1. The Appointing of the Seven (6:1–6)

1. The Appointing of the Seven (6:1–6)

ACTS 6

II. PERSECUTION AND EXPANSION (6:1–9:31)

A. STEPHEN (6:1–8:1A)

1. The Appointing of the Seven (6:1–6)

1  At this time,¹ as the disciples² were increasing in number, a complaint was voiced by the Hellenists against the Hebrews, because their widows were being overlooked at the daily distribution.³

2  Then the Twelve called the whole body of the disciples to them and said, “It is not desirable that we should leave (the ministry of) the word of God and serve at tables.

3  So, brothers, look out seven men from your own number,⁴ men of good repute, full of the Spirit and wisdom, whom we may put in charge of this business.

4  We ourselves will continue in prayer and in the ministry of the word.”

5  What they said was approved by the whole company, so they chose Stephen, a man full of faith and the Holy Spirit, Philip, Prochorus, Nicanor, Timon, Parmenas, and Nicolaus, a proselyte from Antioch.

6  They brought these men before the apostles, who prayed and laid their hands on them.

The time has now come to record a new and momentous advance in the life of the new community. This advance involved the large-scale evangelization of Gentiles. It was the Hellenists in the church who took the lead in this enterprise, and as they have not been mentioned in the record thus far, Luke introduces his account of it by saying something about them and their leaders.

1  The church of Jerusalem, we are now told, comprised both “Hebrews” and “Hellenists.” The main distinction between the two groups was probably linguistic: the Hellenists were Jews whose habitual language was Greek and who attended Greek-speaking synagogues; the Hebrews spoke Aramaic (or Mishnaic Hebrew) and attended synagogues where the service was conducted in Hebrew. Many of the Hellenists had affinities with the lands of the Jewish dispersion around the Mediterranean shores, whereas the Hebrews Were Palestinian Jews; there were doubtless several minor social and cultural differences between the two groups.⁵ In the Jewish world as a whole there were tensions between them, and some of these tensions endured between members of the two groups who had joined the “discipies”⁶—as the followers of Jesus are here called for the first time in Acts.

It was over a practical issue, and not over a matter of theological importance, that disagreement became acute. As daily allocations were made to poorer members of the community from the common fund to which the wealthier members had contributed their property, complaints began to arise that one group was being favored at the expense of the other. Widows naturally formed a considerable proportion of the poorer members of the church, and the Hellenistic widows were said to be at a disadvantage in comparison with the Hebrew widows, perhaps because the distribution of charity was in the hands of the “Hebrews.”

2–4  The apostles—or “the Twelve,” as they are called here⁷—wisely determined to put the trouble right at once. It was not their primary business to supervise the financial arrangements of the community or to take an active part in the “daylie handreachinge” (as Coverdale’s English version of 1535 calls it).⁸ They therefore called the community together and bade them select seven men to be responsible for administering the charitable allocation. These seven should be men of honorable reputation, so that their probity might command complete confidence; they should be wise men, competent in administration and also qualified to deal wisely with a situation in which such delicate human susceptibilities had to be considered; above all, they must be men of God, filled with his Spirit. These might be regarded as ideal requirements for all church appointments. If such men could be found, to take charge of the distribution and see that no further cause for justified complaint arose, the apostles would be free to devote their undistracted attention to directing the church’s regular worship and to preaching the gospel.

5  The apostolic suggestion met with approval, and seven men were selected. All seven appear to have been Hellenists (this conclusion does not rest merely on the fact that they all have Greek names); indeed, they were probably the recognized leaders of the Hellenists in the church. Stephen heads the list: he is more particularly described as “a man full of faith and the Holy Spirit”—a description whose relevance and significance appear very clearly as the story proceeds. Philip also plays an important part in the subsequent narrative of Acts.⁹ About the other five Luke has nothing further to say. Prochorus is represented in later tradition as being an attendant of John the evangelist, as bishop of Nicomedia, and as martyred at Antioch.¹⁰ About Nicolaus, the last-named of the seven, two interesting facts are mentioned: he was not even a Jew by birth, but a proselyte (a convert to Judaism from paganism), and he belonged to Antioch—Antioch on the Orontes. That the only one of the seven to have his place of origin named should belong to Antioch may be a token of Luke’s special interest in that city (to which, according to tradition, he himself belonged).¹¹ As early as the time of Irenaeus (c. A.D. 180), and possibly earlier, this Nicolaus was held to be the founder of the party of the Nicolaitans, who receive unfavorable mention in Rev. 2:6, 15.¹² The Nicolaitans certainly derived their name from some Nicolaus—whether from this Nicolaus or another must remain uncertain.

6  It was the community as a whole that selected these seven men and presented them to the apostles for their approbation; it was the apostles who installed them in office. This they did by laying their hands on them, after prayer. The imposition of hands is mentioned in a variety of contexts in the Old Testament for the bestowal of a blessing (cf. Gen. 48:13–20), for expressing identification, as when the sacrificer laid his hands on the head of the sacrificial victim (Lev. 1:4; 3:2; 4:4; 16:21, etc.), for commissioning a successor (cf. Num. 27:23), and so forth. According to the Mishnah, members of the Sanhedrin were admitted by the imposition of hands.¹³ In the present instance the imposition of apostolic hands formally associated the Twelve with the appointment of the Seven to discharge their special duty. It did not, of course, impart the gift of the Spirit; the Seven were already “full of the Spirit” (v. 3).

The Seven have conventionally been called “deacons”; in a number of Christian traditions this designation has come to be used in a restricted sense of those who are responsible for the financial affairs of the church. While the Greek noun diakonos, from which “deacon” is derived, is not used in this passage,¹⁴ the related noun diakonia is used (as is also the verb diakoneō, “serve,” in v. 2);¹⁵ but diakonia is used impartially of the daily “distribution” (v. 1) and the “ministry” of preaching (v. 4).¹⁶ With reference to their present function, it might be better to describe the Seven as “almoners”; and where diakonos appears elsewhere in the Greek New Testament to denote an order of service in the church distinct from that of the “bishop” (episkopos) or “elder” (presbyteros),¹⁷ it might be better to render it by the more general term “minister” (cf. Phil. 1:1; 1 Tim. 3:8–13).

While the Seven were appointed to service as almoners, it is plain that their activity was by no means confined to this. Stephen and Philip, at any rate, were well equipped for public leadership in general and for the particular forms of service in which Luke describes them as engaging—Stephen for the defense of the gospel and Philip for the work of evangelism.

2. Progress Report (6:7)

7  The word of God advanced and the number of the disciples in Jerusalem increased greatly; moreover, a large company of the priests¹⁸ were rendering obedience to the faith.¹⁹

7   At this point Luke interrupts his narrative with a brief report of progress. Six such reports appear at intervals throughout Acts and serve to punctuate the history.²⁰ But here, immediately before the account of Stephen’s activity, there is special relevance in Luke’s emphasis on the church’s increase in numbers and popularity. In particular, the fact that so many priests were joining the community meant that the ties which attached many of the believers to the temple order would be strengthened. It is not suggested that these priests relinquished their priestly office; the logic of such a step would not be generally appreciated at this stage.²¹ The ordinary priests were socially and in other ways far removed from the wealthy chief-priestly families from which the main opposition to the gospel came. Many of the ordinary priests were no doubt men holy and humble of heart, like Zechariah, father of John the Baptist,²² men who would readily be persuaded of the truth of the gospel. But it was not good that the new movement should be too closely attached to the old order, and there is “tremendous tension” in the juxtaposition of the reference to these priests and the account of Stephen’s insistence that the temple order was now superseded.²³

3. Stephen’s Activity Arouses Opposition (6:8–10)

8  Stephen, who was full of grace and power, performed great wonders and signs among the people.²⁴

9  Then some members of the Synagogue of the Freedmen (as it was called)—both Cyrenaeans and Alexandrians and men from Cilicia and Asia—rose up and engaged in debate with Stephen,

10  but they were unable to resist²⁵ the wisdom and spirit with which he spoke.

8  Did Stephen perform “great wonders and signs” before the apostles’ hands were laid on him? Since at that time he was already “full of faith and the Holy Spirit” (v. 5), it is reasonable to conclude that this fullness was accompanied by the “grace and power” which enabled him to perform them. It has been argued, however, that it is through the imposition of apostolic hands that “the Seven evidently receive (or rather, Stephen and Philip evidently receive) what Luke regards as the distinctive mode of the Spirit’s activity in the missionary enterprise—the Spirit of God which confirms the word of God with signs and wonders.”²⁶ But it was to authorize Stephen and his colleagues to discharge one special responsibility that the apostles laid their hands on them. At any rate, the “great wonders and signs” (which most probably included acts of healing) would naturally bring Stephen into favor “among the people,” as they brought the apostles (5:12–13). But another aspect of Stephen’s activity provoked fierce hostility.

9–10  Stephen expounded his distinctive teaching about the implications of the gospel in one of the synagogues²⁷ of Jerusalem which was frequented by Jews from several lands of the dispersion, the “Synagogue of the Freedmen,” comprising worshipers from Cyrene, Alexandria, Cilicia, and Asia.²⁸ There were several synagogues in Jerusalem, some of them (like this one) attended by Hellenistic Jews. The mention of Cilicia raises the possibility that this was the synagogue attended by Saul, otherwise called Paul, whose native Tarsus was the principal city of Cilicia. (On the other hand, “a Hebrew born of Hebrews,” as he calls himself in Phil. 3:5, might have preferred to attend a synagogue where the service was conducted in Hebrew.) One Hellenistic synagogue in Jerusalem from the period preceding A.D. 70 is known from a Greek inscription set up by its founder Theodotus and discovered on Ophel in 1913/14.²⁹ It has been held that this was the very synagogue to which Luke refers here:³⁰ the identification, in the nature of the case, is incapable of proof. Freedmen were former slaves (or the children of former slaves) who had been emancipated by their owners; if their owners were Roman citizens, their freedmen were enrolled as members of their family. Many Jews who were taken captive to Rome at the time of Pompey’s conquest of Judaea (63 B.C.) were subsequently emancipated and thenceforth had the status of freedmen.

Stephen’s teaching aroused keen opposition, and a full-dress debate was probably arranged. The exact subject of the debate is not stated; the messiahship of Jesus was no doubt the central issue, but Stephen expounded the implications of this messiahship more radically than his fellow-believers had hitherto done, with reference to the abiding validity of the law of Moses and especially of the temple order. The nature of his arguments may be inferred from the charges brought against him (vv. 13–14) and from his reply (7:2–53). The strength of his case was such that his opponents in the debate found themselves worsted. They accepted his premises (for like him they acknowledged the authority of Old Testament scripture), but they could not accept his conclusions, so scandalous and revolutionary did they appear.

4. Stephen Accused before the Sanhedrin (6:11–15)

11  Then they put up men who said, “We have heard him speaking blasphemous words against Moses and against God.”

12  They stirred up all the people, the elders and the scribes, and setting upon him they seized him and brought him before the Sanhedrin.

13  There they set up false witnesses, who said, “This man never ceases speaking out against the holy place and the law;

14  we have heard him say that this Jesus of Nazareth will destroy this place and change the customs which Moses handed down to us.”

15  All who sat in the Sanhedrin fixed their eyes on him and saw his face: it was like the face of an angel.³¹

11  Unable to silence Stephen in open debate, his opponents adopted another course. Informers were put up to represent his arguments in the most damaging light. They are called “false witnesses” because, although their reports had a basis of truth, anyone who testifies against a spokesman of God is ipso facto a false witness. Stephen’s arguments constituted an attack on Moses, they said, because they implied the abrogation of Moses’ law; they constituted an attack on God because they threatened to undermine the temple order, the foundation of national worship, with which (it was believed) the glory of God was bound up.

According to the later formulation of rabbinical law, blasphemy involved the profane use of the ineffable name of Israel’s God³²—and any utterance of that name apart from the high priest’s pronouncing of it on the day of atonement was a profane use. But, as the narrative of our Lord’s appearance before the Sanhedrin indicates, blasphemy was interpreted in a wider sense in the early decades of the first century A.D. (cf. Mark 14:61–64). Stephen is later reported as making a claim for Jesus quite similar to that which Jesus himself had made before the Sanhedrin (7:56), but at this stage the charge of blasphemy against God was evidently based on the allegation that he had used language about the temple similar to the language which Jesus was unsuccessfully accused of using about it.

12  The charge brought against Stephen was all the deadlier because it was one which would infuriate the people of Jerusalem. Any threat, real or imagined, to the temple was not only an offense to their religious feelings; it was also a threat to their livelihood. The economic life of the city and its residents depended on the temple. The chief-priestly party knew that they need have no fear of popular disapproval this time in prosecuting a leading member of the Nazarene community; on the contrary, the people would support and indeed demand the severest sanctions of the law against this man. Stephen was accordingly arrested and put on his trial before the Sanhedrin.

13–14  The witnesses gave their evidence. Stephen’s teaching, they said, threatened both the temple (“the holy place”) and the law,³³ for he maintained persistently that Jesus of Nazareth would destroy the temple and change the customs handed down from Moses’ time.

As with the “false witnesses” who brought similar testimony against Jesus before the Sanhedrin, their charges were not baseless fabrications. Jesus had indeed said something about destroying the temple, and Stephen had evidently repeated his words. What Stephen meant (as appears in the sequel) was that the coming of Christ implied the end of the temple order. Jesus foretold the destruction of the material temple—“not one stone will be left standing on another,” he said; “all will be thrown down” (Mark 13:2)—but the charge brought against him at his trial was not based on this prediction. As the charge was worded, he bad said, “I will destroy this temple that is made with hands, and in three days I will build another, not made with hands” (Mark 14:58); on this the witnesses seem to have agreed, although in other details their testimony involved such discrepancies that it had to be disallowed. That Jesus had indeed said something of the kind was apparently a matter of general knowledge in Jerusalem; it was recalled in mockery when he was exposed to public derision on the cross (Mark 15:29–30). But we search the Synoptic Gospels in vain for any information about the setting in which he uttered those words, or words like them. John, however, says that when he was challenged to justify his action in cleansing the temple, he said, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up” (John 2:19). John explains these words as a reference to the raising up of “the temple of his body” on the third day (John 2:21). He does not report Jesus as using the terms “made with hands” and “not made with hands,” but the way in which those terms entered into the Christian vocabulary from an early date suggests strongly that they do indeed owe their origin to Jesus.³⁴

It is noteworthy that Luke, in his narrative of the trial of Jesus, does not reproduce the incident of the false witnesses. This is not the only place where Luke omits a theme in the ministry of Jesus, featuring in the other Synoptic Gospels, in order to deal with it in a new context in the life of the early church.³⁵ Here we have an instance of this tendency in his treatment of the theme of the destruction of the temple by Jesus.

