Adversus Judaeos, “Against the Jews”) were delivered by Chrysostom as a presbyter at Antioch across 386 and into 387, several of them clustered around the autumn Jewish high holy days — the Feast of Trumpets, the Day of Atonement, and Tabernacles — and the spring festival of Passover. The conventional Latin title is misleading, and modern translators increasingly retitle the set Against Judaizing Christians or Discourses Against Judaizing Christians to mark the actual rhetorical situation: Chrysostom’s audience and target were not Jews, who were not in his church to hear him, but Christians.

Antioch was a city where Judaism remained vital and attractive. A significant number of Chrysostom’s congregation — “Judaizers” in the patristic vocabulary — kept Jewish fasts and festivals, sought out the synagogue for oaths and for the reputed healing power of its rites, and saw no contradiction between this and their baptism. The boundary between the two communities was, in the historian’s phrase, still porous. Chrysostom regarded this syncretism as a mortal danger to Christian identity and preached to stop it. His strategy was to make the synagogue and Judaism so repellent to his hearers that they would not go near them. That strategy is the origin of the homilies’ violence.

The occasion, in other words, was pastoral and the audience was internal, but the weapon Chrysostom reached for was the wholesale denigration of Judaism as a religion and of Jews as a people. This is the crucial structural fact about the homilies: their target (Judaizing Christians) and their content (abuse of Judaism) are not the same thing. A reader who attends only to the target can be misled into thinking the homilies are not “really” about Jews at all; a reader who attends only to the content can be misled into thinking Chrysostom set out to incite a pogrom. Neither is accurate. He set out to frighten wavering Christians away from the synagogue, and to do it he was willing to say almost anything about the synagogue and those who worshipped there — which is precisely why the texts proved so dangerous in later hands that had no interest in his original pastoral problem at all.

What They Actually Say

The methodology forbids softening this material, and it should not be softened. Chrysostom’s language is, by any standard and in any century, brutal. In the first homily he calls the synagogue worse than a brothel and a drinking-house — “a den of robbers and a lodging for wild beasts,” “a dwelling of demons,” “a temple of demons” — and says that “the souls of the Jews” are themselves dwelling-places of demons (Chrysostom, Adversus Judaeos 1.3–1.6; trans. in the standard collected English version, e.g. Harkins, FOTC 68). He repeats the charge of collective guilt for the death of Christ — deicide — and draws from it the conclusion that the Jews are without hope of pardon. In the most notorious register he uses the language of beasts fit for slaughter, drawing on Psalm and prophetic imagery turned to a purpose its authors never intended.

These are not isolated slips recoverable by a charitable gloss; sustained vilification is the rhetorical engine of the homilies, deliberately deployed. To read them is to encounter a great saint and pastor saying things the Church cannot and does not endorse. Stating that plainly is not disloyalty to Chrysostom; it is the honesty his own preaching on truth demands.

The Scholarly Frame: Psogos and Its Limits

The standard scholarly treatment is Robert L. Wilken’s John Chrysostom and the Jews: Rhetoric and Reality in the Late Fourth Century (University of California Press, 1983). Wilken’s central contribution is to locate the homilies within the conventions of late-antique rhetoric, specifically the psogos — the formal speech of blame or invective, the mirror-opposite of the enkomion of praise. In that genre, vilification of the target in the most extreme available terms was not a measure of literal conviction but a recognized literary mode; orators heaped abuse on whatever they meant to discredit, and audiences understood the register. On this reading, to lift Chrysostom’s sentences out of the rhetorical culture that produced them and weigh them as modern racial doctrine is an anachronism. A number of scholars add that to call Chrysostom an “antisemite” imports a nineteenth- and twentieth-century racial category that did not exist in his world; his hostility was religious and rhetorical, not racial.

This frame explains; it does not excuse, and Wilken himself does not offer it as exoneration. Three limits must be held firmly. First, the psogos convention accounts for the form of the violence but does not make its content harmless: words have effects beyond the intentions and conventions of those who speak them. Second, the homilies were heard and later read as referring to real Jews and real synagogues, not as a literary exercise, and they shaped real attitudes. Third — and decisively — the genre context tells us why Chrysostom spoke as he did; it does not make what he said true, kind, or safe to repeat. The standard of METHODOLOGY §4 applies exactly here: context is reported as a topic, never deployed as an alibi.

