Παύλου ὁ διδάσκαλος.—BASIL SELEUC. Orat. deS.Steph.
Καὶ ἴδοι τις ἄν τὸ λεγόμενον σαφῶς εἰ τὴν σοφίαν τοῦ Στεφάνου, εἰ τὴν Πέτρου γλῶτταν, εἰ τὴν Παύλου ῥυμὴν ἐννοήσειε, πῶς οὐδὲν αὐτοὺς ἔφερεν οὐδὲν ὑρίστατο, οὐ δημῶν θυμὸς, οὐ τυράννων ἐπαναστάσεις, οὐ δαιμόνων ἐπιβουλὴ, οὐ θάνατοι καθημερινοί. ἀλλʼ ὥσπερ ποταμοὶ πολλῷ τῷ ῥοίζῳ φερόμενοι οὕτω πάντα παρασύροντες ἀπῄεσαν.—S. CHRYS. in Joan. Hom. li. Opp. viii. 30.
“This farther only have I to say, my lords, that like as St. Paul was present and consenting to the death of the proto–martyr St. Stephen, and yet they be now twain holy saints in heaven, …. so I verily trust we may hereafter meet in heaven merrily together, to our everlasting salvation.”—Last WordsofSirT.MoretohisJudges.
THE appointment of the Seven, partly because of their zeal and power, and partly because of the greater freedom secured for the Apostles, led to marked successes in the progress of the Church. Not only was the number of disciples in Jerusalem greatly multiplied, but even a large number of the priests1 became obedient to the faith. Up to this time the acceptance of the Gospel, so far from involving any rupture with Judaism, was consistent with a most scrupulous devotion to its observances. It must be borne in mind that the priests in Jerusalem, and a few other cities, were a multitudinous body,2 and that it was only the narrow aristocratic clique of a few alien families who were Sadducees in theology and Herodians in politics. Many of the lower ranks of the priesthood were doubtless Pharisees, and as the Pharisees were devoted to the doctrine of the Resurrection, there was nothing inconsistent with their traditions in admitting the Messiahship of a Risen Saviour. Such a belief would at this time, and, indeed, long afterwards, have made little difference in their general position, although if they were true believers it would make a vast difference in their inward life. The simplicity, the fervour, the unity, the spiritual gifts of the little company of Galilæans, would be likely to attract the serious and thoughtful. They would be won by these graces far more than by irresistible logic, or by the appeals of powerful eloquence. The mission of the Apostles at this time was, as has been well observed, no mere apostolate of rhetoric, nor would they for a moment pretend to be other than they were—illiterate men, untrained in the schools of technical theology and rabbinic wisdom. Had they been otherwise, the argument for the truth of Christianity, which is derived from the extraordinary rapidity of its dissemination, would have lost half its force. The weapons of the Apostolic warfare were not carnal. Converts were won, not by learning or argument, but by the power of a new testimony and the spirit of a new life.
Up to this period the name of Stephen has not occurred in Christian history, and as the tradition that he had been one of the seventy disciples is valueless,3 we know nothing of the circumstances of his conversion to Christianity. His recognition, however, of the glorified figure, which he saw in his ecstatic vision, as the figure of Him who on earth had called Himself “the Son of Man,” makes it probable that he was one of those who had enjoyed the advantage of hearing the living Jesus, and of drawing from its very fountain–head the river of the water of life.4 We would fain know more of one who, in so brief a space of time, played a part so nobly wise. But it was with Stephen as it has been with myriads of others whose names have been written in the Book of Life; they have been unknown among men, or known only during one brief epoch, or for one great deed. For a moment, but for a moment only, the First Martyr steps into the full light of history. Our insight into his greatness is derived almost solely from the record of a single speech and a single day—the last speech he ever uttered—the last day of his mortal life.
