It might be said that paraenetic exegesis had primacy of place. The scriptures were always treated as the Word of God and as the guide to life. Even though Halakah was rejected by the increasingly Gentile Christian movement at a very early stage, the notion that moral teaching was enshrined in God's Word replaced it very rapidly. As we have seen, the pervasive exhortation not only compounded sayings from Psalms, Proverbs and the Gospels into new expressions of the character to be fostered by the Christian, but also drew on biblical models who exemplified particular virtues or lived a life worth imitating. Furthermore, the common assumption of the surrounding culture was that literature was read for the sake of moral improvement. It was characteristic of the Antiochene school to follow the practice of the rhetorical schools in seeking the moral import of the text. Generally, the expectation that a tale had a moral, that the text's intention was the improvement of the reader, encouraged ways of reading the text, especially in the homily genre, that had a practical outcome with respect to lifestyle, interior attitude and ethical choice.

It is against that background that we turn to examine the exegetical homilies of John Chrysostom. John drew huge crowds as the leading rhetorical speaker of the time, offending people in high places by his rigorous puritanism and moral outspokenness, but delighting the populace with the message of God's mercy and love and the call for repentance.