Whatever form of words Stephen used which gave rise to the accusation that he said Jesus would destroy the temple, he certainly grasped and expounded the inner meaning of Jesus’ own words. The apostles and many of the rank and file of the Jerusalem church might continue to attend the temple services and to be respected as devout and observant Jews; Stephen held that the gospel meant the end of the sacrificial cultus and all the ceremonial law. As he and his fellow-Hellenists saw the situation, those things were the outward and visible sign of Jewish particularism, and could not be reconciled with the wider scope of the salvation accomplished by Jesus. Jesus himself had said that with his message of the kingdom “some thing greater than the temple” had come (Matt. 12:6). The inauguration of the new order meant the supersession of the temple order by a new edifice not made with hands, that spiritual house of living stones described in 1 Pet. 2:4–10 where spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God, are offered up through Jesus Christ by a holy priesthood.

15  When the attempt was made to convict Jesus on a charge of threatening the security or sanctity of the temple, it may have been because the profanation of the temple was an offense which the Roman administration expressly reserved to the jurisdiction of the Jewish authorities. Had he been convicted on that charge, they could have dealt with him at their own discretion, without reference to the prefect. The attempt failed against Jesus, but there was every prospect that a prosecution of Stephen on those grounds would be successful. It was unnecessary to elaborate the charge of speaking against the law, when the evidence for his speaking against the temple was so unambiguous. But while his accusers pressed their charge against him, Stephen stood before the Sanhedrin with face aglow, as one who stood consciously in the presence of God.³⁶ This was “not the mild, gentle look that is often seen in paintings of angels; not the fierce look of an avenging angel, but a look that told of inspiration within, clear eyes burning with the inner light.”³⁷ Luke does not say explicitly at this stage that Stephen was filled with the Holy Spirit as he faced his judges,³⁸ although he says so of Peter when he made his defense before the same court a little earlier (4:8); he has no need to do so here, since his whole narrative implies it.

1. Lit., “in these days” (…), a formula marking the beginning of a new division of the work and here also the use of a new (Hellenistic) source, which went on to record the launching of the Gentile mission in Syrian Antioch (11:19–26).

2. This is the first occurrence in Acts of the word “disciples” () as a designation for the followers of Jesus; it is used frequently in Luke and the other Gospels for those who accompanied him during his ministry.

3. The Western text adds “because it was being administered by Hebrews” ().

4. The Western reading is fuller: “What is it then, brothers? look out seven men from among yourselves.…”

5. On the term “Hellenists” () see H. J. Cadbury, “The Hellenists,” in Beginnings I.5 (London, 1933), pp. 59-74; C. F. D. Moule, “Once More, Who Were the Hellenists?” ExT 70 (1958–59), pp. 100-102; M. Hengel, Between Jesus and Paul, E.T. (London, 1983), pp. 1-29; also H. Windisch, TDNT 2, pp. 511–12 (s.v.); BAGD, s.v. .

6. We find this tension in the early Hellenistic period (cf. 1 Macc. 1:11–15), and it persisted into the Roman period; see M. Hengel, Judaism and Hellenism, E.T. (London, 1974), Jews, Greeks and Barbarians, E.T. (London, 1980); I. H. Marshall, “Palestinian and Hellenistic Christianity,” NTS 19 (1972–73), pp. 271–87.

7. This term is used for the apostles here only in Acts (cf. “the Eleven” in 1:26; 2:14, where one of the Twelve receives special mention and the rest are referred to collectively), although it is quite common in Mark and Luke (cf. 1 Cor. 15:5).

8. A literal anglicization of Luther’s in der täglichen Handreichung.

9. See 8:5–40; 21:8–9. On the possibility that he was one of Luke’s informants for part of his narrative see p. 400 with n. 10.

10. Under his name there has come down to us an apocryphal fifth-century work called the Acts Of John, an orthodox work, not to be confused with the second-century Gnostic composition with the same title.

11. J. Smith points out as a parallel that, out of eight accounts of Napoleon’s Russian campaign (three by Frenchmen, three by Englishmen, and two by Scots), only the two Scots mention that the Russian general Barclay de Tolly was of Scots extraction (The Voyage and Shipwreck of St. Paul [London, ⁴1880], p. 4). See pp. 229–30, nn. 33, 40 (on 11:28).

12. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 1.23.1; cf. 3.11.7. Victorinus of Pettau (c. A.D. 300), in the earliest Latin commentary on the Apocalypse, has a note on Rev. 2:6: “Before that time factious and pestilential men had made for themselves a heresy in the name of the deacon Nicolaus, teaching that meat offered to idols could be exorcized, so that it might be eaten, and that one who had committed fornication might receive absolution on the eighth day.” Victorinus is more circumstantial in his account than Irenaeus, and does not make Nicolaus personally responsible for Nicolaitanism; he may have drawn his information on this matter (as on much else) from Papias. The Nicolaitans evidently encouraged Christians to ignore the terms of the apostolic decree of 15:29 below (see pp. 299–300).

13. Mishnah, Sanhedrin 4.4. The ceremony was called in Hebrew. Cf. 8:17; 9:12, 17; 19:6 below, with accompanying exposition and notes.

14. The NT uses diakonos in a wide variety of senses, e.g., of domestic servants, of civil magistrates as servants of God, of Christian preachers and teachers as servants of Christ, and even of Christ himself, as a “servant to the circumcised” (Rom. 15:8).

15. Gk. , “to serve at tables,” where the “tables” may have been used either for handing out food or (more probably) for distributing the money to buy food.

16. Gk. ….

17. For and see 20:17, 28 below, with exposition and notes.

18. There is a variant reading “Jews” for “priests” in Cod. and a few cursives; there is also a Western variant “in the temple” ().

19.This objective use of “faith” (that which is to be believed, i.e., the gospel) is commoner in the Pastoral Letters (cf. 1 Tim. 1:19; 4:6; 6:10) than elsewhere in the NT. If the article were not present (), one might render “were obedient by faith” (cf. “obedience of faith” in Rom. 1:5; 16:26, i.e., the obedience which consists in faith).

20. Cf. 9:31; 12:24; 16:5; 19:20; 28:31. C. H. Turner (“Chronology of the New Testament,” HDB I, pp. 421–23) points out that Acts is thus cut into six “panels” covering on an average five years each.

21. K. Bornhäuser interpreted the Letter to the Hebrews on the improbable theory that it was addressed to these believing priests (Empfänger und Verfasser des Briefes an die Hebräer [Gütersloh, 1932]). C. Spicq, who took a similar line in L’épître aux Hébreux, I (Paris, 1952), pp. 218, 226–31, later argued that these priests were “Esseno-Christians,” former members of the Qumran community (“L’épître aux Hebreux: Apollos. Jean-Baptiste, les Hellenistes et Qumran,” Revue de Qumran 1 [1958–59], pp. 365–90).

22. Luke 1:5–6.

23. A. Cole, The New Temple (London, 1950), p. 33.

24. For “grace” the Byzantine text reads “faith” (in conformity with v. 5). After “among the people” there is a Western addition: “by the name of the Lord (Jesus Christ).”

25. After “withstand” the Western text continues: “… the wisdom which was in him and the Holy Spirit by whom he spoke, for they were confuted before him with all freedom of speech. Being unable, therefore, to face up () to the truth, they suborned men.”

26. G. W. H. Lampe, The Seal of the Spirit (London, 1951), p. 74.

27. The synagogue was instituted, perhaps as early as the Babylonian exile, for the reading and exposition of the sacred scriptures. Especially in the lands of the dispersion, it served as the general community center for the Jews in any locality. In a large city there might be several Jewish synagogues, although the tradition that there were 480 in Jerusalem before its destruction (TJ Megillah 73d) may be taken with a grain of salt. See Schürer II, pp. 423–54.

28. It is most probable that only one synagogue is in view here, although some have seen a reference to two, three, four, or even five synagogues in the text. The emendation of “Libertines” to “Libyans” (so Beza, Tischendorf, M. Dibelius) is tempting in the vicinity of “Cyrenaeans” and “Alexandrians”; but the temptation should be resisted. A libertinus (the Latin term here taken over as a loanword into Greek) was either the manumitted slave of a Roman citizen (a libertus) or the son of one. See A. M. Duff, Freedmen in the Early Roman Empire (Oxford, ²1957).

29. CIJ 1404; cf. A. Deissmann, Light from the Ancient East, E.T. (London, ²1927), pp. 439–41.

30. Cf. L. H. Vincent, “Découverte de la Synagogue des Affranchis a Jérusalem,” RB 30 (1921), pp. 247–77.

31. The Western text adds: “standing in their midst.”

32. “The blasphemer is not guilty until he have expressly uttered the Name” (Mishnah, Sanhedrin 7.5).

33. Compare the charge brought against Paul in 21:28 below.

34. Cf. 7:48. See C. F. D. Moule, “Sanctuary and Sacrifice in the Church of the New Testament,” JTS n.s. 1 (1950), pp. 29–41; M. Simon, “St. Stephen and the Jerusalem Temple,” JEH 2 (1951), pp. 133–37; R. J. McKelvey, The New Temple (Oxford, 1969), pp. 67–72, 77–80, 86–87.

35. Cf. 5:15 (p. 109, n. 26).

36. With the description of Stephen’s face being “like the face of an angel” compare the pen-picture of Paul in the second-century Acts of Paul 3 (see p. 271 with n. 8): “full of grace, for at times he looked like a man, and at times he had the face of an angel.”

37. L. E. Browne, The Acts of the Apostles (London, 1925), p. 111. Perhaps Professor Browne indulges his imagination somewhat when he goes on: “We can hardly doubt that it was Saul who remembered that look, a look which burnt into his soul until he too was turned to accept Jesus as his master and learnt in his own life to experience the presence of the Holy Spirit.”

38. Stephen is explicitly said to have been “full of the Holy Spirit” when, having finished his defense, he saw the Son of Man at the right hand of God (7:55). See also v. 5 above.

ACTS 7

5. The High Priest’s Question (7:1)

1  The high priest said,¹ “Is this so?”

1 The high priest was probably still Caiaphas, as at the trial of Jesus; he remained in office until A.D. 36.² As president of the Sanhedrin by virtue of his office, he was chief judge in Israel. It was necessary in Jewish court procedure that the accused person should know what the charges against him were, and have an opportunity of replying to them.³

6. Stephen’s Reply (7:2–53)

a. The patriarchal age (7:2–8)

2  Then Stephen said, “Brothers and fathers, listen. The God of glory appeared to Abraham our father when he was in Mesopotamia, before he took up residence in Harran,

3  and said to him, ‘Leave your country and your kinsfolk, and come into the land that I will show you.’

4  Then he left the land of the Chaldaeans and took up residence in Harran. After his father’s death, God made him migrate into this land in which you now reside.⁴

5  He gave him no inheritance in it, not even as much as his foot could cover, but he promised to give it as a possession to him and to his posterity after him, although as yet he was childless.

6  ‘Your posterity,’ God told him, ‘will be resident aliens in a foreign land; they will enslave them and ill-treat them for four hundred years.

7  But I will bring judgment on the nation by which they are enslaved,’ said God, ‘and after that they will come out, and worship me in this place.’

8  He gave him, moreover, the covenant of circumcision, and so, when Isaac was born to Abraham he circumcised him on the eighth day, and Isaac did so in turn to Jacob, and Jacob to the twelve patriarchs.

This speech is commonly called Stephen’s defense, or apology, but it is obviously not a speech for the defense in the forensic sense of the term.⁵ Such a speech as this was by no means calculated to secure an acquittal before the Sanhedrin. It is rather a defense of pure Christianity as God’s appointed way of worship; Stephen here shows himself to be the precursor of the later Christian apologists, especially those who defended Christianity against Judaism. The charges brought against Stephen by the witnesses for the prosecution may have been framed tendentiously; Stephen sets forth here in some detail the arguments of which those charges were travesties.

A major theme of the speech is its insistence that the presence of God is not restricted to any one land or to any material building. God revealed himself to Abraham long before Abraham settled in the holy land; he was with Joseph in Egypt; he gave his law to the people of Israel through Moses when they were wanderers in a wilderness. The people of God similarly should not be restricted to any one locality; a movable tent such as they had in the wilderness and in the earlier years of their settlement in Canaan was a more fitting shrine for the divine presence in their midst than the fixed structure of stone that King Solomon built. The period that Israel spent as a pilgrim people—“the church in the wilderness”—is viewed as setting forth the divine order; in this respect (as in some others) Stephen echoes the teaching of the great Old Testament prophets—though even in the wilderness Israel fell short of the divine ideal.

Another theme of the speech becomes a regular feature of later anti-Judaic apologetic—the insistence that the Jewish people’s refusal to acknowledge Jesus as Messiah was all of a piece with their attitude to God’s messengers from the beginning of their national history. Joseph’s brothers hated him, although he was God’s predestined deliverer for them; Moses, another divinely ordained deliverer, was repudiated by his people more than once. The prophets too were persecuted and killed by those to whom they brought the word of God, and at last the one to whom the prophets bore witness in advance had been handed over to death by those to whom his saving message was first proclaimed.

It has been argued that Stephen’s speech is marked by emphases which are characteristically Samaritan.⁶ But the Samaritans did not dispute the principle of a temple, as Stephen did: they differed from the Jews on the question of its proper location—on Mount Gerizim or in Jerusalem (cf. John 4:20). Stephen’s insistence that “the Most High does not dwell in houses made with hands” (v. 48) would have been as applicable to the Samaritan temple on Gerizim while it stood as it was to the temple in Jerusalem.

