Antiochene Exegetical Christianity (Chrysostom-centered)

Antioch was one of the largest cities of the Roman East, and the Christianity that grew there developed a distinctive habit of reading. Where Alexandria hunted for the hidden spiritual sense beneath the text, Antioch's teachers insisted on what the words actually said in their own historical setting — and then pressed hard on what that demanded of the people in front of them. John Chrysostom, trained in rhetoric by the pagan orator Libanius and in Scripture by Diodore of Tarsus, preached in Antioch through the 380s and 390s to congregations of tradesmen, householders, and slaves: on money, on anger, on how you treat your servants, on the theatre and the racetrack, on almsgiving as a matter of justice rather than generosity. In 387, after the city's crowds smashed the imperial statues and Antioch waited to learn whether it would be destroyed in reprisal, he preached the sermons On the Statues to a terrified population. And the reason hundreds of his sermons survive at all is largely that people wanted to hear them again. At the end of 397 he was taken to Constantinople and made its archbishop, where he preached the same way to the imperial court, which is roughly why he died in exile in 407.