Golden Mouth: The Story of John Chrysostom-Ascetic, Preacher, Bishop

Cornell University Press, November 1998. Paper Back. Very Good. A new, comprehensive study--the first in English in over a hundred years--of the life and writings of St. John Chrysostom by the author of <i>Early Christian Doctrines</i> and <i>Early Christian Creeds</i>. With scholarly confidence, Kelly forms a convincing narrative of St. John's career, always framed by a careful reading of his voluminous surviving writings. We are fortunate that St. John is among the small handful of saints about whom we have a great deal of information--St. Augustine is the only comparable case--and we owe Kelly a great debt for his patient reconstruction of events out of such a massive amount of material. There are certain disappointments, mainly in what seem to be jarring anachronisms: Kelly's passing remarks about ''what seems to us sexist language'' or about St. John lacking ''the tools of modern biblical scholarship'' tell us more about modern academic preoccupations than about John. But these deficiencies are vastly overshadowed by the solid contributions this study makes to our understanding of the life of one of our greatest saints, and of Eastern Christianity generally in a time of revolutionary change. Owner name inside, sharp as new appearance, no marks in text, crisp binding.