Christliche Gemeinde in einer spätantiken Großstadt: Die Apostelgeschichtshomilien des Johannes Chrysostomus

Abstract

What did the Christian community of Constantinople look like around 400 AD? Is it even possible to arrive at a reasonably trustworthy picture of the Christians in question, including their religious practices, everyday life, and socio-cultural environment? Which questions occupied them and their bishop? In the homilies on Acts, we possess a portion of John Chrysostom’s extensive oeuvre that enables a rather unvarnished picture of the preacher and his audience. That is so because the homilies have been transmitted in an unedited state, as Chrysostom delivered them, because they were delivered successively during the course of half a year (400-401 AD), and because we know the political situation in Constantinople at that time quite well. Acts has a special place within the New Testament not because its subject is the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus directly, but rather because it is where Luke the Evangelist relates the origins of the Church and, in particular, how the disciples of Jesus began to proclaim and live out their faith. When a cohesive series of sermons takes this biblical book as its subject, that series is bound to mirror something of the faith and life of the community that hears the homilies, and of the bishop who delivers them. This thesis will be tested using several texts from the homilies on Acts. It turns out that the person of Peter, as he is known to us from Acts, is the model for the community leader, bishop, and preacher, and that the first community in Jerusalem is fashioned into a model for the Christians in Constantinople, especially with regard to their moral comportment. This “mirror,” then, provides us with a view of the metropolitan community: it consists predominately of Christians from the rich, educated upper class, who take their Christianity seriously enough to attend religious services daily. The task of bishop John Chrysostom is so to influence their practical life, by means of concrete guidance, that more of the Kingdom of God becomes visible in the Christian community.