The attempt has also been made to relate Stephen’s viewpoint to that of the Ebionites, those judaizing Christians who for some centuries maintained their distinctness from catholic Christianity.⁷ They shared to some extent Stephen’s negative attitude to the temple order and sacrificial ritual, and looked on Jesus as the Deuteronomic “prophet like Moses” (cf. v. 37). But the Ebionite attitude was the result of reflection on the theological implications of the destruction of the temple in A.D. 70, whereas Stephen appreciated the logic of the situation nearly forty years before that.⁸

The Ebionites were far from sympathizing with the Gentile world mission which was logically implied in Stephen’s argument and which was inaugurated by his death. The Christians who embarked on this world mission were Hellenists like Stephen, and in his speech we may recognize the first manifesto of Hellenistic Christianity. Stephen and his fellow-Hellenists, as has already been pointed out, were more farsighted than their “Hebrew” brethren in appreciating the breach with the temple order implied in the teaching and work of Jesus. But it looks as if they were also more farsighted in appreciating the supranational and universal scope of the gospel. The opening words of Stephen’s defense imply that the people of God must be on the march, must pull up their tent stakes as Abraham did, leaving national particularism and ancestral ritual, and go out where God may lead. This note indeed anticipated the call in Heb. 13:13 to abandon traditional Judaism for Jesus’ sake and “go forth to him outside the camp.” In a number of respects Stephen blazes a trail later followed by the writer to the Hebrews, although Stephen is in some ways the more radical of the two: in Hebrews the levitical ritual is treated as “a shadow of the good things to come” (Heb. 10:1), whereas Stephen maintains that the sacrificial system was a perversion from the wilderness period onward (vv. 41–43).⁹

There were doubtless different nuances of emphasis within Hellenistic Christianity. Luke himself does not share Stephen’s wholly negative estimate of the temple: until a late point in his record he mentions it with respect, from the angelic annunciation to Zechariah in the holy place (Luke 1:8–22) to Paul’s vision of Christ within the sacred precincts (Acts 22:17). Not until Paul’s ejection from the temple during his last visit to Jerusalem (21:30) is its doom sealed.¹⁰

It is uncertain if Stephen’s view of the temple order as a deviation from the authentic tradition of Israel’s worship reflects a particular tendency within Hellenistic Judaism.¹¹ No doubt many Jews of the dispersion felt less attached to temple and sacrifice than did their fellow-Jews nearer home, but even Philo of Alexandria regarded the temple with veneration and went on pilgrimage to Jerusalem to offer prayers and sacrifices there.¹² Stephen’s view, in any case, was controlled by his understanding of the difference that Christ had made.

2–3  Stephen has his reply ready. It takes the form of a historical retrospect—a form well established in Jewish tradition. “The protestation of faith is, in the Old Testament, often associated with a recital of the divine intervention in the life of Israel. ‘God in history’ was the underlying basis of Rabbinic optimism. The declaration at the bringing of the first-fruits (Deut. 26:5–10) is paralleled by Psalms 78 and 107.… Stephen’s address in Acts 7is thus in the true form. It is in the sequel that he differs from Hebrew models.”¹³

Stephen’s historical survey reviews the history of the nation from the call of Abraham to the building of Solomon’s temple. His outline of the patriarchal age (vv. 2–8) and of Israel in Egypt (vv. 9–19) provides an introduction to his central themes; his account of Moses’ early days (vv. 20–29), the call of Moses (vv. 30–34), and the wilderness wanderings (vv. 35–43) provides an indirect answer to the charge of speaking against Moses and a more direct answer to the charge of speaking against God; his contrast between the wilderness tent and the Jerusalem temple (vv. 44–50) replies particularly to the charge of speaking against the temple.

Beginning with the patriarchal age, then, he reminds his hearers that it was in Mesopotamia,¹⁴ far from the promised land, that God first revealed himself to Abraham. One might well ask what could have persuaded Abraham to uproot himself as he did from the land of his birth and set out on a journey whose goal he did not know in advance. By all the prudential canons of ordinary life, it was a mad adventure; but as related in the biblical narrative it was an act of true wisdom. It was the God of glory¹⁵ who appeared to him and summoned him to embark on the path of faith, and the use of that title implies that God manifested himself to Abraham in glory so compelling that Abraham had no option but to obey. Those who are obedient to the heavenly vision, Stephen seems to suggest, will always live loose to any particular earthly spot, will always be ready to get out and go wherever God may guide.

A glance at any edition of the New Testament, Greek or English, in which Old Testament quotations or allusions are set in distinctive type, will show how far the very language of the Old Testament enters into the texture of Stephen’s speech. (It is quoted regularly in the LXX form.) But the speech is no mere catena of quotations, studiously put together; the Old Testament wording is reproduced with a spontaneity which suggests that the author has the narrative at his fingertips and is able to use it with a striking freshness and freedom.¹⁶ Here, in verse 3, he quotes from Gen. 12:1 the words spoken by God to Abraham in Harran after the death of his father Terah, but gives them a setting before Abraham’s departure for Harran on the first stage of his journey. When it is stated in Gen. 15:7 and Neh. 9:7 that God brought Abraham from Ur of the Chaldees, it is probably implied that Abraham received a divine communication there as well as later, when he had settled in Harran. Philo and Josephus concur.¹⁷

4–5  Abraham accordingly left “the land of the Chaldaeans”¹⁸—a term which is plainly synonymous here with “Mesopotamia” (v. 2)¹⁹—and settled in Harran, in the upper Euphrates valley, at the intersection of important caravan trade routes, known to have been a flourishing city early in the second millennium B.C.²⁰There he stayed until his father died; then, under divine direction, he continued his migration and arrived in Canaan.²¹ But even then Abraham was given no part of the land in actual possession: for the rest of his life he lived as a resident alien there. It was a promised land indeed to him—promised to him and his posterity before he had any children—but to him and his immediate posterity it remained no more than a promised land. Abraham had no tangible object in which to trust: he believed the bare word of God, and acted upon it.

6–7 Not only did Abraham receive no portion of the land as a present possession; his faith was further tested by the revelation that his descendants would leave that land for one that was not their own, and that they would suffer oppression and servitude there for several generations.²² Yet their exile would not be permanent: in due course God would give them deliverance from their oppressors and bring them back to worship him in the land of Canaan.²³

8  One sign was given to Abraham, the sign of circumcision, as the outward token of the covenant which God made with him.²⁴ Abraham’s acceptance of this visible token for himself and his descendants was a further expression of his faith in God. And “thus, while there was still no holy place, all the essential conditions for the religion of Israel were fulfilled.”²⁵ When Isaac was born, Abraham circumcised him on the eighth day after his birth,²⁶ and the sign of the covenant was transmitted from generation to generation, from Isaac to Jacob, and from Jacob to his twelve sons, the ancestors of the twelve tribes of Israel.²⁷

b. Israel in Egypt (7:9–19)

9  “The patriarchs, moved by jealousy, sold Joseph into Egypt; but God was with him,

10  and delivered him out of all his afflictions, and gave him favor and wisdom in the presence of Pharaoh, king of Egypt. Pharaoh appointed him governor over Egypt and over all his house.

11  Then a famine and great distress came upon the whole of Egypt and Canaan, and our forefathers could find no food.

12  Hearing that there was grain in Egypt, Jacob sent our forefathers there a first time.

13  On their second visit Joseph was made known to his brothers, and Joseph’s kinship was disclosed to Pharaoh.

14  Then Joseph sent and called for his father Jacob and all his family, amounting in all to seventy-five persons.

15  So Jacob went down into Egypt²⁸ and died there, as also did our forefathers,

16  and they were brought back to Shechem and laid in the tomb which Abraham had bought for a price in silver from the sons of Hamor in Shechem.²⁹

17  When the time was approaching for the (fulfilment of the) promise which God had made³⁰ to Abraham, the people increased and multiplied in Egypt,

18  until there arose over Egypt another king, who did not know³¹ Joseph.

19  This king plotted against our people; he ill-treated our forefathers, making them expose their newborn infants so that they should not be brought up alive.

9–10  As early as the patriarchal age, there was opposition to the purpose of God in calling Abraham and guiding the fortunes of his posterity. The sons of Jacob sold their brother Joseph into slavery in Egypt. But God was continuously superintending the accomplishment of that one increasing purpose which he inaugurated when he called the father of the faithful out of Mesopotamia, and which was to find its consummation in the coming of Christ. He so ordered the fortunes of Joseph in Egypt that he rose to high authority in that land as grand vizier to Pharaoh.³²

11–16  This worked out to the advantage of Joseph’s family, for when famine arose in Canaan the sons of Jacob went to buy food in Egypt, where Joseph’s foresight and authority had prepared large stores of grain. On the second occasion when they went to Egypt to buy food, Joseph (whom they had not recognized on their former visit)³³ revealed his identity to them, and they were forced to acknowledge him as their deliverer. (There may be a suggestion here that a greater than Joseph, who also was not recognized by his people when he came to them the first time, will be acknowledged by them as their divinely appointed deliverer when they see him the second time.) The result of the brothers’ recognition of Joseph and their reconciliation to him was that Jacob and all his family went down to Egypt—seventy-five persons in all, says Stephen, following the Greek text.³⁴ There Jacob died; there, too, his sons also died in due course. But they were buried not in Egypt but in the land which God had promised to their descendants as their inheritance.³⁵ The presence of their tombs in the land of promise, where the tombs of Abraham and Isaac were already, was a token that, even if they died down in Egypt, they died in faith.³⁶

17–19  Their children and grandchildren, however, stayed in Egypt and multiplied there, until the appointed time came for God to redeem his promise to the patriarchs and give their descendants possession of the land of Canaan. The instrument in God’s hand for bringing about their departure from Egypt was a new king (presumably one of the early kings of the Nineteenth Dynasty)³⁷ who tried to restrict the increasing number of Israelites by forced labor and compulsory infanticide. But for his policy they might have found Egypt so comfortable that they would never have thought of leaving it.

c. Moses’ early days (7:20–29)

20  “It was at this time that Moses was born—an exceedingly beautiful³⁸ child. He was brought up for three months in his father’s house.

21  Then he was exposed, but Pharaoh’s daughter adopted him and brought him up as her son.

22  So Moses was educated in all the wisdom of the Egyptians; he was powerful in his words and deeds.

23  When he was nearly forty years old, he conceived the idea of visiting his brothers, the people of Israel.

24  When he saw one of them being unjustly treated, he went to his defense and avenged the injury inflicted on him by giving the Egyptian a mortal blow.³⁹

25  He thought his brothers understood that God was giving them deliverance through him, but they did not.

26  The next day he accosted them when they were engaged in a fight and tried to reconcile them peacefully. ‘Men,’ he said, ‘you are brothers.⁴⁰ Why should you harm each other?’

27  But the man who was attacking the other pushed him away: ‘Who,’ he asked, ‘made you ruler and judge over us?

28  Do you want to kill me, as you killed the Egyptian yesterday?’

29  When he heard this, Moses fled. He lived as an alien in the land of Midian; there two sons were born to him.

20–22  The edict that every male child born to the Israelites was to be exposed at birth, or thrown into the Nile, was defied by Moses’ parents. They kept him for three months before exposing him, and when at last they did expose him, they did so in such a way that he was quickly rescued.⁴¹ A daughter of the king found him, was attracted by him, and brought him up as her son, in a style befitting a royal prince.⁴² Thus Moses received the best education that the Egyptian court could provide, and distinguished himself in speech and action.⁴³ Stephen expresses himself with more moderation than other Jewish Hellenists, who represent Moses as the father of science and culture and as the founder of Egyptian civilization.⁴⁴

23–28  That an Egyptian king should try to frustrate the divine purpose was intelligible, but some of the chosen people themselves tried unintentionally to hinder it. If Pharaoh was God’s instrument in weaning the Israelites from their attachment to Egypt, Moses was his agent in leading them out. Moses had begun to be aware of this, but his fellow-Israelites were slow to recognize him as their deliverer. This was shown on the occasion when he presented himself to them as their champion, after he was fully grown,⁴⁵ but his intervention on their behalf was not appreciated. The writer to the Hebrews tells how at this time he made the great renunciation, refusing to be known any more as the son of a royal princess and casting in his lot by preference with the downtrodden people of God (Heb. 11:24–26). Here again a pattern of behavior is traced which was to find its complete and final expression when Jesus appeared among his people as the Savior provided by God.

29  Moses had exposed himself to grave peril by his attempt to champion his oppressed people. His action in killing an Egyptian bully was more widely known than he wished. His royal upbringing would not protect him if Pharaoh suspected that he planned to lead a slave revolt. Moses had to leave Egypt in haste, and find refuge in northwest Arabia.⁴⁶ There he in turn, like his patriarchal ancestors, became “a sojourner in a foreign land” (Ex. 2:22)—a fact which he acknowledged when he called his firstborn son Gershom (“a sojourner there”).⁴⁷

d. The call of Moses (7:30–34)

30  “When forty years had elapsed, an angel appeared to him in the wilderness of Mount Sinai, in the flame of a burning bush.

31  When Moses saw it, he was amazed at the sight. As he was approaching it to look at it, the voice of the Lord came to him:⁴⁸

32  ‘I am the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.’⁴⁹ Moses trembled and did not dare to look.

33  Then the Lord said to him, ‘Take off your sandals from your feet; the place where you are standing is holy ground.

34  I have indeed seen the ill-treatment of my people in Egypt, I have heard their groaning, and I have come down to deliver them. Come now, let me send you to Egypt.’

30–34  Moses’ exile was part of the divine plan: it was there in northwest Arabia, “in the wilderness of Mount Sinai,” that an angel of God appeared to him in the burning bush and the voice of God addressed him.⁵⁰ The God who revealed himself to Abraham in Mesopotamia and gave Joseph the assurance of his presence in Egypt now communicated with Moses by vision and voice in Midian, far from the frontiers of the holy land. That spot of Gentile territory was “holy ground” for the sole reason that God manifested himself to Moses there.⁵¹ No place on earth possesses an innate sanctity of its own. In its Christian application this principle is expressed excellently in William Cowper’s lines:

“Jesus, where’er thy people meet,

There they behold thy mercy-seat;

Where’er they seek thee, thou art found,

And every place is hallowed ground.”

But it found expression much earlier in Israel’s covenant law: “in every place,” said Yahweh, “where I cause my name to be remembered, I will come to you and bless you” (Ex. 20:24).