It was the faith of Stephen, together with his loving energy and blameless sanctity which led to the choice of him as one of the Seven. No sooner was he elected than he became the most prominent of them all. The grace which shone in his colleagues shone yet more brightly in him,5 and he stood on a level with the Apostles in the power of working wonders among the people. Many a man, who would otherwise have died unknown, has revealed to others his inherent greatness on being entrusted with authority. The immense part played by Stephen in the history of the Church was due to the development of powers which might have remained latent but for the duties laid on him by his new position. The distribution of alms seems to have been a part only of the task assigned him. Like Philip, he was an Evangelist as well as a Deacon, and the speech which he delivered before the Sanhedrin, showing as it does the logical force and concentrated fire of a great orator and a practised controversialist, may explain the stir which was caused by his preaching.
The scenes of that preaching were the Hellenistic synagogues of Jerusalem. To an almoner in a city where so many were poor, and to a Hellenist of unusual eloquence, opportunities would constantly recur in which he was not only permitted, but urged, to explain the tenets of the new society. Hitherto that society was in full communion with the Jewish Church. Stephen alone was charged with utterances of a disloyal tendency against the tenets of Pharisaism, and this is a proof how different was his preaching from that of the Twelve, and how much earlier he had arrived at the true appreciation of the words of Jesus respecting the extent and nature of His Kingdom. That which, in the mind of a Peter, was still but a grain of mustard seed, sown in the soil of Judaism, had already grown, in the soul of a Stephen, into a mighty tree. The Twelve were still lingering in the portals of the synagogue. For them the new wine of the kingdom of heaven had not yet burst the old wine–skins. As yet they were only regarded as the heads of a Jewish sect,6 and although they believed that their faith would soon be the faith of all the world, there is no trace that, up to this time, they ever dreamed of the abrogation of Mosaism, or the free admission of uncircumcised Gentiles into a full equality of spiritual privileges. A proselyte of righteousness—one who, like Nicolas of Antioch, had accepted the sign of circumcision—might, indeed, be held worthy of honour; but one who was only a “proselyte of the gate,”7 one who held back from the seal of the covenant made to Abraham, would not be regarded as a full Christian any more than he would be regarded as a full Jew.
Hence, up to this time, the Christians were looked on with no disfavour by that Pharisaic party which regarded the Sadducees as intriguing apostates. They were even inclined to make use of the Resurrection which the Christians proclaimed, as a convenient means of harassing their rivals. Nor was it they who had been guilty of the murder of Jesus. They had not, indeed, stirred one finger for His deliverance, and it is probable that many of them—all those hypocrites of whom both Jesus and John had spoken as a viper brood—had looked with satisfaction on the crime by which their political opponents had silenced their common enemy. Yet they did not fear that His blood would be brought on them, or that the Apostles would ever hurl on them or their practices His terrible denunciations. Though the Christians had their private meetings on the first day of the week, their special tenets, their sacramental institutions, and their common meal, there was nothing reprehensible in these observances, and there was something attractive even to Pharisees in their faithful simplicity and enthusiastic communism.8 In all respects they were “devout according to the Law.” They would have shrunk with horror from any violation of the rules which separated clean from unclean meats; they not only observed the prescribed feasts of the Pentateuch and its single fast, but even adopted the fasts which had been sanctioned by the tradition of the oral law; they had their children duly circumcised; they approved and practised the vows of the Nazarites; they never omitted to be on their knees in the Temple, or with their faces turned towards it, at the three stated hours of prayer.9 It needs but a glance at the symbolism of the Apocalypse to see how dear to them were the names, the reminiscences, the Levitical ceremonial, the Temple worship of their Hebrew fellow–citizens. Not many years later, the “many myriads of Jews who believed were allzealous of the Law,” and would have thought it a disgrace to do otherwise than “to walk orderly.”10 The position, therefore, which they held was simply that of one synagogue more, in a city which, according to the Rabbis, could already boast that it possessed as many as 480. They might have been called, and it is probable that they were called, by way of geographical distinction, “the Synagogue of the Nazarenes.”
