Eight Homilies Against the Jews: Late Antique Sermons, Christian-Jewish Conflict, and Rhetorical Invective in Fourth-Century Antioch

Eight Homilies Against the Jews is a forceful and troubling work of late-fourth-century Christian polemic, composed to dissuade Antiochene Christians from attending synagogues, observing Jewish festivals, or seeking Jewish ritual authority. Its literary style is intensely rhetorical: denunciation, biblical proof-texting, vivid invective, and theatrical urgency combine in sermons shaped by the conventions of Greco-Roman declamation. The text belongs to the wider context of early Christian self-definition, when boundaries between church and synagogue were still contested. John Chrysostom, later archbishop of Constantinople and famed as the "golden-mouthed" preacher, was trained in classical rhetoric at Antioch and became one of the most influential homilists of the Greek church. These sermons reflect both his pastoral anxiety over Christian participation in Jewish practices and the competitive religious environment of late antique cities. They also reveal how eloquence could serve exclusionary and hostile theological ends. This book is recommended not as devotional reading, but as an essential primary source for students of patristics, late antiquity, Jewish-Christian relations, and the history of religious intolerance. Read critically, it illuminates the power of preaching, the formation of Christian identity, and the enduring consequences of anti-Jewish rhetoric.