The message which Moses received from God at that holy place was one of faithfulness to his promise. God had not forgotten his covenant with the patriarchs: he remained the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Nor was he heedless of the distress of their descendants in Egypt: he was on the point of intervening for their deliverance, and in this deliverance Moses was to be his agent. “Come now, let me send you to Egypt.”

e. The wilderness wanderings (7:35–43)

35  “This man Moses, whom they repudiated with the words, ‘Who made you our ruler and judge?’⁵²—this is the man whom God has sent as their ruler and deliverer, with the power of the angel who appeared to him in the bush.

36  This is the man who brought them out, after performing wonders and signs in the land of Egypt and at the Red Sea, as also for forty years in the wilderness.

37  This is that Moses who said to the people of Israel, ‘God will raise you up a prophet like me from among your brothers. ‘⁵³

38  This is he who was in the assembly in the wilderness with the angel that spoke to him on Mount Sinai and with our forefathers; it is he who received living oracles to give to us.

39  But our fathers refused to obey him: they rejected him and turned back to Egypt in their hearts.

40  ‘Make us gods to go before us,’ they said to Aaron; ‘as for this man Moses, who brought us out of Egypt, we do not know what has happened to him.’

41  In those days, moreover, they made the calf, offered a sacrifice to the idol, and exulted in what their own hands had made.

42   So God turned (from them): he abandoned them to the worship of the host of heaven. So it is written in the book of the prophets:

‘Did you bring sacrifices and offerings to me,

Those forty years in the wilderness, O house of Israel?

43  No: you took up the tent of

Moloch and the star of your god Raiphan,

the images which you made for your worship.

I will remove you beyond Babylon.’⁵⁴

35–36  The very man whom his people had refused was the man chosen by God to be their ruler and redeemer. They had rejected him the first time (as Joseph’s brothers had repudiated Joseph), but the second time he came to them they had no option but to accept him (as Joseph’s brothers recognized him on the second occasion). The implied parallel with the recent refusal of Jesus is too plain to require elaboration. All the authority of the divine messenger whom he had seen at the burning bush lay behind Moses when he went back to Egypt to lead his people out, and lead them out he did, amid tokens of his heavenly commission that none could gainsay—“wonders and signs⁵⁵ in the land of Egypt and at the Red Sea,” not to speak of those which marked the following years of wandering in the wilderness.⁵⁶

37  Was Moses in all this a forerunner of Jesus, as Stephen appeared to claim? Moses’ own words supply a sufficient answer—and here Stephen quotes the promise about the prophet like Moses from Deut. 18:15 which Peter has already quoted in the temple court (3:22).

38  There in the wilderness Moses was the people’s leader; there they were constituted Yahweh’s assembly;⁵⁷ there they had the “angel of the presence”⁵⁸ in their midst; there they received through Moses the living oracles of God.⁵⁹ What more could the people of God want?—and it was all theirs in the wilderness, far from the promised land and the holy city.

39–41  Even so, they were not content: they disobeyed Moses and repudiated his leadership, although he was God’s spokesman and vicegerent among them. Was Stephen charged with speaking “blasphemous words against Moses”—with propagating doctrines which threatened the abiding validity of “the customs which Moses handed down to us”? Such a charge came well from the descendants of those who had refused Moses’ authority in his very lifetime, from people whose attitude to the greater prophet than Moses had shown them to be such worthy children of their forefathers! Why, those Israelites in the wilderness, for all their sacred privileges, longed to go back to Egypt, from which Moses had led them out.⁶⁰ The invisible presence of God was not enough for them: they craved some form of divinity that they could see. When Moses was absent, receiving the “oracles” from God on Mount Sinai, they persuaded Aaron to manufacture “gods to go before us.”⁶¹ Thus they showed how much they cared for the pure, aniconic worship of their fathers’ God. The long history of Israel’s lapsing into idolatry, which called forth the remonstrance of one prophet after another and at last brought them into exile, had its beginnings in the wilderness, when they paid sacrificial homage to the golden calf and held high festival in honor of their own handiwork.⁶²

42–43  The course of their idolatry, as traced throughout the Old Testament, from the wilderness wanderings to the Babylonian exile, Stephen finds summed up in the words of Amos 5:25–27. The full-blown worship of the “host of heaven,” the planetary powers, to which Jerusalem gave itself over in the later years of the monarchy, under Assyrian influence, was the fruition of that earlier idolatry in the wilderness.⁶³ It was more than its fruition, in fact; it was the divinely ordained judgment for that rebellious attitude. God turned and “abandoned them to the worship of the host of heaven.” These are terrible words, but the principle that men and women are given up to the due consequences of their own settled choice is well established in scripture and experience.⁶⁴ While Stephen asserts the principle here in relation to the Jewish nation, Paul asserts it in relation to the Gentile world in Rom. 1:24, 26, 28.

The Masoretic text of the words quoted from Amos differs considerably from the form reproduced here (the LXX rendering, with some variations). In the original wording and context Amos, prophesying on the eve of the Assyrian invasions which brought the northern kingdom of Israel to an end, warns the Israelites that they will be deported “beyond Damascus” and that they will carry with them into exile the very tokens of that idolatry—“Sakkuth your king and Kaiwan your star-god”—for which Yahweh is about to bring this judgment on them.⁶⁵ Both forms of the text begin with the question: “Did you bring me sacrifices and offerings during the forty years in the wilderness, O house of Israel?” And in both forms of the text the implied answer is “No.”

It must be determined how the implied answer “No” was understood first by Amos and then by Stephen.

As for Amos’s intention, it has commonly been believed that he implied that Israel’s worship in the wilderness was entirely nonsacrificial. But this interpretation fails to bring out the main emphasis of his words. His question probably meant: “Was it mere sacrifices and offerings, sacrifices and offerings that were an end in themselves and not the expression of your loyalty of spirit, that you offered in the wilderness days?” The expected answer will then be: “No: we offered something more than that; we brought true heart-worship and righteousness.”⁶⁶ Amos, like Jeremiah, looks back on the wilderness experience as Israel’s honeymoon period, when Yahweh’s will was her delight.⁶⁷

Stephen, however, following the LXX, understands the implied “No” to mean: “No: we offered sacrifices and offerings indeed, but to other gods, not to the God of Israel.”⁶⁸ He has just emphasized the unfaithfulness of Israel in worshiping the golden calf, and infers from that episode that the idolatry which the prophets later condemned had its origins in the wilderness. Even then the people had been rebellious in heart; even then they had gone astray after foreign divinities, taking up “the tent of Moloch” and “the star of your god Raiphan”—Raiphan being a designation of the planet Saturn.

Stephen certainly does not mean that the Mosaic tabernacle had actually become the “tent of Moloch” because of Israel’s perversion of the pure order of worship:⁶⁹ the Mosaic tabernacle is spoken of with high respect in the next sentence, as the symbol of God’s abiding faithfulness. Moloch and Raiphan are members of the “host of heaven”;⁷⁰ Stephen means that the worship of the planetary powers, for which the nation lost its liberty and suffered deportation, was the climax of that idolatrous process which began in the wilderness. In principle at least the worship of those powers had its inception in the wilderness: it was to them that sacrifices and offerings were brought even at that early date.⁷¹ Stephen does not mention the apostasy of Baal-peor, when Israel “ate the sacrifices of the dead” (Ps. 106 [LXX 105]:28), but that would have reinforced his argument.

Amos, foretelling the Assyrian exile of the northern kingdom, described the place of their captivity as “beyond Damascus”; the LXX rendering concurs with the Masoretic text. But the same disloyalty to the God of their fathers brought a similar judgment on the southern kingdom more than a century later, in the Babylonian exile, and Stephen accordingly replaces “beyond Damascus” with “beyond Babylon” (perhaps as being more relevant in a Jerusalem setting). The idols which they had made for worship could give them no help in that terrible day.

f. Tabernacle and temple (7:44–50)

44  “Our forefathers had the tent of testimony in the wilderness, as Moses was directed, by the one who spoke to him, to make it according to the model he had seen.

45  Our forefathers who succeeded them brought it in with Joshua when they dispossessed the nations which God drove out before them,⁷² (and so it remained) until the days of David⁷³

46  David found favor in God’s sight and sought to provide a tabernacle for the God⁷⁴ of Jacob.

47  But it was Solomon who built a house for him.

48  The Most High, however, does not dwell in houses made with hands. So the prophet says:

49  ‘Heaven is my throne;

Earth is a footstool for my feet.

What house will you build for me?’ says the Lord, ‘

Or what will be my resting-place?

50  Was it not my hand that made all these things?’⁷⁵

44  But had the people of Israel no sanctuary in the wilderness, no reminder of the presence of God in their midst, that they should so unaccountably and so quickly forget him and lapse into idolatry? Yes indeed, says Stephen; they had the “tent of the testimony”—the “Trysting tent,” to use James Moffatt’s rendering. It was called the tent of the testimony because it housed the tables of the law, known comprehensively as “the testimony.” The ark in which these tables were placed was accordingly called the “ark of the testimony”; the tent, which served as a shrine for the ark, was correspondingly called (among other things) the tent of the testimony.⁷⁶ It was no ordinary tent: it was made by the direct command of God, and constructed in every detail according to the model that Moses had been shown on the holy mount.⁷⁷ The writer to the Hebrews lays special emphasis on this model, identifying it with the heavenly sanctuary, “set up not by man but by the Lord” (Heb. 8:2). But, whereas the writer to the Hebrews draws attention to the sacrifices offered in association with the wilderness sanctuary and to their typological significance, Stephen is significantly silent about them; the only wilderness sacrifices which he mentions are those offered to idols.

Stephen has just countered the charge of blasphemy against Moses with a vos quoque; now he proceeds to counter the charge of blasphemy against God—that is, against his dwelling place—in the same way. The forefathers of his accusers and judges had rebelled against Moses; they paid similar disregard to the shrine which bore witness that God was continually dwelling among them as they moved from place to place.

45  When the Israelites at last entered the land of Canaan under Joshua’s⁷⁸ leadership, they took the tent of the testimony with them, together with the sacred ark which it enshrined. The tent remained with them, in one place or another, through the period of their dispossession of the Canaanites and their settlement in the land, down to the time of David. “In its mobile character—so we may here fill out the interstices of the argument—the tent was a type or figure of God’s never-ceasing, never-halted appointments for His people’s salvation.”⁷⁹

46  Toward the end of the period of the judges, the ark was captured by the Philistines. When they found themselves compelled to restore it, Samuel wisely relegated it to a place of obscurity. When King David established his new capital at Jerusalem, he enhanced its sacral character by bringing the ark out of its place of relegation at Kiriath-jearim and installing it in a tent-shrine which he had erected for it on Mount Zion.⁸⁰ His doing so is commemorated in Ps. 132:2–5, where it is related

“how he swore to Yahweh,

and vowed to the Mighty One of Jacob:

‘I will not enter my house

or get into my bed;

I will not give sleep to my eyes

or slumber to my eyelids,

till I find a place for Yahweh,

a dwelling-place for the Mighty One of Jacob.’ ”⁸¹

But when he had put down his enemies inside and outside the land, David longed to provide a nobler dwelling place for the ark (the token of God’s presence with his people) than this tent-shrine. The contrast between his own palace, panelled in cedar-wood, and the curtained tent within which the ark abode, weighed on his mind. He confided in the prophet Nathan, and Nathan’s first reaction was to commend the king and bid him act on his inclination and build a palace for the ark of God. But Nathan soon ascertained the mind of God more clearly, and went back to David with the message that God desired no house of cedar from him; instead, he would himself establish David’s house—his dynasty—in perpetuity.

Nathan went on to tell David that his son and successor would build a house for the “name” of God. But Stephen evidently did not consider that the building of Solomon’s temple was the fulfilment of this promise. It is plain that many early Christians interpreted the accompanying promise, that this son of David would have his throne established forever, as fulfilled in Christ.

“He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High;

and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David,

and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever;

and of his kingdom there will be no end” (Luke 1:32–33).

It was in Christ too, they believed, that the promise of a new house, built for the name of God, was truly fulfilled. It was directly after his entry into Jerusalem, when he was hailed as the son of David, that Jesus went into the temple area and ejected from the Court of the Gentiles the trespassers whose activity there prevented it from fulfilling its proper purpose. “Is it not written,” he asked, “ ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations’?” (Mark 11:17).⁸² In these words is an adumbration of that new temple in which those who were formerly “strangers and sojourners” are now made “fellow-citizens with the saints” and “built into” a living sanctuary which is a fit “dwelling place of God in the Spirit” (Eph. 2:19–22). The work of building began with Jesus’ resurrection: it was of “the temple of his body” that he spoke when he undertook to raise up a new temple in three days (John 2:20–21). If some such intention is rightly traced in Stephen’s language here, it underlines the relevance of this speech as a theological introduction to Luke’s narrative of the Gentile mission.

47  By contrast with the “tabernacle” or bivouac⁸³ that David erected for God, the house⁸⁴ that Solomon his son built was a structure of stone, immobile, fixed to one spot. The brevity with which Solomon’s building is introduced and dismissed, and the contrast implied with David’s intention, which was not to be realized until the advent of a greater than Solomon, expresses plain disapproval. Yet perhaps it is not so much Solomon’s action that Stephen deprecates—Solomon himself confessed that no temple made with hands could house the God of heaven: “Behold, heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain thee; how much less this house which I have built!” (1 Kings 8:27).⁸⁵ It was rather the state of mind to which the temple gave rise—a state of mind which could not have been engendered by the mobile tabernacle—that Stephen reprobated, as Jeremiah had done in his day.