But this acceptance with the people could only be temporary and deceptive. If, indeed, the early believers had never advanced beyond this stand–point, Christianity might have been regarded to the last as nothing more than a phase of Pharisaism, heretical for its acceptance of a crucified Messiah, but worthy of honour for the scrupulosity of its religious life. But had Christianity never been more than this, then the olive branch would have died with the oleaster on which it was engrafted. It was as necessary for the Church as for the world that this hollow semblance of unison between religions which, in their distinctive differences, were essentially antagonistic, should be rudely dissipated. It was necessary that all Christians, whether Jews or Gentiles, should see how impossible it was to put a new patch on an old garment.
This truth had been preached by Jesus to His Apostles, but, like many other of His words, it lay long dormant in their minds. After some of His deepest utterances, in full consciousness that He could not at once be understood, He had said, “He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.” And as they themselves frankly confess, the Apostles had not always been among those “who had ears to hear.” Plain and reiterated as had been the prophecies which He had addressed to them respecting His own crucifixion and resurrection, the first of these events had plunged them into despair and horror, the second had burst upon them with a shock of surprise. He who commanded the light to shine out of darkness had, indeed, shined in their hearts “to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ;”11 but still they were well aware that they had this treasure “in earthen vessels.” To attribute to them an equality of endowments, or an entire unanimity of opinion, is to contradict their plainest statements. To deny that their knowledge gradually widened is to ignore God’s method of revelation, and to set aside the evidence of facts. To the last they “knew in part, and they prophesied in part.”12 Why was James the Lord’s brother so highly respected by the people as tradition tells us that he was? Why was Paul regarded by them with such deadly hatred? Because St. Paul recognised more fully than St. James the future universal destiny of a Christianity separated from Judaic institutions. The Crucifixion had, in fact, been the protest of the Jew against an isopolity of faith. “From that moment the fate of the nation was decided. Her religion was to kill her. But when the Temple burst into flames, that religion had already spread its wings and gone out to conquer an entire world.”13
Now, as might have been expected, and as was evidently designed by their Divine Master, the lastpoint on which the Galilæan Apostles attained to clearness of view and consistency of action was the fact that the Mosaic law was to be superseded, even for the Jew, by a wider revelation. It is probable that this truth, in all its fulness, was never finally apprehended by all the Apostles. It is doubtful whether, humanly speaking, it would ever have been grasped by any of them if their powers of insight had not been quickened, in God’s appointed method, by the fresh lessons which came to them through the intellect and faith of men who had been brought up in larger views. The obliteration of natural distinctions is no part of the divine method. The inspiration of God never destroys the individuality of those holy souls which it has made into sons of God and prophets. There are, as St. Paul so earnestly tried to impress upon the infant Churches, diversities of gifts, diversities of ministrations, diversities of operations, though it is the same Spirit, the same Lord, the same God, who worketh all things in all.14 The Hellenistic training of a Stephen and a Saul prepared them for the acceptance of lessons which nothing short of an express miracle could have made immediately intelligible to a Peter and a James.
Now the relation of the Law to the Gospel had been exactly one of those subjects on which Jesus, in accordance with a divine purpose, had spoken with a certain reserve. His mission had been to found a kingdom, not to promulgate a theology; He had died not to formulate a system, but to redeem a race. His work had been not to construct the dogmas of formal creeds, but to purify the soul of man, by placing him in immediate relation to the Father in Heaven. It required many years for Jewish converts to understand the meaning of the saying that “He came not to destroy the Law but to fulfil.” Its meaning could indeed only become clear in the light of other sayings of which they overlooked the force. The Apostles had seen Him obedient to the Law; they had seen Him worship in the Temple and the Synagogues, and had accompanied Him in His journeys to the Feasts. He had never told them in so many words that the glory of the Law, like the light which lingered on the face of Moses, was to be done away. They had failed to comprehend the ultimate tendency and significance of His words and actions respecting the Sabbath,15 respecting outward observances,16 respecting divorce,17 respecting the future universality of spiritual worship.18 They remembered, doubtless, what He had said about the permanence of every yod and horn of a letter in the Law,19 but they had not remarked that the assertion of the preeminence of moral over ceremonial duties is one unknown to the Law itself. Nor had they seen that His fulfilment of the Law had consisted in its spiritualisation; that He had not only extended to infinitude the range of its obligations, but had derived their authority from deeper principles, and surrounded their fulfilment with diviner sanctions. Nor, again, had they observed how much was involved in the emphatic quotation by Christ of that passage of Hosea, “I will have mercy and not sacrifice.”20 They were not yet ripe for the conviction that to attach primary importance to Mosaic regulations after they had been admitted into the kingdom of Heaven, was to fix their eyes upon a waning star while the dawn was gradually broadening into boundless day.
