Overview
About this work
Homily 20 on Ephesians is one of Chrysostom’s fullest surviving sermons on Christian marriage. Expounding Ephesians 5:22–33, he places husband and wife within the mystery of Christ and the Church and calls both to a household shaped by sacrificial love, reverence, concord, prayer, and freedom from luxury. His language reflects the social assumptions of late antiquity, yet the sermon repeatedly presses husbands toward self-giving love modeled on Christ. It has therefore become one of the most important patristic witnesses to Chrysostom’s theology of marriage and the Christian home.
Setting
Historical context
These homilies belong to Chrysostom’s exposition of Ephesians, CPG 4431. Their precise setting has been debated, but the traditional Oxford/NPNF preface gives strong internal reasons for placing the series at Antioch and before 392, including references to Antiochene saints, nearby monastic communities, and the city’s schism. Homily 20 should thus be read as preaching addressed to an actual late-fourth-century congregation rather than as a systematic marriage manual. Chrysostom applies Paul’s household teaching to the daily relations, temptations, expenses, worship, and expectations of married Christians.
Structure
Contents
Chrysostom begins with harmony between husband and wife and then unfolds Paul’s comparison of marriage with Christ’s love for the Church. He discusses beauty of soul, one-flesh union, authority and mutual responsibility, and the husband’s duty to love rather than rule by fear. The second half becomes intensely practical: he warns against wealth-seeking, counsels gentle speech, describes how a newly married couple can establish a peaceful household, and urges shared prayer, church attendance, Scripture, and generosity. The sermon ends with a vision of marriage ordered toward virtue and eternal life rather than display or possessions.
Text & source details
Editions
- Edition
- Original Greek
- Reader label
- Ancient Greek
- Publication
- Patrologia Graeca 62 (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 (Alexander), 1889
- Reader label
- English — Alexander (1889)
- Translator
- Oxford translation, revised by Gross Alexander
- Publication
- Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, vol. 13 (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 Ephesians; PG 62:135–150; 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 20 on Ephesians, 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 20 on Ephesians, 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. 13 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1889)
Applies to: English — Alexander (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
BiblIndex, John Chrysostom, In epistulam ad Ephesios homiliae 1–24, CPG 4431, PG 62.
Source websitePhilip Schaff, ed., Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, vol. 13, Preface to Chrysostom’s Homilies on Ephesians (1889).
Source websiteHoly Synod of the Orthodox Church in America, “On Marriage.”
Source website