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A Liturgy of His Name, and Homilies Harder to Carry

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A Liturgy of His Name, and Homilies Harder to Carry

The Divine Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom is the eucharistic service used on most days of the year throughout the Byzantine rite, which makes it, by frequency of celebration, one of the most used liturgical texts in the world. The attribution to John is traditional and old, and Robert Taft's account of the rite treats the received text as the outcome of a long development in Constantinople rather than as a composition of his; the connection is best read as the rite of his city taking his name, not as a document he wrote out.

The harder part of his legacy is a set of eight homilies delivered at Antioch in 386 and 387, usually called Adversus Judaeos, against the Judaisers. The immediate target was Christians in his congregation who kept Jewish fasts and festivals and used the synagogue, and the language is violent even by the standards of ancient invective, describing the synagogue in terms that later readers put to uses John did not live to see. The homilies were quoted in medieval polemic and again in the twentieth century by people with murderous intentions.

Two things are true at once and the atlas records both. Historians of late antiquity, Kelly among them, place the texts in a specific local quarrel about religious boundaries in a city where the two communities lived close together, and note that this genre of attack was aimed at his own congregation. And churches that venerate him have themselves acknowledged the damage the texts have done. Neither observation cancels the other, and neither is the last word.

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