About the early ministry of Stephen we are told comparatively little in the Acts, but its immense importance has become more clear in the light of subsequent history. It is probable that he himself can never have formed the remotest conception of the vast results—results among millions of Christians through centuries of progress—which in God’s Providence should arise from the first clear statement of those truths which he was the first to perceive. Had he done so he would have been still more thankful for the ability with which he was inspired to support them, and for the holy courage which prevented him from quailing for an instant under the storm of violence and hatred which his words awoke.
What it was which took him to the synagogues of Jewish Hellenists we do not know. It may have been the same missionary zeal which afterwards carried to so many regions the young man of Tarsus who at this time was among his ablest opponents. All that we are told is that “there arose some of the synagogue which is called the synagogue of the Libertines and Cyrenians, and Alexandrians, and those of Cilicia and Asia disputing with Stephen.” The form of the sentence is so obscure that it is impossible to tell whether we are meant to understand that the opponents of Stephen were the members of one synagogue which united these widely–scattered elements; of fiveseparate synagogues; of threesynagogues—namely, that of the Freedmen, that of the African, and that of the Asiatic Hellenists; or of two distinct synagogues, of which one was frequented by the Hellenists of Rome, Greece, and Alexandria, the other by those of Cilicia and Proconsular Asia. The number of synagogues in Jerusalem was as I have already mentioned) so large that there is no difficulty in believing that each of these bodies had their own separate place of religious meeting,21 just as at this day in Jerusalem there are separate synagogues for the Spanish Sephardim, the Dutch Anshe hod, and the German and Polish Ashkenazim.22 The freedmen may have been the descendants of those Jews whom Pompey had sent captive to Italy, and Jews were to be counted by myriads in Greece, in Alexandria, and in the cities of Asia. But to us the most interesting of all these Greek–speaking Jews was Saul of Tarsus, who, beyond all reasonable doubt, was a member of the synagogue of the Cilicians,23 and who in that case must not only have taken his part in the disputes which followed the exhortations of the fervid deacon,24 but as a scholar of Gamaliel and a zealous Pharisee, must have occupied a prominent position as an uncompromising champion of the traditions of the fathers.
Though the Saul of this period must have differed widely from that Paul, the slave of Jesus Christ, whom we know so well, yet the main features of his personality must have been the same. He could not have failed to recognise the moral beauty, the dauntless courage, the burning passion latent in the tenderness of Stephen’s character. The white ashes of a religion which had smouldered into formalism lay thickly scattered over his own heart, but the fire of a genuine sincerity burned below. Trained as he had been for years in Rabbinic minutiæ, he had not yet so far grown old in a deadening system as to mistake the painted cere–cloths of the mummy for the grace and flush of healthy life. While he listened to St. Stephen, he must surely have felt the contrast between a dead theology and a living faith; between a kindling inspiration and a barren exegesis; between a minute analysis of unimportant ceremonials and a preaching that stirred the inmost depths of the troubled heart. Even the rage which is often intensified by the unconscious rise of an irresistible conviction could not wholly prevent him from perceiving that these preachers of a gospel which he disdained as an execrable superstition, had found “in Christ” the secret of a light and joy, and love and peace, compared with which his own condition was that of one who was chained indissolubly to a corpse.
