HistoricalChristian.Faith

Is Chrysostom's Sethite reading genuinely his, or a later editor's hand?

Type: supporting argument (off-timeline) · Assessment: weak — the doubt does not hold. The 67 Homilies on Genesis that carry the Sethite reading (Homily 22) are securely Antiochene (c. 388); the "412–413" date is unsupported and falls after Chrysostom's death; and the Photius prop is a misattribution — Photius questioned the homilies' number, not their authorship. A genuine kernel remains (the two Genesis series are a real scholarly puzzle), but it leaves both series authentically Chrysostom's, so he stands as a firm Sethite witness · doubt advanced by Fr. Stephen De Young

Related arguments: the Sethite reading — see also the Rabbinic-origin thesis · Augustine's case

Here the sub-claim is a defeater: a reason offered for not counting Chrysostom as a firm Sethite witness.

The claim

In the Lord of Spirits episode "Land of Giants," asked whether the Sethite reading in Chrysostom's Genesis homilies is actually his, Fr. Stephen De Young answers that it is "hard to know for sure," for two reasons — a late date and a disputed authorship:

If he does take that view, he's taking that view around 412, 413. … This is after. This is post-St. Ephraim, post-St. Augustine. … he's got two sets of homilies on Genesis, essentially, and scholars disagree about how those relate to each other. … The dating in the early fifth century is secure, but there are also a significant number of people — and these people include St. Photius the Great, his notes on the library at Constantinople — who think that what are now considered to be the later homilies weren't St. John Chrysostom, or at least reflect another hand. That someone else came and revised them. … It's also very possible that we don't know what view he held, and this was sort of expanded upon by a later editor of his homilies.

— Fr. Stephen De Young, Lord of Spirits, "Land of Giants."¹ His conclusion is modest — "it's not a slam-dunk to use this text from Chrysostom and say: Well, that's what Chrysostom's view was and that's it." Two evidentiary props carry that doubt: (a) the Sethite material is late, c. 412–413, after Ephrem and Augustine; and (b) St. Photius's library notes question whether the relevant homilies are Chrysostom's own or a later hand's. We test both, then ask what survives.

Who advances it

The doubt is De Young's (with Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick), and it sits downstream of two real bodies of scholarship that he names only loosely: the long-standing puzzle of Chrysostom's two Genesis series (framed by W. A. Markowicz, "Chrysostom's Sermons on Genesis: A Problem," Theological Studies 24 [1963]), and Photius's ninth-century notice of the homilies in the Bibliotheca.² The framing that turns these into a defeater — a c. 412–413 date and a Photius who doubts the authorship — is De Young's own.

The evidence for

There is a genuine kernel here, and it should be granted in full. Chrysostom really did leave two overlapping works on Genesis: the major series of 67 Homilies on Genesis (CPG 4409) and a shorter series of nine Sermons on Genesis (CPG 4410), the first eight of which cover the same early chapters, "and in places the resemblance is verbatim." How the two relate is a real and unsettled question — Markowicz's "problem" — with live theories that one set is a revision of the other, that only the sermons were actually preached while the homilies are a prepared text, or that one represents an auditor's notes.² So De Young's "scholars disagree about how those relate to each other" is accurate. There is, further, a serious recent argument that the written text of the homilies underwent a literary recension after 401 (internal evidence in the eighth homily points to retouching in the wake of the anthropomorphite controversy at Constantinople) — so the instinct that the text we read was edited at a later stage is not baseless.³ And Photius's Bibliotheca does transmit a count that differs from ours, showing his manuscript was not identical to the received text.⁴

Adversarial assessment

What holds. The two-series puzzle is real, and so is the general caution: a single proof-text from a father whose corpus has a complicated transmission history should not be over-leaned-on without care. That much of De Young's instinct is sound, and a scholarly recension of the homilies' written form (within Chrysostom's own lifetime) is a defensible position.

The "412–413" date is unsupported — and incoherent as stated. The Sethite reading is given in Homily 22 on Genesis, part of the 67-homily series. The scholarly consensus dates that series to Antioch, c. 385–388, most probably 388 — Quasten, Cayré, and Altaner/Stuiber all settle on 388, and Cyrille Crépey's 2009 study argues the case in detail; the standard English edition (R. C. Hill, Fathers of the Church) places it at Antioch, "perhaps as early as the year 385."⁵ No dating in the literature puts the homilies at 412–413. That date is not merely outside the range; it falls after Chrysostom's death in 407 — which is exactly why De Young must read it as the work of "a later editor." But the premise that generates the editor is the unsupported date, not any datum about the text. Even the latest serious proposal — a Constantinople recension — is placed after 401, within Chrysostom's lifetime and episcopate, and concerns anthropomorphite-controversy retouching, not the paternity of the giants in Genesis 6.³

The Photius prop is a misattribution. What Photius's Bibliotheca actually contributes is a number: he counts the homilies at 61 against our 67 (and reports only 27 delivered during Lent). In the standard edition De Montfaucon weighs that testimony and concludes that Photius's manuscript had simply lost about five homilies — the internal evidence of the present Homily 33, which notes the Holy-Week-to-Pentecost break, shows the gap is in Photius's copy, not in the genuine series.⁴ Photius nowhere brands the Genesis homilies inauthentic or assigns them to "another hand"; he does not apply a stylistic-authenticity argument to them at all. The "another hand / later editor" theories De Young hangs on Photius are in fact modern proposals (Baur, and the Markowicz "problem"), retrojected onto a ninth-century notice that says something quite different — that a few folios went missing.²

None of it dislodges the attribution. Both Genesis series are accepted as genuinely Chrysostom's (CPG 4409 and 4410). The recension question is about where and when the written text was fixed, not whose theology it carries — and it stays within Chrysostom's lifetime. The Sethite reading of Genesis 6, moreover, is not an isolated clause that an editor could have slipped in: it is of a piece with Chrysostom's whole program in Homily 22 — the lexical insistence that Scripture calls human beings, never angels, "sons of God," the christological argument that incorporeal beings "neither marry nor are given in marriage," and the genealogical reading of Seth's line against Cain's. Excising the Sethite reading would mean rewriting the homily, not retouching it.⁶

Assessment

Weak. De Young's bottom-line caution — don't treat one father's proof-text as a "slam-dunk" — is reasonable in the abstract, and the two-series puzzle behind it is genuine. But as a defeater of Chrysostom's Sethite witness the case does not hold, because both load-bearing props fail. The "412–413" date is found in no study of the homilies and postdates Chrysostom's death (407); the consensus places the Sethite Homily 22 at Antioch, c. 388, within his lifetime as a priest. And the appeal to Photius misattributes to him an authorship doubt he never raised: his Bibliotheca gives a lower count (61), which the editors explain as folios lost from his copy — not a judgment that the homilies are "another hand." Even the strongest version of the underlying instinct — a Constantinople recension of the written text after 401 — keeps the homilies authentically Chrysostom's and within his lifetime, and touches the anthropomorphite controversy, not the Genesis-6 reading. So Chrysostom remains a firm Sethite witness (c. 388/407); his page's "strongly Sethite" reading stands. What should be flagged on De Young's page is the misstatement: the unsupported, post-mortem "412–413" date, and the attribution to St. Photius of an authenticity doubt that is in fact a modern theory about a missing-folio count.

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