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92 In fourth-century Antioch religious communities overlapped: Christianity and traditional temple cult sometimes competed for venues, such as at the martyrion of Babylas in Daphne; some Christians shared with Jews a respect for Jewish scripture and local synagogues; and Christians competed among themselves for control over the city’s churches. In the face of the multilayered and highly politicized significance of so many local places, Christian leaders such as John Chrysostom, in the vocabulary of modern geographers, named these complex intersections as places of clearly negative or positive value in an attempt to construct and spread a particular religious orthodoxy. Antioch in the 380s was a volatile place, with Bishop Meletius’s recent return from exile, an imperial decree that banned “heretics ” from meeting in churches, Meletius’s death and burial alongside the recently translated relics of Babylas, and John Chrysostom’s ordination as deacon and then priest. John Chrysostom’s homilies De incomprehensibili natura dei and Adversus Iudaeos from 386–87 demonstrate the fervor with which he instructed his audience to frequent certain sites, and forbid them from entering others. Locating these exhortations within the context of the political struggles to gain and maintain religious and political authority within the city demonstrates the rhetorical means by which, and the political gains for which, Chrysostom fought to patrol his community’s boundaries, identifying where in Antioch his listeners should and should not go. Among the many religious and political factions competing for the allegiance of Antioch’s citizens, John Chrysostom required “orthodox” behavior to mirror the “orthodox” theological beliefs that he taught, and through his spatial rhetoric he demonstrated the clear physical and spiritual benefits that his listeners would gain by doing as he recommended. 3 Being Correctly Christian John Chrysostom’s Rhetoric in 386–87 Being Correctly Christian 93 THE URBAN LANDSCAPE: ANTIOCH IN 386 In 386 Meletius’s successor, Bishop Flavian, ordained John Chrysostom as a presbyter , and John started to preach to church audiences. Since the imperial cunctos populos edict of February 380, the Christianity of Meletius, Flavian, and John Chrysostom was the only legally recognized form of Christianity in Antioch, despite the continuing competition between two Nicene bishops and multiple religious communities in the city (CTh 16.1.2).1 When John Chrysostom started to preach, Bishop Flavian’s homoian opponents had been forbidden from meeting in church buildings in the city for five years, since an imperial edict of Theodosius in 381, and the much-beloved Meletius had died in the same year and been buried beside Babylas in the church that Meletius had built (CTh 16.5.6). Chrysostom explicitly associates two series of homilies that he preached interspersed with each other in 386–87, shortly after his ordination as a presbyter. The Adversus Iudaeos homilies and the homilies De incomprehensibili natura dei provide significant insight into the manipulation of Antioch’s places in Chrysostom’s rhetoric, although a comparison will reveal that his spatial rhetoric differed between the two series to reflect their different opponents and audiences. The dating of both series of homilies reveals their chronological relation to one another, and highlights the value of reading them together. Wendy Pradels, Rudolf Brändle, and Martin Heimgartner have suggested a revised and more specific chronology for the Adversus Iudaeos homilies based on the new manuscript they published of the second homily in the series.2 Their careful analysis dates Discourse 1 in this series to either late August or early September 386, just before the Jewish holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. They present a persuasive argument that Discourse 4 was the next on this topic to be delivered, and that it dates to the same festival time the following year, August 29, 387, and was followed soon after 1. The absence of Antioch’s bishop from an imperial list in 381 could signal continued imperial uncertainty about who would succeed Meletius after his death. David Hunt, “Christianising the Roman Empire: The Evidence of the Code,” in The Theodosian Code, ed. Jill Harries and Ian Wood (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 150. 2. Wendy Pradels, Rudolf Brändle, and Martin Heimgartner, “The Sequence and Dating of the Series of John Chrysostom’s Eight Discourses Adversus Iudaeos,” ZAC 6 (2002): 90–116. See the text in Pradels, Brändle, and Heimgartner, “Das bisher vermisste Textstück in Johannes Chrysostomus, Adversus Judaeos, Oration 2,” ZAC 5 (2001): 23–49. In light of evidence from their newly uncovered and translated section of Discourse...

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