We catch but a single glimpse of these furious controversies. Their immediate effect was the signal triumph of St. Stephen in argument. The Hellenists were unable to withstand the wisdom and the spirit with which he spake. Disdainful Rabbinists were at once amazed and disgusted to find that he with whom they now had to deal was no rude provincial, no illiterate amha–arets, no humble hediot, like the fishermen and tax–gatherers of Galilee; but one who had been trained in the culture of heathen cities as well as in the learning of Jewish communities—a disputant who could meet them with their own weapons, and speak Greek as fluently as themselves. Steeped in centuries of prejudice, engrained with traditions of which the truth had never been questioned, they must have imagined that they would win an easy victory, and convince a man of intelligence how degrading it was for him to accept a faith on which, from the full height of their own ignorance, they complacently looked down. How great must have been their discomfiture to find that what they had now to face was not a mere personal testimony which they could contemptuously set aside, but arguments based on premisses which they themselves admitted, enforced by methods which they recognised, and illustrated by a learning which they could not surpass! How bitter must have been their rage when they heard doctrines subversive of their most cherished principles maintained with a wisdom which differed not only in degree, but even in kind, from the loftiest attainments of their foremost Rabbis—even of those whose merits had been rewarded by the flattering titles of “Rooters of Mountains” and “Glories of the Law!”
At first the only discussion likely to arise would be as to the Messiahship of Jesus, the meaning of His death, the fact of His Resurrection. These would be points on which the ordinary Jew would have regarded argument as superfluous condescension. To him the stumbling–block of the Cross would have been insurmountable. In all ages the Messianic hope had been prominent in the minds of the most enlightened Jews, but during the Exile and the Restoration it had become the central faith of their religion. It was this belief which, more than any other, kindled their patriotism, consoled their sorrows, and inspired their obedience. If a Shammai used to spend the whole week in meditating how he could most rigidly observe the Sabbath—if the Pharisees regarded it as the main function of their existence to raise a hedge around the Law—the inspiring motive was a belief that if only for one day Israel were entirely faithful, the Messiah would come. And what a coming! How should the Prince of the House of David smite the nations with the sword of his mouth! How should He break them in pieces like a potter’s vessel! How should He exalt the children of Israel into kings of the earth, and feed them with the flesh of Behemoth, and Leviathan, and the bird Bar Juchne, and pour at their feet the treasures of the sea! And to say that JesusofNazarethwas the promised Messiah—to suppose that all the splendid prophecies of patriarchs, and seers, and kings, from the Divine Voice which spoke to Adam in Paradise, to the last utterance of the Angel Malachi—all pointed to, all centred in, One who had been the carpenter of Nazareth, and whom they had seen crucified between two brigands—to say that their very Messiah had just been “hung” by Gentile tyrants at the instance of their own priests;—this, to most of the hearers in the synagogue, would have seemed wicked if it had not seemed too absurd. Was there not one sufficient and decisive answer to it all in the one verse of the Law—“Cursed by God is he that hangeth on a tree?”25
Yet this was the thesis which such a man as Stephen— no ignorant Galilæan, but a learned Hellenist—undertook to prove, and didprove with such power as to produce silence if not assent, and hatred if not conviction. For with all their adoration of the letter, the Rabbis and Pharisees had but half read their Scriptures, or had read them only to use as an engine of religious intolerance, and to pick out the views which most blended with their personal preconceptions. They had laid it down as a principle of interpretation that the entire books of the Canon prophesied of nothing else but the days of the Messiah. How, under these circumstances, they could possibly miss the conception of a suffering as well as of a triumphant Messiah,26 might well amaze us, if there had not been proof in all ages that men may entirely overlook the statements and pervert the meaning of their own sacred books, because, when they read those books, the veil of obstinate prejudice is lying upon their hearts. But when the view of ancient prophecy, which proved that it behoved Christ thus to suffer and to enter into His glory,27 was forcibly presented to them by the