48  The gods of the heathen might be accommodated in material shrines, but not God Most High. This was taught by the higher paganism, as well as by Jews and Christians.⁸⁶ The contrast between what is “made with hands” and what is “not made with hands” is a prominent feature in the primitive catechesis of the New Testament and early Christian apologetic.⁸⁷ Where the temple is concerned, the contrast appears to go back to our Lord himself. Although the evidence given at his trial, to the effect that he said, “I will destroy this temple that is made with hands, and in three days I will build another, not made with hands” (Mark 14:58), is described as “false witness,” it is not likely to have been false on this point.⁸⁸

49–50  To emphasize the full agreement of his case with the prophetic revelation, Stephen quotes the opening words of Isa. 66—words which clearly anticipate his own argument, whether their primary reference was to the building of the second temple or to some other occasion.⁸⁹ There the prophet goes on to say in Yahweh’s name, almost immediately after the passage quoted by Stephen: “But this is the man to whom I will look, he that is humble and contrite in spirit, and trembles at my word” (Isa. 66:2b). This well described the character of the people of God, who constitute his true temple (cf. Isa. 57:15). But to those who imagine that they can localize the presence of God, the scornful answer comes: “What is the place of my rest?” Do they think they can make God “stay put”—imprison him in a beautiful ornamented cage?⁹⁰ “The Temple was not intended … to become a permanent institution, halting the advance of the divine plan for the people of God.”⁹¹

Stephen’s argument is thus concluded; all that remains is to drive it home to the conscience of his audience. He has answered the charges brought forward by the prosecution. As for the charge of subverting the Mosaic tradition, it is not he but the nation, and preeminently its leaders, that should plead guilty to this: their guilt is amply attested by their own sacred scriptures, back to Moses’ own lifetime. As for the charge of blaspheming God by announcing the supersession of the temple by “this Jesus of Nazareth,” he makes no attempt to deny it but justifies his position by the claim that it is the position occupied by the patriarchs and prophets, whereas the position of his opponents involves a point-blank denial of the consistent witness of the scriptures. “Stephen’s speech thus resolves itself into a great defence of the doctrine of the Church Invisible, based on a broad survey of the history of the people of God.”⁹²

g. Personal application (7:51–53)

51  “You obstinate people, disobedient in heart and hearing alike, you always oppose the Holy Spirit. Your forefathers did so, and so do you.

52  Which of the prophets did your forefathers not persecute? They killed those who announced in advance the advent⁹³ of the Righteous One; you have now betrayed and murdered him—

53  you, who received the law by the agency of angels, but have not kept it.”

51  Having defended his position thus, Stephen now applies the moral to his hearers in true prophetic vein. The suddenness of his invective has taken some of his commentators by surprise, as it perhaps took some of his hearers; and it is suggested that his immediately preceding words must have occasioned an angry outburst in the court, to which he now responds. But it is unnecessary to think of any interruption at this point. There was really nothing to add after his quotation of Isa. 66:1–2; that clinched his case. The words that follow sum up in pointed and personal terms the indictment which he has been building up throughout his speech.

That the nation was obstinate, “stiffnecked,” was a complaint as old as the wilderness wanderings—a complaint made by God himself (Ex. 33:5). The description of them as disobedient—“uncircumcised in heart and ears”—meant that, while they were circumcised in the literal sense, in accordance with the Abrahamic institution, their unresponsiveness and resistance to God’s revelation were such as might have been expected from Gentiles to whom he had not made known his will (cf. Lev. 26:41; Deut. 10:16; Jer. 4:4; 6:10; 9:26; Ezek. 44:7). Moses and the prophets had described earlier generations in these terms; they were equally true, said Stephen, of the contemporary generation.

52  Many of the prophets of God in Old Testament times suffered persecution and sometimes death itself for their faithfulness to the divine commission. There is ample evidence of this in the canonical books, and Jewish tradition elaborated the theme,⁹⁴ describing, for example, the martyrdom of Isaiah by sawing asunder in the reign of Manasseh⁹⁵ and of Jeremiah by stoning at the hands of the people who had forced him to go down to Egypt with them.⁹⁶ Much of that opposition to the prophets was due to their attack on Israel’s perverted notions of the true worship of God—an attack exemplified in the prophetic texts quoted in Stephen’s speech. Stephen placed himself in the prophetic succession by attacking Israel’s record on this very point; it is therefore especially relevant that Israel’s traditional hostility to the prophets should be mentioned here.

But did not the Jews of later days reprobate their ancestors’ behavior toward the prophets? Yes indeed. “If we had lived in the days of our fathers,” they said, “we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets” (Matt. 23:30). They paid tribute to the prophets’ memory and built monuments in their honor. But Stephen insists that they are still true sons of their ancestors, maintaining the same hostility to God’s messengers:⁹⁷ if those ancestors killed those who foretold the advent of the Righteous One,⁹⁸ they themselves—and here Stephen’s indictment is directed particularly to his chief-priestly judges—had carried that hostility to its logical conclusion by handing the Righteous One himself over to violent death.

53  By rejecting the Messiah, they had filled up the measure of their fathers. The fathers had all along resisted the plan of God, the very purpose for which he had made them a nation and called them into covenant relationship with himself; their descendants had now repudiated the one in whom the divine plan and purpose were to be consummated. In the earliest days of the nation, it disobeyed the law of God, although it had received that law by angelic mediation.⁹⁹ And now in these last days, when God has spoken through no angel but through the Righteous One par excellence, Stephen’s hearers had with even greater decisiveness rejected him.

7. The Stoning of Stephen (7:54–8:la)

a. Stephen’s final witness (7:54–56)

54  Hearing this, they were filled with rage and ground their teeth at him.

55  But he, being full of the Holy Spirit, looked up into heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus¹⁰⁰ standing at God’s right hand.

56  “Look!” he said, “I see heaven opened, and the Son of Man standing at God’s right hand.”

54  To the earlier part of Stephen’s speech his judges had perhaps listened with considerable interest, wondering where his outline of patriarchal times would lead him. But as he continued, the drift of his argument became clearer, and they heard him with increasing anger and horror.¹⁰¹ And when he flung the charge of blasphemy, persistent opposition to God and his ways, back on themselves, their vexation and rage could no longer be restrained.¹⁰²

55–56  While his hearers gave vent to their annoyance, Stephen remained calm, fully controlled as before by the Spirit of God, when suddenly, as he kept his gaze fixed upward, a vision of the glory of God met his inward eye. Much more real to him in that moment than the angry gestures and cries of those around him was the presence of Jesus at God’s right hand. “Look!” he exclaimed. “I see the heavens parted and the Son of Man standing at God’s right hand.”¹⁰³

Not many years before, another prisoner had stood at the bar before the same court, charged with almost the same offenses as Stephen. But when the hostile evidence broke down, the high priest adjured the prisoner to tell the court plainly if he was indeed the Messiah, the Son of God. Had he said “Yes” and no more, it is not clear that he could have been convicted of a capital offense. “Messiah” was not his chosen self-designation, but if the question was put to him like that, he could not say “No.” He went on, however, to reframe his answer in words of his own choosing: “you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Almighty, and coming with the clouds of heaven” (Mark 14:62).¹⁰⁴ No more was required: Jesus was found guilty of blasphemy and judged to be worthy of death. Now Stephen in the same place was making the same claim on Jesus’ behalf as Jesus had made for himself: he was claiming, in fact, that those words of Jesus, far from being false and blasphemous, were words of sober truth which had received their vindication and fulfilment from God. Unless the judges were prepared to admit that their former decision was tragically mistaken, they had no option but to find Stephen guilty of blasphemy as well.

This is the only New Testament occurrence of the phrase “the Son of Man” outside the Gospels.¹⁰⁵ Apart from this instance, it is found only on the lips of Jesus. It has its Old Testament roots in Dan. 7:13–14, where a human figure (“one like a son of man,” in the literal rendering of the Aramaic) is seen coming to the enthroned Ancient of Days “with the clouds of heaven” to receive universal dominion from him. The un-Greek idiom “the Son of Man” (more literally “the son of the man”) means “the ‘one like a son of man’ ” who is to receive world dominion, but since it was not in current use as a technical term, Jesus could and did employ it freely of himself and fill it with whatever meaning he chose. The background in Dan. 7:13–27 links the “one like a son of man” closely with “the saints of the Most High,” whom the New Testament identifies with Jesus’ disciples and their converts.¹⁰⁶

Jesus’ reply to the high priest’s question combines Daniel’s description of the “one like a son of man” coming with the clouds of heaven and the oracle of Ps. 110:1 in which the king of Israel is invited by Yahweh to sit at his right hand. This oracle underlies the description of Stephen’s present vision. But Stephen sees the Son of Man not sitting but standing at God’s right hand. Is there any significance in this change of verb?

Some commentators have thought not; C. H. Dodd, for example, remarks that the verb to stand “has commonly the sense ‘to be situated’, without any necessary implication of an upright attitude.”¹⁰⁷ But in allusions to the oracle of Ps. 110:1 the participle “sitting” is so constant that this exception calls for an explanation. Various explanations have been offered. “He had not yet taken definitely his seat,” says William Kelly, “but was still giving the Jews a final opportunity. Would they reject the testimony to Him gone on high indeed, but as a sign waiting if peradventure they might repent and He might be sent to bring in the times of refreshing here below?”¹⁰⁸ But from Luke’s point of view this was no “final opportunity” for the Jews; they continue to receive further opportunities to the very end of his narrative.¹⁰⁹

More plausibly, Jesus has been pictured as rising up from the throne of God to greet his proto-martyr; J. A. Bengel, who takes this view, quotes to the same effect from the sixth-century Christian poet Arator.¹¹⁰ Others have understood Stephen to foresee the glory of Christ’s advent: “Christ rises in preparation for his Parousia,” says Huw Pari Owen.¹¹¹ A refinement of this interpretation is proposed by C. K. Barrett: Jesus is indeed standing because “he is about to come,” but Luke believed that “the death of each Christian would be marked by what we may term a private and personal parousia of the Son of man.”¹¹²

Most probably Stephen’s words should be taken closely along with Jesus’ promise: “everyone who acknowledges me before men, the Son of Man also will acknowledge before the angels of God” (Luke 12:8; in Matt. 10:33 “the Son of Man” is replaced by “I”). That is to say, Jesus stands up as witness or advocate in Stephen’s defense. Stephen appeals from the adverse judgment of the earthly court, and “in the heavenly court … this member of the Son of Man community is already being vindicated by the head of that community—the Son of Man par excellence” (C. F. D. Moule).¹¹³ If, at the moment when he was about to begin testifying before the Sanhedrin, Stephen had some foreview of this beatific vision, no wonder his face shone like an angel’s (6:15).

Did Stephen’s vision of the Son of Man involve an appreciation of his exercising world dominion? According to William Manson, “Stephen grasped and asserted the more-than-Jewish-Messianic sense in which the office and significance of Jesus in religious history were to be understood. … Whereas the Jewish nationalists were holding to the permanence of their national historical privilege, and even the ‘Hebrew’ Christians gathered round the Apostles were, with all their new Messianic faith, idealising the sacred institutions of the past, ‘continuing stedfastly in the temple’, ‘going up to the temple at the hour of prayer’ which was also the hour of the sacrificial service, sheltering under the eaves of the Holy Place, Stephen saw that the Messiah was on the throne of the universe.”¹¹⁴

This may be a just assessment of Stephen’s thought, but nothing like certainty on this is attainable. Manson’s interpretation is part of his case for seeing Stephen as the antecursor of the writer to the Hebrews. What may be said with some confidence is that Luke treats the ministry of Stephen as an introduction to the Gentile mission, in which Christ’s claim to world dominion began to be vindicated. The vindication of his sovereign claim by the Gentile mission appears again as the theme of James’s speech at the Council of Jerusalem (15:14–18).

In short, the presence of the Son of Man at God’s right hand meant that for his people a way of access to God had been opened up more immediate and heart-satisfying than the temple could provide. It meant that the hour of fulfilment had struck, and that the age of particularism had come to an end. The sovereignty of the Son of Man was to embrace all nations and races without distinction: under his sway there is no place for an institution which gives religious privileges to one group in preference to others.

b. Death of Stephen (7:57–60)

57  But with a loud shout they stopped their ears and rushed on him as one man.¹¹⁵

58  Then they hustled him outside the city and proceeded to stone him. The witnesses laid down their clothes at the feet of a young man called Saul.

59  So they stoned Stephen, while he called on (the Lord): “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit,” he said.

60  Then, falling on his knees, he cried aloud, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.” So saying, he fell asleep.

57–58  Commentators differ about what happened next. Many who heard Stephen describe his vision must have felt that this was unabashed contempt of the Shekhinah.¹¹⁶ Did the crowd of bystanders take the law into their own hands and lynch him? Joseph Klausner thought that Stephen’s stoning was the work of “some fanatical persons … who decided the case for themselves. They saw in Stephen a ‘blasphemer’ worthy of stoning, although according to the Talmudic rule ‘the blasphemer is not culpable unless he pronounces the Name itself’—which Stephen had not done. The fanatics did not trouble themselves about the judicial rule; they took Stephen outside the city and stoned him.” It may be true, as Klausner goes on to say, that “in the opinion of the Pharisees there was in his words no actual blasphemy, but only an offense requiring the forty stripes lacking one.” But that does not justify the conclusion that “the Sanhedrin could not see fit to impose the death sentence on him.” He conceded that Stephen “may have been deserving of that according to the rules of the Sadducees”;¹¹⁷ and in the trial of Stephen, as in the examination of Jesus, it was the Sadducean chief priests who played the leading part. We must beware of supposing that trials before the Sanhedrin in the early decades of the first century A.D. were invariably conducted in the atmosphere of severe impartiality and judicial calm prescribed in the idealized Mishnaic account.¹¹⁸

The reference to the witnesses suggests strongly that Stephen’s stoning was carried out as a legal execution, as the penalty for blasphemy. The restriction of blasphemy to the actual pronouncing of the ineffable name was a later rabbinical refinement;¹¹⁹ there is no reason to think that the Sadducean authorities limited the offense in any such way. For Stephen to suggest that the crucified Jesus stood in a position of authority at the right hand of God must have ranked as blasphemy in the thinking of those who knew that a crucified man died under the divine curse.

As for the witnesses, it was their duty to play the chief part in such an execution—a duty prescribed in the written Torah. “The hand of the witnesses shall be first against him to put him to death, and afterward the hand of all the people” (Deut. 17:7; cf. Lev. 24:14; Deut. 13:9–10). In order to throw the first stones the witnesses would naturally divest themselves of their outer garments, as they are here said to have done.

