The Ancient Church Lie Making a Modern Comeback

Excerpt from “They Took His Name In Vain”

This is from the chapter on John Chrysostom. It starts mid-chapter. Chrysostom was called the golden mouth because of his ability to communicate. He popularized the idea of deicide—the killing of God. And the Jews were to blame. He summed up his views on the Jewish people in an eight-part sermon series called Against the Jews.

I also want to mention one more thing. This is heavy material. It exposes an ancient conspiracy, not only against the Jewish people, but against God himself. But what it is not is an indictment against God’s church. It’s a warning to the faithful: such attitudes are making a comeback. God loves His Church.

Chrysostom did not deliver Adversus Judaeos — Against the Jews — into a vacuum. Robert Wilken’s standard academic study of these sermons[1] and their historical context establishes something crucial: Chrysostom’s own congregation in Antioch regularly attended synagogue services, observed Jewish festivals, and sought out Jewish blessings and oaths, which many Antiochene Christians considered especially spiritually potent.[2] And this made Chrysostom jealous, and clearly quite angry.

This part of Chrysostom’s story usually gets left on the cutting room floor, and it is shockingly eye-opening. It’s like writing a biography of Bill Cosby as “America’s dad” and leaving out that he was a sexual predator. Or speaking glowingly of Henry Ford as the automobile maker who invented the modern assembly line and leaving out that he was a notorious antisemite who spread unsubstantiated lies about the Jews controlling the world (so much so that Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf that he was a “single great man”).

Ordinary Christians in his own church were still only a few generations removed from a faith that had come straight out of Judaism. Jewish worship still drew them. They still saw something real in it. Chrysostom was not preaching contempt to people who already hated Judaism. He was trying to persuade them that something they still found spiritually attractive was actually demonic. And he used every bit of his famous “golden mouth” to do it.

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Chrysostom was a gifted communicator who feared his congregation’s attraction to Jewish tradition. Instead of responding with patient teaching—even if his teaching had been wrong—he turned to dehumanizing rhetoric. That reflex has not disappeared. The medium has changed, but the rhetoric has not: churches once reached hundreds; podcasts now reach millions.

This book will document, in its treatment of Story 22, how antisemites clothed in Christianity are no longer afraid to say out loud what was only said in whispers since the Holocaust. Former pastor J.D. Hall’s appearance on Tucker Carlson’s program rewrote Ottoman history to make Israel look uniquely harsh toward Christians by comparison. Pastor Steven Anderson has stated that “Jews are no longer God’s chosen people in the New Testament… and … the modern-day nation of Israel… is a complete fraud.”[3] 

The late Texe Marrs claimed erroneously, “DNA science reveals that almost all the Jews in the world come from Khazaria. They are not of the blood lineage of Abraham and the prophets... The ‘Jews’ have no genetic claims to the land of Israel and no family connection whatsoever to historical Israel.”[4] The truth is that DNA has revealed the exact opposite.[5] The Khazar theory is a myth — that present-day Jews are the descendants of converts from a medieval Turkic people — that has been thoroughly debunked. And Marrs failed to mention that that would only account for half of the world’s Jews; the other six to eight million came from the Arab world and other parts of Europe.  Tucker Carlson just recently compared religious Jews in Israel to ISIS, while downplaying the religious persecution and discrimination within the larger Muslim world.[6] 

And in 2025, Pastor Dale Partridge self-published a book titled The Israel Delusion: Challenging Zionism and Reclaiming the Church as God’s Chosen People—arguing explicitly that “the Church has replaced Israel and has inherited Israel’s biblical promises. The nation of Israel is bogus.”[7] Partridge regularly posts seemingly antisemitic tropes online. (His diatribes against women and blacks are quite archaic and demeaning as well, claiming women should not have the right to vote[8], and he would not let his daughter marry a black man because it would lower the IQ of his grandchildren.[9])

Sixteen centuries separate Chrysostom from Partridge, but the argument is basically the same. A New Testament passage aimed at particular people in a first-century conflict gets turned into an accusation against the entire Jewish people for all time. You will see this happen again and again throughout this book. By the end, I hope you will recognize it immediately whenever someone employs this tactic.

[1] Robert L. Wilken, John Chrysostom and the Jews: Rhetoric and Reality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 72, 75. https://archive.org/details/johnchrysostomje0000wilk. Wilken shows that Christians in the Middle East and Asia Minor attended synagogue and adhered to Jewish feasts. Many Christians in Antioch, where Chrysostom was bishop, attended synagogue on Sabbath and High Holy Days.

[2] John Chrysostom, Adversus Judaeos (Against the Jews), eight homilies delivered in Antioch, 386–387 AD, Homily 1. http://tertullian.org/fathers/chrysostom_adversus_judaeos_01_homily1.htm.

[3] Steven Anderson, quoted in "Pastor 'scams' Jewish clerics for film," Jewish News of Greater Phoenix, December 10, 2014, https://www.jewishaz.com/community/pastor-scams-jewish-clerics-for-film/article_c6f8e942-8008-11e4-b57f-8b4c6d7cbff8.html.

[4] Texe Marrs, DNA Science and the Jewish Bloodline (Austin, TX: RiverCrest Publishing, 2013), quoted in Book Summary, Bookey, accessed October 12, 2026, https://cdn.bookey.app/files/pdf/book/en/dna-science-and-the-jewish-bloodline.pdf.

[5] Ron Cantor, “They Say Jews Have No DNA Link to Israel — Science Says Otherwise,” Ron Cantor, YouTube video, August 10, 2026, https://youtu.be/JHVI-pU6jR8.

[6] Breck Worsham (@ImBreckWorsham), post on X, August 18, 2026, https://x.com/ImBreckWorsham/status/2089460514594156871.

[7] James W. Walraven, “Dale Partridge: ‘The Israel Delusion’: Book Review,” jameswalraven.com, September 12, 2025, https://jameswwalraven.com/thoughtfortoday/2480-Dale-Partridge-The-Israel-Delusion-Book-Review-Part-4.

[8] Steve Rabey, “Yes, There Is a Movement to Take Away Women’s Right to Vote,” Baptist News Global, April 7, 2026, https://baptistnews.com/article/yes-there-is-a-movement-to-take-away-womens-right-to-vote/.

[9]   Dale Partridge, "Christian Nationalist Pastor Dale Partridge Won't Let His Daughter Marry A Black Christian Man,” Right Wing Watch, Vimeo video, October 7, 2026, https://vimeo.com/1233805585?fl=pl&fe=vl. Strange fact: Partridge’s wife is Mexican!