insight and eloquence of one who was their equal in learning and their superior in illumination, we can understand the difficulties to which they were reduced. How, for instance, could they elude the force of the 53rd chapter of Isaiah, to which their Rabbis freely accorded a Messianic interpretation? The Messianic application of what is there said about the Servant of Jehovah, and the deep humiliation borne for the sake of others, is not only found in the Targum of Jonathan and in many Rabbinic allusions, down even to the Book Zohar, but seems to have remained entirely undisputed until the mediæval Rabbis found themselves inconvenienced by it in their controversies with Christians.28 Yet this was but an isolated prophecy, and the Christians could refer to passage after passage which, on the very principles of their adversaries, not only justified them in accepting as the Christ One whom the rulers of the Jews had crucified, but even distinctly foreshadowed the mission of His Forerunner; His ministry on the shores of Gennesareth; His humble entry into Jerusalem; His rejection by His own people; the disbelief of His announcements; the treachery of one of His own followers; the mean price paid for His blood; His death as a malefactor; even the bitter and stupefying drinks that had been offered to Him; and the lots cast upon His clothes—no less than His victory over the grave by Resurrection, on the third day, from the dead, and His final exaltation at the right hand of God.29 How tremendous the cogency of such arguments would be to the hearers of Stephen cannot be shown more strikingly than by the use made of them by St. Paul after the conversion which they doubtless helped to bring about. It must have been from St. Stephen that he heard them first, and they became so convincing to him that he constantly employs the same or analogous arguments in his own reasonings with his unconverted countrymen.30
It is clear that, in the course of argument, Stephen was led to adduce some of those deep sayings as to the purpose of the life of Christ which the keen insight of hate had rendered more intelligible to the enemies of our Lord than they had been in the first instance to His friends. Many of those priests and Pharisees who had been baptised into the Church of Christ with the notion that their new belief was compatible with an unchanged loyalty to Judaism, had shown less understanding of the sayings of their Master, and less appreciation of the grandeur of His mission, than the Sadducees whose hatred had handed Him over to the secular arm. It did lie within the natural interpretation of Christ’s language that the Law of Moses, which the Jews at once idolised and evaded, was destined to be disannulled; not, indeed, those moral sanctions of it which were eternal in obligation, but the complicated system wherein those moral commandments were so deeply imbedded. The Jewish race were right to reverence Moses as an instrument in the hands of God to lay the deepest foundations of a national life. As a Lawgiver whose Decalogue is so comprehensive in its brevity as to transcend all other codes—as the sole Lawgiver who laid his prohibition against the beginnings of evil, by daring to forbid an evil thought—as one who established for his people a monotheistic faith, a significant worship, and an undefinable hope—he deserved the gratitude and reverence of mankind. That this under–official of an obscure sect of yesterday should dare to move his tongue against that awful name, and prophesy the abolition of institutions of which some had been delivered to their fathers of old from the burning crags of Sinai, and others had been handed down from the lips of the mighty teacher through the long series of priests and prophets, was to them something worse than folly and presumption—it was a blasphemy and a crime!
And how did he dare to speak one word against, or hint one doubt as to the permanent glory of, the Temple? The glowing descriptions of the Talmud respecting its colossal size and royal splendour are but echoes of the intense love which breathes throughout the Psalms. In the heart of Saul any word which might sound like a slight to “the place where God’s honour dwelt” would excite a peculiar indignation. When the conflagration seized its roofs of cedar–wood and melted its golden tables, every Jew in the city was fired with a rage which made him fight with superhuman strength—
“Through their torn veins reviving fury ran,
And life’s last anger warmed the dying man.”
Among those frenzied combatants was a body of Tarsian youths who gladly devoted their lives to the rescue of Jerusalem. What they felt at that supreme moment may show us what such a zealot as Saul of Tarsus would feel, when he heard one who called himself a Jew use language which sounded like disparagement of “the glory of the whole earth.”