The young man called Saul, who guarded the clothes of the chief executioners, will play an increasingly important part in the record of Acts, as a leading champion of the cause which he was now opposing. Saul was his family name as an Israelite; he is better known in history by his Roman cognomen Paullus (Paul). It may be regarded as an undesigned coincidence that while Luke alone informs us that his Jewish name was Saul, he himself claims to have belonged to the tribe of Benjamin.¹²⁰ His parents thus gave him the name of the most illustrious member of that tribe in the nation’s history—the name of Israel’s first king, Saul.¹²¹

If the stoning of Stephen was a legal execution, how could it be carried out on the spot, without that authorization of the Roman governor which was required by provincial law? It is not an adequate answer to suggest that it may have taken place in the interregnum after Pilate’s removal from his office in A.D. 36/37. For one thing, there was no interregnum (Lucius Vitellius, legate of Syria, saw to that);¹²² for another thing, even if there had been an interregnum, the exercise of capital jurisdiction by the Jewish court would still have been a usurpation of Roman prerogative, as was shown when James the Just was executed in A.D. 62, in the interval between Festus’s death and his successor’s arrival.¹²³ The charge which was found proved against Stephen—speaking against the temple—probably belonged to the category of offenses against the temple for which the Roman administration, as an exceptional concession, allowed the Jewish authorities to carry out the death sentence without reference to the governor.¹²⁴

59  The ancient law directing the witnesses to take the lead in the act of stoning was amplified in later times and is recorded thus in the Mishnah (late second century A.D.):

“When the trial is finished, the man convicted is brought out to be stoned.… When ten cubits from the place of stoning they say to him, ‘Confess;¹²⁵ for it is the custom of all about to be put to death to make confession, and every one who confesses has a share in the age to come.’ … Four cubits from the place of stoning the criminal is stripped.¹²⁶ … The drop from the place of stoning was twice the height of a man. One of the witnesses pushes the criminal from behind, so that he falls face downward. He is then turned over on his back. If he dies from this fall, that is sufficient.¹²⁷ If not, the second witness takes the stone and drops it on his heart. If this causes death, that is sufficient; if not, he is stoned by all the congregation of Israel.”¹²⁸

In the Mishnah this (or any other) form of execution is treated as an unwelcome necessity, to be avoided if the slightest legal loophole can be found; Luke does not give the impression that Stephen’s executioners stoned him reluctantly as a disagreeable but unavoidable duty.

Nor did Stephen make confession to his judges or executioners. Instead, as he was being stoned he committed himself to his advocate on high with the words: “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.” These words are reminiscent of Jesus’ final utterance from the cross in Luke’s passion narrative: “Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit!” (Luke 23:46).¹²⁹ There is this striking difference: whereas Jesus committed his spirit to God, Stephen committed his to Jesus—eloquent evidence for the rapid emergence of a high christology in the church.¹³⁰

60  There was yet another of our Lord’s words from the cross echoed by Stephen. For, on his knees among the flying stones, he made his last appeal to the heavenly court—not this time for his own vindication but for mercy toward his executioners. Before he was finally battered into silence and death, he was heard to cry aloud, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them” (the “Lord” being again, presumably, the Lord Jesus).¹³¹

There is an Old Testament story of another messenger of God who for his faithfulness was stoned to death, not (like Stephen) outside the city but in the temple court itself, “between the altar and the sanctuary,” as our Lord said (Luke 11:51)—Zechariah the son of Jehoiada, priest and prophet. But as Zechariah was about to breathe his last, he prayed, “May Yahweh see and avenge!” (2 Chron. 24:22). The martyr-deaths were similar; the dying prayers were widely different. Stephen had learned his lesson in the school of him who, when he was being fixed to the cross, prayed, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34).¹³² Having prayed thus, says Luke, Stephen “fell asleep”—an unexpectedly peaceful description for so brutal a death, but one which fits the spirit in which Stephen accepted his martyrdom.

1. The Western text adds “to Stephen.”

2. See pp. 91–92, n. 15 (on 4:6).

3. Cf. the reference to Roman procedure in 25:16.

4. The Western text adds “and your fathers before you.”

5. On Stephen’s speech see B. W. Bacon, “Stephen’s Speech: Its Argument and Doctrinal Relationship,” in Biblical and Semitic Studies (Yale Bicentennial Publications, 1901), pp. 213–76; M. Jones, “The Significance of St. Stephen in the History of the Primitive Christian Church,” Exp. 8, 13 (1917), pp. 161–78; W. Mundle, “Die Stephanusrede Apg. 7: Eine Mäyrapologie,” ZNW 20 (1921), pp. 133–47; F. J. Foakes-Jackson, “Stephen’s Speech in Acts,” JBL 49 (1930), pp. 283–86; A. Fridrichsen, “Zur Stephanusrede,” Le Monde Oriental 25 (1931), pp. 44–52; A. F. J. Klijn, “Stephen’s Speech—Acts VII.2–53,” NTS 4 (1957–58), pp. 25–31; M. Simon, St. Stephen and the Hellenists in the Primitive Church (London, 1958), pp. 39–97; L. W. Barnard, “Saint Stephen and Early Alexandrian Christianity,” NTS 7 (1960–61), pp. 31–45; J. Bihler, Die Stephanusgeschichte im Zusammenhang der Apostelgeschichte (Munich, 1963); T. Holtz, “Die Stephanusrede Act 7,” in Untersuchungen über die alttestamentlichen Zitate Bei Lucas = TU 104 (Berlin, 1968), pp. 85–127; J. Kilgallen, The Stephen Speech: A Literary-Redactional Study of Acts 7:2–53 = AnBib 67 (Rome, 1976).

6. See A. Spiro, “Stephen’s Samaritan Background,” Appendix V in J. Munck, The Acts of the Apostles, AB (Garden City, NY, 1967), pp. 285–300; M. H. Scharlemann, Stephen: A Singular Saint = AnBib 34 (Rome, 1968); C. H. H. Scobie, “The Origins and Development of Samaritan Christianity,” NTS 19 (1972–73), pp. 390–414.

7. Cf. H.-J. Schoeps, Theologie und Geschichte des Judenchristentums (Tübingen, 1949), pp. 440–47. Schoeps pays special attention to similarities between the presentation of Stephen in Acts and that of James the Just in the pseudo-Clementine literature (which he finds to preserve much Ebionite material). The parallels between these two presentations are sufficiently striking to constitute an interesting problem in literary and historical criticism. But the solution of the problem is not that propounded by Schoeps, who concludes that Stephen, “far from being a historical character, is an ersatz figure brought forward by Luke for tendentious reasons, in order to unload on to him doctrines which the author found it inconvenient to acknowledge as his own” (p. 441). For a critique of Schoeps on this point see M. Simon, “Saint Stephen and the Jerusalem Temple,” JEH 2 (1951), pp. 127–42; he concludes that, on the contrary, Stephen is the original and the pseudo-Clementine James the tendentious creation (p. 140).

8. Even the Qumran community and (it appears) the Essenes in general did not disapprove of the temple ritual in principle: they abstained from participation in it because it was controlled by an illegitimate hierarchy which “conveyed pollution to the sanctuary” (CD 4.18).

9. See especially W. Manson, The Epistle to the Hebrews (London, 1951), pp. 25–46 (the chapter entitled “Stephen and the World-Mission of Christianity”); on p. 36 he enumerates eight important features of Stephen’s speech which recur in Hebrews, and suggests accordingly that Stephen’s outlook may provide a starting point from which to seek an understanding of that epistle. M. Simon, on the other hand, contrasts Stephen’s approach with that of Hebrews, particularly with regard to the temple. “To Stephen, the Temple means, from the very beginning, a falling away from the authentic tradition of Israel, as God inspired and directed it.… the view most commonly held later on was, I think, that which is expressed in Hebrews: the Temple and its cult was, together with the whole ritual Law, ‘a shadow of good things to come’. It is indeed imperfect, but by no means bad and perverse. For these things are, as Hebrews again puts it, ‘figures of the true’. Stephen’s view is almost unparalleled in early Christian ecclesiastical thought” (“Saint Stephen and the Jerusalem Temple,” pp. 127–28). It should be borne in mind that the writer to the Hebrews uses the tabernacle, not the temple, as “a parable for the present time” (Heb. 9:9).

10. See p. 410 with n. 51.

11. M. Simon (“Saint Stephen and the Jerusalem Temple,” pp. 132–37) adduces some evidence, including the carefully chosen wording of LXX in significant passages, suggesting that a section of the Jewish dispersion “may well have directed against the Temple in Jerusalem, its ritual and its sacrifices, the same criticism which some Greek philosophers used to utter against the traditional pagan religion, its temples and ritual” (see below on 17:14–15, pp. 336–37 with nn. 64–67). Certainly in their proselytizing propaganda Jews of the dispersion would tend to emphasize the moral and spiritual character of their religion and soft-pedal its ritual requirements. See Schürer III, pp. 138–40; also J. Klausner, From Jesus to Paul, E.T. (London, 1944), pp. 123–205. But the hostility which Stephen’s thesis provoked in Hellenistic circles in Jerusalem suggests that opposition on grounds of principle to the temple and its ritual was not generally acceptable in Hellenistic Judaism.

12. Cf. Philo, On Providence 2.64.

13. I. Abrahams, Studies in Pharisaism and the Gospels, II (Cambridge, 1924), p. 18. To the OT passages adduced by Abrahams might be added Pss. 105; 106; 135; 136; Neh. 9:6–37; cf. also Paul’s synagogue address at Pisidian Antioch (13:16–41 below).

14. Mesopotamia represents the fuller Greek expression (“Syria between the rivers”), referring to that part of North Syria lying between the Euphrates and the Orontes. Ancient Mesopotamia did not normally include the southern area of modern ‘Iraq, in which lay the Babylonian city of Ur (“Ur of the Chaldees”), near the mouth of the Euphrates, which Abraham left to go to Harran. But here Mesopotamia is plainly synonymous with “the land of the Chaldaeans” (v. 4).

15. For the title cf. Ps. 29 (LXX 28):3 (and similar expressions in Eph. 1:17; 1 Cor. 2:8).

16. Thus, in vv. 6–7, the words spoken to Abraham in Gen. 15:13–14 are rounded off with the clause “and they will worship me in this place” (i.e., in Canaan), which is an echo of the words addressed to Moses in Ex. 3:12: “you shall serve (worship) God on this mountain” (i.e., Sinai/Horeb). With this telescoping of distinct Pentateuchal texts may be compared the telescoping of distinct incidents in v. 16 (see p. 137 below with n. 35).

17. Cf. Philo, On Abraham 71; Josephus, Ant. 1.154.

18. In LXX “Ur of the Chaldees” (Heb. ) is regularly rendered by “the land [Gk. , not as here] of the Chaldaeans.” Gk. denotes both the of Urartu (Armenia) and the Kaldu (Heb. kaśdîm, “Chaldaeans,” “Chaldees”) of southern Babylonia.

19. Josephus similarly, in his preamble to the story of Abraham, speaks of “the Chaldaeans and the other Mesopotamians” (Ant. 1.157).

20. See S. Lloyd and W. C. Brice, “Harran,” AS (1951), pp. 77–111. In Greek and Roman times it was known as Carrhae. Its name is not identical with that of Abraham’s brother Haran (Gen. 11:27–31), which in Hebrew is spelled with initial hē, not .

21. The chronological data of Gen. 11:26, 32; 12:4 would suggest that Terah’s death took place sixty years after Abraham’s departure from . J. Ussher and other chronologers of an earlier day harmonized the present statement of Stephen with the evidence of Genesis by the improbable expedient of supposing that Terah was seventy years old when his oldest son (Haran) was born, and that Abraham was not born until Terah was 130. That Abraham did not leave until his father was dead is asserted also by Philo (On the Migration of Abraham 177), and is implied by the Samaritan Pentateuch, which in Gen. 11:32 gives Terah’s age at death as 145, not 205 (MT, LXX). It would follow that Abraham, who left Harran at the age of 75 (Gen. 12:4), did so as soon his father had died. It would be unwarranted to see here evidence of Samaritan influence on Stephen’s speech: apart from its recognizably sectarian variants, the Samaritan Pentateuch is basically a popular Palestinian text. Possibly Stephen (or Luke) and Philo relied on a Greek version (no longer extant) which agreed with the Samaritan reading of Gen. 11:32. P. E. Kahle says with greater assurance that “not a single MS of the Christian ‘Septuagint’ has preserved in Gen. 11:32 a reading which Philo and Luke read in their Greek Tora in the first Christian century” (The Cairo Geniza [London, 1947], p. 144).

22. The figure of 400 years for the oppression of the Israelites is taken from Gen. 15:13. According to Ex. 12:40 (MT) their sojourning in Egypt lasted 430 years, for which 400 might be taken as a round number. But rabbinical exegesis reckoned the 400 years as running from the birth of Isaac to the Exodus. Cf. Paul in Gal. 3:17, where the giving of the law (in the third month after the Exodus) is dated 430 years after the promise to Abraham (Gen. 12:3, 7; 13:15, etc.). This accords with the Samaritan and LXX expansion of Ex. 12:40, which includes in the 430 years the Israelites’ sojourning in Canaan as well as in Egypt. The period spent in Egypt would then be considerably shorter; cf. Gen. 15:16, “in the fourth generation they shall come back here.”

23. Cf. p. 134, n. 16.

24. Cf. Gen. 17:9–14, 23–27.

25. K. Lake and H. J. Cadbury, Beginnings I.4, p. 72.

26. Gen. 21:4.

27. Circumcision, at puberty (cf. Gen. 17:25), if not in infancy, was practised by most of the nations with which Israel had dealings in patriarchal times, but only for Israel had it this special covenant significance. The term “patriarchs” (Gk. ), here used of the sons of Jacob as tribal ancestors, is so used of them in 4 Macc. 16:25 and in the title of the Greek version of The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs. Cf. p. 66, n. 83 (on 2:29).

28. Cod. B omits “into Egypt.”

29. The Western and Byzantine texts read “of Shechem” (), whence KJV “the father of Shechem.”

30. Gk. . P⁴⁵ and the Western text read (“promised”); 81 and the Byzantine text read (“swore”).

31. The Western text reads “did not remember” ().

32. Stephen’s language here reflects that of Ps. 105 (LXX 104):16–23 as well as that of Gen. 37–45.

33. W. M. Ramsay argues that “the first time” () in v. 12 must mean the first of three, the third time being the occasion when the whole family of Jacob went down (BRD, p. 254n.). But the classical force of Gk. cannot be pressed in this way in Hellenistic times (cf. p. 30, n. 9, on 1:1). Here “the first time” (or “the former occasion”) is simply correlative to “the second occasion” ().

