Late antique authors sometimes described humility (tapeinophrosynē; humilitas) as the key to all other virtues and good deeds. John Chrysostom’s praise for this virtue was particularly emphatic: humility was the “mother, and root, and nurse, and foundation, and bond of all good things: without this we are abominable, and execrable, and polluted.” The admonitions of the Jewish prophets made the importance of this virtue clear, and the central narrative of the New Testament reinforced it. The belief that God humbled himself by becoming human and then chose working class people as his messengers was at the core of the Christian understanding of humility.