Overview
About this work
Homily 19 is part of St John Chrysostom’s exposition of 1 Corinthians and centers on Paul’s teaching in chapter 7. Chrysostom reads marriage, continence, and virginity pastorally, insisting that husband and wife owe each other mutual fidelity and should not practice abstinence without consent. He then follows Paul into questions about mixed marriages, slavery, freedom, and Christian calling. The sermon is valuable for seeing how Chrysostom joins close biblical explanation to practical spiritual counsel for households seeking to live faithfully in Christ.
Setting
Historical context
Chrysostom preached his homilies on 1 Corinthians during his ministry at Antioch; the exact date is not known. The older NPNF preface notes internal evidence tying the series to Antioch, while patristic catalogues identify the corpus as CPG 4428. Homily 19 reflects the pastoral setting of a major late-fourth-century Christian city, where questions of marriage, sexual conduct, household order, and social status were immediate concerns. Its treatment is not a free-standing marriage treatise but part of a larger, sequential exposition of Paul’s first letter to Corinth.
Structure
Contents
Beginning with 1 Corinthians 7:1–2, Chrysostom explains why Paul turns from severe corrections to counsel about marriage and virginity. He develops Paul’s language of mutual marital obligation, warns against unilateral abstinence, considers marriages between believers and unbelievers, and urges Christians not to treat social status as an obstacle to holiness. The latter sections dwell on slavery and true freedom, arguing that Christian liberty is interior and can be preserved even under external bondage. The homily closes by directing the hearer toward virtue, self-mastery, and the freedom found in Christ.
Text & source details
Editions
- Edition
- Original Greek
- Reader label
- Ancient Greek
- Publication
- Patrologia Graeca 61 (Migne), represented by University of the Aegean Digital Patrology / Greek Patrology mirror
- Rights
- Free use is permitted with attribution to the source (Greek notice printed on every page).
- Edition
- Voices of the Fathers Modern English
- Reader label
- Modern English — VOTF
- Translator
- Voices of the Fathers editorial project
- Publication
- Voices of the Fathers
- Date
- 2026
- Rights
- Voices of the Fathers Modern English is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0), to the extent copyright and related rights subsist in the translation and associated editorial material. Commercial reuse requires separate permission from Voices of the Fathers. The underlying ancient text and identified public-domain source editions retain their respective status.
- Edition
- NPNF (Chambers), 1889
- Reader label
- English — Chambers (1889)
- Translator
- Oxford translation, revised by Talbot W. Chambers
- Publication
- Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, vol. 12 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1889)
- Date
- 1889
- Rights
- Public domain; CCEL source header states “Rights: Public Domain.”
Text and edition sources
John Chrysostom, Homilies on First Corinthians; PG 61:151–164; Patrologia Graeca (Migne), Digital Patrology representation.
Applies to: Ancient Greek Free use is permitted with attribution to the source (Greek notice printed on every page). Source websiteHomily 19 on First Corinthians, Voices of the Fathers Modern English, Voices of the Fathers, 2026, CC BY-NC 4.0.
Applies to: Modern English — VOTF Voices of the Fathers Modern English is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0 for noncommercial reuse with attribution, to the extent copyright and related rights subsist in the translation/editorial contribution. Underlying ancient texts and identified public-domain sources retain their own status. Source websiteHomily 19 on First Corinthians, Voices of the Fathers Modern English, Voices of the Fathers, 2026, CC BY-NC 4.0.
Applies to: Modern English — VOTF Voices of the Fathers Modern English is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0), to the extent copyright and related rights subsist in the translation and associated editorial material. Commercial reuse requires separate permission from Voices of the Fathers. The underlying ancient text and identified public-domain source editions retain their respective status. Source websiteNicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, vol. 12 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1889)
Applies to: English — Chambers (1889) CCEL source header: Rights: Public Domain. Source websiteLexical and concordance sources
James Tauber, ed., MorphGNT: SBLGNT Edition, version 6.12 (2017), DOI 10.5281/zenodo.376200.
Morphological parsing and lemmatization are CC BY-SA according to the upstream README; the SBLGNT text is separately governed by the SBLGNT EULA. Voices of the Fathers used the morphology/lemmatization data as an analytical witness, not as the controlling Greek text. Source websiteJohn Jeffrey Dodson, Greek New Testament lexicon data, Biblical Humanities repository.
Public domain according to the upstream repository documentation preserved in the VOTF concordance toolkit. Source websiteOpen Scriptures, Strong's Dictionaries of Hebrew and Greek; Greek XML release data includes Ulrik Petersen’s Strong’s Greek Dictionary in XML.
Upstream provenance retained; used for Strong’s identifiers and associated Greek headword/definition data. No new VOTF license is asserted over the upstream dataset. Source websiteVoices of the Fathers editorial concordance review, 2026.
Overview research
John Chrysostom, In epistulam I ad Corinthios argumentum et homiliae 1–44, CPG 4428.
Source websitePhilip Schaff, ed., Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, vol. 12, Preface to Chrysostom’s Homilies on the Corinthians (1889).
Source websiteGreek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, “Writings of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers.”
Source website