34. Gen. 46:27; Ex. 1:5; Deut. 10:22 MT say seventy persons (including Jacob, and Joseph with his two sons). In Ex. 1:5 the fragmentary Hebrew MS 4QEx^a says seventy-five persons; so also do Gen. 46:17; Ex. 1:5 LXX, omitting Jacob and Joseph, but giving Joseph nine sons instead of the two of MT (Gen. 46:27). Josephus (Ant. 2.176; 6.89) accepts the figure of seventy; Philo (On the Migration of Abraham 199–201) reconciles the discrepant readings allegorically: the number five, symbolizing the senses, has been omitted from the smaller number, signifying the transition from recalcitrant Jacob to Israel, the man with the vision of God (as though from Heb., “man seeing God”).

35. Jacob was buried at Hebron, in the cave of Machpelah, which Abraham had bought from Ephron the Hittite for 400 silver shekels (Gen. 23:16; 49:29–32; 50:13). Joseph was buried at Shechem, in the piece of ground which Jacob had bought for 100 pieces of money (if that is the meaning of , NEB “sheep”) from the sons of Hamor (Josh. 24:32). According to Josephus (Ant. 2.199), the other sons of Jacob were buried at Hebron. The two separate purchases of land are telescoped here. It is unlikely that the suppression of Hebron in favor of Shechem is a sign of Samaritan influence; the burial of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob at Hebron is as clearly recorded in the Samaritan Bible as in MT.

36. Cf. Heb. 11:13.

37. It is evident from the early chapters of Exodus that the Egyptian court was not far distant from the place of the Hebrews’ settlement in Egypt; this suits Dynasty XIX rather than XVIII. The reference to the building of “Raamses” in Ex. 1:11 evidently points to Pi-Ramessē (near modern Qantir), the East Delta residence of Rameses II (c. 1290–1224 B.C.), the greatest king of Dynasty XIX.

38. Gk. , “beautiful to God” (“divinely beautiful”). Such expressions occur elsewhere with elative force; cf. Jon. 3:3, where Nineveh is a city “great to God” (LXX ). Moses is described as in Ex. 2:2 (LXX for Heb. , “good”) and Heb. 11:23.

39. The Western text adds “of his race” after “being unjustly treated” and “and buried him in the sand” after “giving the Egyptian a mortal blow” (following Ex. 2:12).

40. The Western text reads “What are you doing, brothers?”

41. Cf. Ex. 2:1–10.

42. It is a vain task to try to identify this princess with any named daughter of an Egyptian king. The Hellenistic Jewish writer Artabanus, in his work Concerning the Jews (quoted by Eusebius, Preparation for the Gospel 9.27), calls her Merris, a name quite similar to that of a daughter of Rameses II by his Hittite wife—but this daughter of Rameses was probably a generation or more younger than Moses.

43. That he was mighty in words might seem to conflict with Moses’ disclaimer of eloquence in Ex. 4:10, but that disclaimer should not be taken too seriously; later in the Pentateuchal narrative Moses is a forceful and persuasive speaker. The statement that he was mighty in deeds is illustrated by the legend preserved by Josephus (Ant. 2.238–53) of his leading an Egyptian campaign against the Ethiopians—a legend perhaps originating in an attempt to explain his marrying a Cushite wife (Num. 12:1, where LXX calls her an Ethiopian)

44. Artabanus (loc. cit.) says that the Egyptians owed all their civilization to Moses, whom he identifies with the Egyptian Hermes (Thoth). An earlier Hellenistic Jew, Eupolemus, describes Moses as the inventor of alphabetic writing (On the Kings in Judaea, quoted by Eusebius, Preparation 9.26). According to Philo (Life of Moses 1.20–24), Moses was proficient in geometry, arithmetic, poetry, music, philosophy, astrology, and all branches of learning. Josephus (Ant. 2.229–30) describes him as unique in wisdom, stature, and beauty. After all this, Stephen’s language appears almost as an understatement! See also J. G. Gager, Moses in Greco-Roman Paganism (Nashville/New York, 1972).

45. “When Moses had grown up,” says Ex. 2:11 (LXX , quoted in Heb. 11:24), but Stephen gives his age at the time as forty. This is paralleled in rabbinical tradition, where his life of 120 years (Deut. 34:7) is divided into three equal parts, the first ending at this point and the second at his return from Midian to Egypt (cf. Ex. 7:7).

46. Midian is probably the region east of Aqaba.

47. The second son, Eliezer, is mentioned in Ex. 18:3–4.

48. The Western text reads “the Lord spoke to him, saying.”

49. The Western text follows the OT (Ex. 3:6) by repeating “the God of” before “Isaac” and “Jacob.” Cf. 3:13 (pp. 79–80, nn. 18, 24).

50. Cf. Ex. 3:1–4:17. The “mountain of God” is referred to there as Horeb; the identity of Horeb and Sinai is indicated by a comparison of Ex. 3:12 and Deut. 1:6, etc., with Ex. 19:11–25. The traditional identification of the biblical Mount Sinai with Jebel Musa in the Sinai Peninsula does not appear to antedate the Pilgrimage of Egeria (A.D. 385–88). The “angel” seen by Moses (v. 30) was the special mal’ak Yahweh (Ex. 3:2), i.e., Yahweh himself in his manifestation to human beings. In Ex. 3 he is variously called “the angel of Yahweh” (v. 2), “God” (v. 4), and “Yahweh” (v. 7); so in Stephen’s narrative the angel speaks with the voice of the Lord (v. 31), claims to be God (v. 32), and is called “the Lord” (v. 33). Cf. vv. 35, 38, and 53 below (and nn. 56, 58, and 99).

51. The removal of the shoes was a mark of reverence in the divine presence, as it was a mark of respect to one’s host when paying a visit.

52. Some Alexandrian authorities ( C 81) and the Western text add “over us” from v. 27.

53. The Western text, following the OT (Deut. 18:15), adds “you are to listen to him.”

54. For “beyond Babylon” the Western reading is “to the parts of Babylon”; this was probably calculated to agree better with “beyond Damascus” in Amos 5:27.

55. So Jesus was divinely accredited to his contemporaries by “mighty works and wonders and signs” which God performed through him among them (2:22).

56. The Exodus narrative well illustrates the two principal vehicles of special revelation employed by God in OT times—mighty works and prophetic communication. The mighty works attending the Exodus would not have been understood by the Israelites had not Moses, as the prophet or spokesman of God, interpreted their significance to them. But the mighty works were not caused by Moses or his words; they were plainly beyond human control. The mighty works and the prophetic words supported each other, and through both together God made himself known to his people. Cf. H. H. Rowley, From Moses to Qumran (London, 1963), pp. 3–31.

57. In Deut. 18:16, immediately after Moses’ reminder of the divine promise to raise up a prophet like himself, he mentions the request which the people had made to God “at Horeb, on the day of the assembly” (Heb. , LXX ), that they might not hear his voice again speaking to them directly. As Moses was with the then, Christ is with his now, and it is still a pilgrim , “the assembly in the wilderness.” See p. 108, n. 23 (on 5:11).

58. The “angel of the presence” of God (lit., “the messenger of his face,” Heb. ) is the angel who makes his presence real to human beings—in other words, the angel of Yahweh (see n. 50 above). No mention is made of this angel in the Exodus narrative of the giving of the law; compare, however, “the angel of God” in Ex. 14:19; also Ex. 33:14, “my presence [Heb. pānai, ‘my face,’ but LXX , ‘I myself’] will go with you.” See also Isa. 63:9, with reference to the Exodus and its sequel, “the angel of his presence saved them” (LXX “he himself saved them”). See also p. 153, n. 99 below.

59. Gk. (cf. Rom. 3:2; Heb. 4:12; 1 Pet. 1:23).

60. Cf. Num. 14:3–4.

61. Cf. Ex. 32:1–6.

62. Cf. Ps. 115 (LXX 114):4 and 135 (LXX 134):15, where the idols of the nations are described as “silver and gold, the work of men’s hands.”

63. For the “host of heaven” see Deut. 4:19; 17:3; 2 Kings (LXX 4 Kms.) 21:3, 5; 23:4–5; Jer. 8:2; 19:13; Zeph. 1:5. Cf. p. 145, n. 71 below.

64. Cf. Ezek. 20:25–26.

65. A comparable judgment is pronounced on Babylonia in Isa. 46:1–2.

66. For this interpretation of the words of Amos see H. H. Rowley, From Moses to Qumran, pp. 72–75; The Unity of the Bible (London, 1953). pp. 30–43. He cites D. B. Macdonald as propounding the same view in “Old Testament Notes: (2) Amos 5:25,” JBL 18 (1899), pp. 214–15. Cf. Isa. 1:10–17; Jer. 7:21–23; Hos. 6:6; Mic. 6:6–8.

67. Cf. Jer. 2:2–3; also Hos. 2:14–15. Contrast Ezek. 20:13.

68. H.-J. Schoeps (Theologie und Geschichte, pp. 221–33, 238, 442–43) relates Stephen’s implied denial that Israel offered sacrifices to Yahweh in the wilderness to the Ebionites’ view that the sacrificial legislation was a spurious interpolation in the Mosaic law; one of the tasks of the Messiah, the prophet like Moses (cf. v. 37), when he came, would be (they believed) to remove those accretions and restore the law to its original purity. Even from the text of the Pentateuch as it stands it would be possible to infer that, while the sacrificial legislation was indeed given through Moses in the wilderness, it was not to be carried into effect until after the settlement in Canaan (cf. Deut. 5:31b and more particularly Num. 15:2b)—but this would be irrelevant to Stephen’s argument.

69. Cf. M. Simon (“St. Stephen and the Jerusalem Temple,” p. 138): “Sacrifices, even if offered to Jahveh, a temple, even if built in Jerusalem, remain what they were in the beginning—works of idolatry. They proceed in all cases from mere human initiative and vanity: they have never been approved or sanctified by God. They are not only a consequence, accepted by God to prevent the worship of the golden calf: they are on a level with the golden calf.” This deduction from Stephen’s words is like the deduction commonly drawn from the great prophets’ attack on contemporary sacrificial practice, that they were opposed to the principle of sacrifice and not merely to its misuse. The deduction in both cases may not reckon adequately with the tendency of prophetic diction to say “not this, but that” where we would say “not only this, but also that” or “not so much this as that.” Stephen certainly speaks in the tradition of the great prophets.

70. “The tabernacle of Moloch” would represent Heb. a revocalization of , “Sakkut your king,” where is Akkadian sakkut, a name of the planet Saturn, equipped with the vowel points of Heb. , “abomination.” (Similarly Moloch, better Molech, is probably Heb. “king,” used as a divine title, equipped with the vowel points of , “shame”—although Otto Eissfeldt, Molk als Opferbegriff im Punischen und Hebräischen und das Ende des Gottes Moloch [Halle, 1935], explained the form from Phoenician molk, a term for human sacrifice attested in Carthaginian inscriptions.) Raiphan (variously spelled Rephan, Remphan, Rompha, etc.) seems to be a form of repa, an Egyptian name of Saturn, used by the LXX translators to replace Kaiwan, an Assyrian name for the same planet (MT , cf. KJV Chiun, involves again the use of the vowel points of ).

71. It was more particularly under the influence of Assyria in the eighth century B.C. that the worship of the planetary divinities became so popular in Israel, but the evidence of Canaanite place names shows that they were worshiped as early as the period of the Tell el-Amarna correspondence (c. 1370 B.C.).

72. Lit., “before our fathers.”

73. It is not clear whether “until the days of David” marks the end of the process of dispossession or the end of the peregrination of the “tent of testimony”; in view of what follows, the latter is more probable.

74. For “God” (), the reading of A C E byz lat syr cop etc., there is a very strongly attested variant “house” (), read by P⁷⁴ B D H 049 pc cop^sa.cod. A powerful argument in favor of “house” is that it was more likely to be assimilated in transmission to “God,” the LXX reading of Ps. 131 (MT 132):5, than vice versa. Hort and Ropes, agreeing that may have been an emendation of , suggest that itself may have been a primitive corruption of (“Lord”), written (in LXX appears in parallelism with The difficulty in accepting is that “to provide a tabernacle for the house of Jacob” is an unnatural idea in the context, where the emphasis lies on the impossibility of making a dwelling place for God. Moreover, in the next sentence must mean “for God”; it cannot have “the house of Jacob” as its antecedent. In support of , see Lake-Cadbury, Beginnings I.4, p. 81; Schoeps. Theologie und Geschichte, p. 238; F. C. Synge, “Studies in Texts: Acts 7:46,” Theology 55 (1952), pp. 25–26; for a defense of see M. Simon, “Saint Stephen and the Jerusalem Temple,” p. 128.

75. Isa. 66:1–2.

76. LXX uses to render not only Heb. as in Ex. 38:21 (LXX 37:19), etc., but also Heb. , “tent of meeting,” as in Ex. 27:21, etc. (It is the latter expression that Moffatt renders “Trysting tent.”)

77. Ex. 25:9, 40; 26:30; 27:8. Cf. the elaboration of this theme in Heb. 8:5; 9:23–24.

78. Gk. , whence KJV “Jesus” (as in Heb. 4:8). There may be a tacit suggestion that it is not by accident that the leader who brought them into the earthly land of promise bore the same name as the one under whose leadership the people of God were to inherit better promises.

79. W. Manson, The Epistle to the Hebrews, pp. 33–34.

80. Cf. 1 Sam. (LXX 1 Kms.) 4:lb–7:2; 2 Sam. (LXX 2 Kms.) 6:1–7:29.

81. According to M. Simon (“Saint Stephen and the Jerusalem Temple,” p. 129), the “place” (Gk. ) in this quotation is Jerusalem; the “dwelling place” (Gk. , “tabernacle,” “bivouac”) is the tent-shrine which David erected for the ark on Zion (cf. 2 Sam. [LXX 2 Kms.] 6:17; 1 Chron. 15:1), by contrast with the “house” (Gk. ) which Solomon built (v. 47; cf. 2 Sam. [LXX 2 Kms.] 7:6 with 1 Chron. 17:5).

