Overview
About this work
Homily 21 continues directly from Chrysostom’s teaching on husband and wife by expounding Ephesians 6:1–4. Its center is the Christian upbringing of children. Parents, especially fathers, are charged to form their children in “the discipline and instruction of the Lord,” not merely to secure education, careers, status, or wealth. Chrysostom treats the household as a school of holiness in which Scripture, moral training, and example prepare children to remain faithful in the wider world. The homily makes the family’s spiritual responsibility concrete and demanding.
Setting
Historical context
Like Homily 20, this sermon belongs to Chrysostom’s Ephesians series, CPG 4431, commonly placed in his Antiochene preaching period and probably before 392 on the internal evidence summarized in the old Oxford/NPNF preface. Its references to schools, trades, public life, pagan culture, and biblical instruction illuminate the pressures faced by Christian families in a large Greco-Roman city. Chrysostom assumes that parents cannot withdraw children from society; instead, he calls them to give children a deep Scriptural and moral formation capable of sustaining Christian life within it.
Structure
Contents
Chrysostom first explains children’s obedience and parents’ responsibility, then contrasts careful training for trades and schooling with neglect of the soul. He urges parents to teach Scripture early, to guard children from corrupting stories and habits, and to prepare them to answer objections to the faith. He then argues that worldly distinction only increases the need for spiritual formation. The final section turns to Abraham and other biblical saints, showing that marriage and family life do not prevent holiness. The household, rightly ordered, can become a setting for Christian philosophy and virtue.
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 62:149–154; 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 21 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 21 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 websiteOrthodox Church in America, The Orthodox Faith, Volume IV, “Family.”
Source website