The ‘and’ in the subtitle of this book is meant as a conjunctive: in the homilies of John Chrysostom, I do not here intend for scholarly traditions to be understood as separate from their rhetorical aims. By ‘and’ neither do I denote a cataloguing of A followed by B, an analysis of traditions of Bible study in the Homilies on Genesis followed by a study of the preacher’s many paraenetic addresses coursing throughout our 67 homilies. Instead, I attempt to view the scholastic and the oratorical as two sides of the same, organic art intended for performance.
This said, however, it must be admitted that this study devotes more pages to the archaeology and categorization of the exegetical traditions on which Chrysostom draws, what Pierre Fruchon called the ‘prior community’. That is because while there are many studies that include John Chrysostom in a reception-history or effect-history analysis of Genesis exegesis, we know a limited amount about how Chrysostom interacted with the sizeable foundation work that had already been done on the book of Genesis by the late 4th-century. And in order to analyze the rhetorical purposes of tradition, which I accomplish by case-studies in Chapters 2, 3, and 4, that which Chrysostom received as tradition must also be established—chapters 5, 6, 7, and 8.
The important study of Hagit Amirav, as Frances Young recognized, suggests that much can be learned about the transmission of ideas and biblical learning in early Christianity by scrutinizing John Chrysostom’s approach to the teaching of the book of Genesis. His work illuminates an ongoing process of debate about patterns of reference around specific texts and offers the opportunity to examine how rhetorical context and the idealized aims of discourse factor into the choices made. The present volume, therefore, may be viewed as an extended analysis of the inspiring work of these two scholars.
If John Chrysostom possesses any originality in the history of the art of biblical interpretation, it is in his eclectic and almost compilatory practice on the one hand, and his at times brilliant application of technical questions to moral paraenesis on the other. This diversity of practice is likely the product of the contexts in which he worked and the resources at his disposal. I avoid the word ‘method’ because it is slightly misleading, implying the systematic strain for a coherence between hermeneutical theory and interpretative result that does not belong to our preacher. That is not to downplay the importance of such passages where hermeneutical theory comes to the fore—we have always famous passages like that in his Homily 5 on Isaiah 6, which captured Bultmann’s attention (see Chapter 2, n. 15). It is to stress rather that at the points where he can be tested, Chrysostom is not always internally consistent (as Catherine Broc-Schmezer demonstrated so aptly) nor does he perform in the way we would expect of a student of Eusebius of Emesa and Diodore, raising again the question of context and tradition. While as a genre compilatory exegesis would flourish well after Chrysostom’s time, a systematic study of his exegesis of Genesis deepens the conclusions of Amirav and Young and, I hope, provides us with a fuller profile of his activity insofar as it involved the bible, its interpretations, and the ways these traditions were employed for Christian self-understanding. Attending to Chrysostom helps us put an ear to the ground and, as it were, detect even if faintly how the waters of biblical science were flowing at the time.