82. Was it our Lord’s implied concern for those Gentiles who desired to draw as near as they could to worship the true God that led to the Greeks’ request for an interview with him during Holy Week in Jerusalem (John 12:21)? It is noteworthy that he went on immediately to speak of his imminent “glorifying”—his being “lifted up” in a twofold sense—as the condition for his drawing to himself not Jewish believers only but all without distinction. It is noteworthy, too, that while the description of the temple as “a house of prayer for all the nations” is taken directly from Isa. 56:7, it also echoes a passage in Solomon’s prayer of dedication where provision is made for the foreigner to “pray toward this house” (1 Kings [LXX 3 Kms.] 8:41–43).

83. Gk. , as in Ps. 132 (LXX 131 ):5 (cf. n. 81 above).

84. Cf. 1 Kings (LXX 3 Kms.) 6:2, “the house (Gk. , translating Heb. bayit) which King Solomon built for Yahweh.”

85. It should also be observed that in the whole of Solomon’s dedicatory prayer (1 Kings [LXX 3 Kms.] 8:23–53) nothing is said of the use of the temple for sacrifices; its prime function is to be a house of prayer. Cf. the view ascribed to Trypho the Jew in Justin’s Dialogue (117.2), that Mal. 1:10–12 means that “God did not accept the sacrifices of those who dwelt then in Jerusalem, and were called Israelites: but declares his pleasure with the prayers of the dispersed members of that nation, and calls their prayers sacrifices.”

86. It was constantly emphasized in Jewish, and later also in Christian, propaganda against paganism (cf. 17:24–25); for the higher paganism see the quotation from Euripides below, p. 336, n. 65. Cf. also Sibylline Oracles 4.8–11: “He has not for his habitation a stone set up as a temple, deaf and dumb, a bane and woe to mortals, but one which may not be seen from earth or measured by mortal eyes, since it was not fashioned by mortal hand.” (Some later lines of this poem, 25–30, may be compared with Trypho’s words quoted in n. 85 above: “Happy among human beings shall they be on earth who … turn away their eyes from every temple and all altars, vain structures of stones that cannot hear, defiled with the blood of living things and sacrifices of four-footed beasts, and look to the great glory of the one God.”)

87. Cf. the disparaging reference in 19:26 below to “gods made with hands.” By contrast, the compound adjective “not made with hands” (Gk. ), used in Mark 14:58 of the new temple, is used in 2 Cor. 5:1 of the resurrection body, in Col. 2:11 of spiritual circumcision, as against “the so-called circumcision in the flesh, performed by human hand” (Eph. 2:11).

88. Cf. M. Simon, “Saint Stephen and the Jerusalem Temple,” pp. 133–37; C. F. D. Moule, “Sanctuary and Sacrifice in the Church of the New Testament,” JTS n.s. 1 (1950), pp. 29–41.

89. The occasion is almost certainly the building of Zerubbabel’s temple, although attempts have been made at times (e.g., by T. K. Cheyne and B. Duhm) to relate the oracle to a Samaritan temple on Gerizim. T. C. G. Thornton (“Stephen’s Use of Isaiah LXVI,” JTS n.s. 25 [1974], pp. 432–34) cites an Aramaic midrash in which Isaiah makes Isa. 66:1–2 (together with 1 Kings 8:27) the basis of a prediction of Nebuchadrezzar’s destruction of Solomon’s temple, and thus incurs the murderous rage of King Manasseh.

90. This is the gravamen of Stephen’s argument. In many respects the tabernacle and the temple were comparable. Both were copies of divinely given patterns: the wilderness tabernacle was made according to the archetype shown to Moses on Sinai, and Solomon’s temple, according to the Chronicler, was constructed according to a plan which David “made clear by the writing from the hand of Yahweh concerning it” (1 Chron. 28:19). Both, according to the canonical OT writings, were associated with sacrificial ritual, although Stephen is silent about this (it would, however, be unwise to draw positive conclusions from his silence). See M. Simon, Verus Israel (Paris, 1948), pp. 111–17. The point on which Stephen concentrates is the main point which distinguished the two structures: the tabernacle was mobile, the temple was stationary.

91. W. Manson, The Epistle to the Hebrews, p. 34.

92. A. Cole, The New Temple (London, 1950), p. 38.

93. Gk. . G. D. Kilpatrick has argued that this word may have been in use as a technical term of Hellenistic Judaism, designating the messianic advent (“Acts VII 52 ,” JTS 46 [1945], pp. 136–45). It occurs nowhere else in the Greek Bible.

94. See T. Schermann (ed.), Prophetarum Vitae Fabulosae (Leipzig, 1907); C. C. Torrey (ed.), Lives of the Prophets (Philadelphia, 1946); H. -J. Schoeps, “Die jüdischen Prophetenmorde,” in Aus frühchristlicher Zeit (Tübingen, 1950), pp. 126–43.

95. See Ascension of Isaiah 5:1–14; TB 49b; Sanhedrin 103b; Justin, Dialogue 120.5; Tertullian, On Patience 14.

96. See Tertullian, Remedy against Scorpions 8; Jerome, Against Jovinian 2.37.

97. Cf. the argument in Matt. 23:29–37; 1 Thess. 2:15–16.

98. For this designation of Christ cf. 3:14 (p. 81, n. 29); 22:14.

99. The angels through whose mediation the law is said to have been instituted are mentioned elsewhere in the NT. In Gal. 3:19 the angelic administration of the law is adduced by Paul to show its inferiority to the promise which God made to Abraham without any mediation. In Heb. 2:2 it is argued that if even the law, “spoken through angels,” imposed inexorable penalties on those who infringed it, much more inexorable must be the penalty for disregarding God’s final revelation, communicated not through angels but in his Son, “as much superior to angels as the name he has obtained is more excellent than theirs” (Heb. 1:4). In Deut. 33:2 LXX God is said to have been attended by angels at his theophany on Sinai (), and this is echoed in several later Jewish texts, but angelic attendance (cf. Ps. 68 [LXX 67]:17) need not imply angelic mediation. There is a possible parallel to Stephen’s statement about angelic mediation in Josephus (Ant. 15.136), where Herod says that the Jewish doctrines and laws have been learned from God through angels (), but there the reference may be to human messengers, prophets. Yet Stephen (Luke), Paul, and the writer to the Hebrews all seem to treat the angelic mediation of the law as a familiar and accepted idea. Stephen’s point is that the impiety of those who, having received the law, disregarded it was the more heinous because it was communicated through beings as high and holy as angels. See F. F. Bruce, The Epistle to the Galatians, NIGTC [Grand Rapids/Exeter, 1982], pp. 176–78).

100. The Western text reads “the Lord Jesus.”

101. To call the speech “a tedious sketch of the history of Israel” (G. B. Shaw, Androcles and the Lion [London, 1928], p. lxxxv) betrays surprising insensitivity to its revolutionary tendency.

102. “They were cut to the quick” (Gk. ). For the same verb cf. 5:33. For the grinding of teeth as a gesture of rage cf. Job 16:9; Ps. 35 [LXX 34]:16). Elsewhere it is used of the fruitless anguish of despair; cf. Luke 13:28 (, from , the verb used here).

103. Similarly James the Just, according to Hegesippus, said to his judges, “Why do you ask me about the Son of Man? He sits at the right hand of the Almighty in heaven, and he will come on the clouds of heaven” (Eusebius, HE 2.23.13).

104. On the interrelation of the three Synoptic accounts of these words see I. H. Marshall, The Gospel of Luke, NIGTC (Grand Rapids/Exeter, 1978), pp. 849–51.

105. The expression in Rev. 1:13 and 14:4 is not the title but (“one like a son of man,” i.e., a human figure, as in Dan. 7:13).

106. The literature on the “Son of Man” question is voluminous. See (among other discussions) C. Colpe, TDNT 8, pp. 400–477 (s.v. ); T. W. Manson, “The Son of Man in Daniel, Enoch and the Gospels,” in Studies in the Gospels and Epistles (Manchester, 1962), pp. 123–45; H. E. Tödt, The Son of Man in the Synoptic Tradition, E.T. (London, 1966); F. H. Borsch, The Son of Man in Myth and History (London, 1967); M. D. Hooker, The Son of Man in Mark (London, 1967); C. F. D. Moule, “Neglected Features in the Problem of ‘the Son of Man,’ ” in Neues Testament und Geschichte, ed. J. Gnilka (Freiburg, 1974), pp. 413–28; R. Pesch and R. Schnackenburg (eds.), Jesus und der Menschensohn (Freiburg, 1975); M. Casey, Son of Man (London, 1979); A. J. B. Higgins, The Son of Man in the Teaching of Jesus (Cambridge, 1980); J. Coppens, Le Fils de l’Homme Néotestamentaire (Leuven, 1981) and Le Fils de l’Homme Vétéro-et Intertestamentaire (Leuven, 1983); B. Lindars, Jesus: Son of Man (London/Grand Rapids, 1983); S. Kim, “The ‘Son of Man’ ” as the Son of GodSon of God, WUNT 30 (Tübingen, 1983); G. Vermes, “The Present State of the ‘Son of Man’ Debate,” in Jesus and the World of Judaism (London, 1983), pp. 89–99.

107. C. H. Dodd, According to the Scriptures (London, 1952), p. 35n.;cf. G. H. Dalman, The Words of Jesus, E.T. (Edinburgh, 1902), p. 311.

108. W. Kelly, An Exposition of the Acts of the Apostles (London, 31952), pp. 102–3; cf. J. N. Darby: “He does not sit as it were till Israel has formally rejected the testimony, when the cry of Stephen reached His ear. He took His place, sitting down until His enemies are made His footstool, after their refusal to hear the Holy Ghost’s testimony. Stephen being received to Christ in heaven, Israel as Israel must wait outside” (Collected Writings 28, p. 283).

109. Therefore E. W. Bullinger saw the dispensational transition not here but at 28:28; see The Companion Bible (London, 1909–21), Appendix 181 (“The Dispensational Position of the Book of the ‘Acts’ ”).

110. Gnomon Novi Testamenti, p. 420: “stantem: quasi obvium Stephano” (Bengel).

111. H. P. Owen, “Stephen’s Vision in Acts VII 55–56,” NTS 1 (1954–55), p. 225.

112. C. K. Barrett, “Stephen and the Son of Man,” in Apophoreta: Festschrift für Ernst Haenchen, BZNW 30 (Berlin, 1964), pp. 32–38.

113. C. F. D. Moule, “From Defendant to Judge—and Deliverer” (1953), in The Phenomenon of the New Testament, SBT 2.1 (London, 1967), pp. 90–91.

114. W. Manson, The Epistle to the Hebrews, pp. 31–32. Since the Son of Man had now received unlimited world dominion, he goes on, the call to the people of God was now to march forward under the direction of the once rejected Jesus, “to whom the throne of the world and Lordship of the Age to Come belonged” (p. 32).

115. One Western authority (the African Latin codex h) makes the populace the subject of this sentence.

116. Rabbis of a later date debated whether or not the shekhinah (the divine presence) rested on the second temple as it did on Solomon’s (1 Chron. 5:13–14; 7:1–2). But their debates (cf. TB 118b; 9b) were mainly exercises in theorizing; while the second temple stood, it was venerated as the habitation of God (cf. Matt. 23:21, “he who swears by the temple, swears by it and by him who dwells therein”).

117. J. Klausner, From Jesus to Paul, E.T. (London, 1944), p. 232.

118. See the Mishnaic tractate Sanhedrin. On the relation of Sanhedrin procedure to the trial of Jesus see J. Blinzler, The Trial of Jesus, E.T. (Cork, 1959); P. Winter, On the Trial of Jesus (Berlin, 1961); E. Bammel (ed.), The Trial of Jesus, SBT 2.13 (London, 1970); D. R. Catchpole, The Trial of Jesus (Leiden, 1971); W. Grundmann, “The decision of the Supreme Court to put Jesus to death (John 11:47–57) in its context: tradition and redaction in the Gospel of John,” and K. Schubert, “Biblical criticism criticised: with reference to the Markan report of Jesus’s examination before the Sanhedrin,” in E. Bammel and C. F. D. Moule (eds.), Jesus and the Politics of His Day (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 295–318, 385–402.

119. Mishnah, Sanhedrin 7.5.

120. Rom. 11:1; Phil. 3:5.

121. Cf. 13:21.

122. Josephus, Ant. 18.89.

123. Josephus, Ant. 20.200–203.

124. See on 21:28 (p. 409, nn. 47–49).

125. Cf. the case of Achan (Josh. 7:19).

126. For this reason F. C. Conybeare suggested that “their garments” (v. 58) should be emended to “his (Stephen’s) garments” (“The Stoning of St. Stephen,” Exp. 8, 6 [1913], pp. 466–70). But the text as it stands is confirmed by 22:20.

127. The account of the death of James the Just (see p. 154, n. 103) follows these Mishnaic prescriptions: “Then they seized him and threw him down and began to stone him, since he did not die from his fall” (Eusebius, HE 2.23.16). Cf. Clem. Recog. 1.70, where Simon Magus (a disguise for Paul?) stirs up a tumult against James and throws him down headlong from the top of a flight of steps in the temple precincts. Schoeps (Theologie und Geschichte, pp. 381–456) may be right in tracing this and much else in the pseudo-Clementine literature back to an Ebionite Acts of the Apostles, composed as a counterblast to the canonical Acts (cf. p. 131, n. 7).

128. Mishnah, Sanhedrin 6.1–4.

129. A prayer from Ps. 31 (LXX 30):5, prefaced by the vocative “Father.”

130. For the early emergence of a high christology in the church see M. Hengel, Between Jesus and Paul, E.T. (London, 1983), pp. 30–47.

131. “The martyr with his dying words begs the heavenly court for mercy towards those against whom he is vindicated” (C. F. D. Moule, The Phenomenon of the New Testament, SBT 2.1, p. 91). Hegesippus represents James as praying, while he was being stoned, “I beseech thee, Lord God and Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do” (Eusebius, HE 2.23.16). See further p. 83 with n. 35.

132. For the textual problem presented by these words of Jesus see commentaries on Luke ad loc.; cf. also J. R. Harris, Side-lights on New Testament Research (London, 1908), pp. 96–103; B. H. Streeter, The Four Gospels (London, ²1930), pp. 138–39.

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