The Later Misuse

The homilies’ afterlife is a study in how a text can outrun and betray its author’s situation. Through late antiquity and the Byzantine Middle Ages, the anti-Jewish polemical tradition (adversus Iudaeos as a whole genre, of which Chrysostom’s were only the most rhetorically extreme example) hardened into a settled theological contempt that fed the legal and social marginalization of Jews in Christian societies. Chrysostom’s specific sermons were not widely available in Western European languages during the medieval period, but the themes they exemplified circulated broadly.

The gravest misuse was modern. In Nazi Germany, Chrysostom’s homilies were quoted and reprinted to lend Christian and patristic legitimacy to antisemitism and, ultimately, to the Holocaust, in an effort to reconcile German and Austrian Christians to the persecution of the Jews. The historian Steven Katz has gone so far as to call Chrysostom’s homilies “the decisive turn in the history of Christian anti-Judaism,” whose furthest consequence was enacted in the political antisemitism of the twentieth century (Katz, cited in scholarship on the reception of the homilies). Whether one accepts so strong a causal claim, the documented fact stands: a saint’s sermons were weaponized in the service of genocide. That is part of the texts’ history and must be told as such.

Contemporary Reckoning

The reckoning is real but uneven, and it is best reported by its actual character rather than overstated. After the Second World War, the Christian churches broadly denounced the Nazi appropriation of patristic anti-Judaism, and resources for Christian-Jewish relations now routinely present the Adversus Judaeos as historical documents of a fraught relationship rather than as living teaching, situating them in “the period’s fiery rhetorical customs” and noting that Chrysostom’s actual target was Judaizing Christians (Council of Centers on Jewish-Christian Relations, Dialogika primary-texts resource, headnote to the homilies).

Within Orthodoxy the response has run along two lines, and both should be named. One line, represented by a range of Orthodox commentators, stresses the psogos frame and the Judaizing target and argues that calling Chrysostom an antisemite is a mistranslation of both his words and his world — a defense of the saint against anachronism. The other line, while not denying the historical context, holds that the homilies’ content is indefensible whatever its genre, that their misuse imposes a duty of explicit repudiation of any antisemitic reading, and that the Church must teach them only with that repudiation attached. The two lines are not simply opposed: most serious Orthodox treatment combines them, insisting at once on the historical frame and on the moral repudiation of the texts’ use. What no responsible Orthodox voice does is endorse the homilies’ rhetoric as a model for how Christians should speak of Jews today. As of 2026 there is no single pan-Orthodox synodal statement on the Adversus Judaeos comparable to the formal Roman Catholic and Protestant declarations on Christian-Jewish relations; the reckoning lives in scholarship, pastoral practice, and the quiet fact that these eight homilies, unlike Chrysostom’s homilies on Scripture and his Paschal sermon, have no place in the Church’s worship.

References

Robert L. Wilken. John Chrysostom and the Jews: Rhetoric and Reality in the Late Fourth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. [The psogos frame; the Antiochene setting; the Judaizing target.]
John Chrysostom. Discourses Against Judaizing Christians (Adversus Judaeos, Homilies 1–8). Trans. Paul W. Harkins. Fathers of the Church 68. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1979. [Greek in PG 48:843–942.]
J. N. D. Kelly. Golden Mouth: The Story of John Chrysostom. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995. [Antioch 386–387 and the occasion of the homilies.]
Wendy Mayer and Pauline Allen. John Chrysostom. The Early Church Fathers. London: Routledge, 2000.
Council of Centers on Jewish-Christian Relations, Dialogika primary-texts resource (ccjr.us), headnote to Chrysostom’s homilies. [Contemporary framing in Christian-Jewish relations.]
Steven T. Katz, on the reception of the homilies, as cited in the scholarly literature on Christian anti-Judaism.