Foiled in argument, the Hellenists of the synagogues adopted the usual resource of defeated controversialists who have the upper hand. They appealed to violence for the suppression of reason. They first stirred up the people— whose inflammable ignorance made them the ready tools of any agitator—and through them aroused the attention of the Jewish authorities. Their plot was soon ripe. There was no need of the midnight secrecy which had marked the arrest of Jesus. There was no need to secure the services of the Captain of the Temple to arrest Stephen at twilight, as he had arrested Peter and John. There was no need even to suppress all semblance of violence, lest the people should stone them for their unauthorised interference. The circumstances of the day enabled them to assume unwonted boldness, because they were at the moment enjoying a sort of interregnum from Roman authority. The approval of the multitude had been alienated by the first rumour of defective patriotism. When every rank of Jewish society had been stirred to fury by false witnesses whom these Hellenists had suborned, they seized a favourable moment, suddenly came upon Stephen,31 either while he was teaching in a synagogue, or while he was transacting the duties of an almoner, and led him away—apparently without a moment’s pause—into the presence of the assembled Sanhedrin. Everything was ready; everything seemed to point to a foregone conclusion. The false witnesses were at hand, and confronted their victim with the charge of incessant harangues against “this Holy Place”—the expression seems to show that the Sanhedrin were for this time sitting in their famous “Hall of Squares”— and against the Law.32 In support of this general accusation, they testified that they had heard him say that Jesus— “this Nazarene,”33 as they indignantly add to distinguish Him from others who bore that common name—“shall destroy this place, and shall change the customs which Moses handed down to us.” It is evident that these false witnesses made some attempt to base their accusation upon truth. There was good policy in this, as false witnesses in all ages have been cunning enough to see. Half truths are often the most absolute of lies, because
“A lie which is half a truth is ever the blackest of lies;
For a lie which is all a lie may be met and fought with outright,
But a lie which is part a truth is a harder matter to fight.”
It is certain that if Stephen had not used the very expressions with which they charged him, he had used others not unlike them. It is his immortal glory to have remembered the words of Jesus, and to have interpreted them aright. Against the moral Law—the great Ten Words of Sinai, or any of those precepts of exquisite humanity and tenderness which lie scattered amid the ceremonial observances—he is not even falsely accused of having uttered a word. But against the permanent validity of the ceremonial Law he may have spoken with freedom; for, as we have seen, its destined abrogation was involved in the very slight importance which Jesus had attached to it. And for the Oral Law it is probable that Stephen, whose training would have rendered impossible any minute fulfilment of its regulations, neither felt nor professed respect. The expression used by the witnesses against him seems to show that it was mainly, though not perhaps exclusively, of this Oral Law that he had been thinking.34 It was not, perhaps, any doubt as to its authenticity which made him teach that Jesus should change its customs, for in those days the critical spirit was not sufficiently developed to give rise to any challenge of a current assertion; but he had foreseen the future nullity of these “traditions of the fathers,” partly from their own inherent worthlessness, and partly because he may have heard, or had repeated to him, the stern denunciation which the worst of these traditions had drawn from the lips of Christ Himself.35
But though Stephen must have seen that the witnesses were really false witnesses, because they misrepresented the tone and the true significance of the language which he had used—although, too, he was conscious how dangerous was his position as one accused of blasphemy against Moses, against the Temple, against the traditions, and against God—it never occurred to him to escape his danger by a technicality or a compromise. To throw discredit even upon the Oral Law would not be without danger in the presence of an assembly whose members owed to its traditions no little of the authority which they enjoyed.36 But Stephen did not at all intend to confine his argument to this narrow range. Rather the conviction came upon him that now was the time to speak out—that this was the destined moment in which, even if need be to the death, he was to bear witness to the inner meaning of the Kingdom of his Lord. That conviction—an inspiration from on high—gave unwonted grandeur and heavenliness to his look, his words, his attitude. His whole bearing was ennobled, his whole being was transfigured by a consciousness which illuminated his very countenance. It is probable that the unanimous tradition of the Church is correct in representing him as youthful and beautiful; but now there was something about him far more beautiful than youth or beauty could bestow. In the spiritual light which radiated from him he seemed to be overshadowed by the Shechinah, which had so long vanished from between the wings of the Temple cherubim. While the witnesses had been delivering their testimony, no one had observed the sudden brightness which seemed to be stealing over him; but when the charge was finished, and every eye was turned from the accusers to a fixed gaze on the accused,37 all who were seated in the Sanhedrin—and one of the number, in all probability, was Saul of Tarsus— “saw his face as it had been the face of an angel.”
In the sudden hush that followed, the voice of the High Priest Jonathan was heard putting to the accused the customary and formal question—
“Are these things so?”38
In reply to that question began the speech which is one of the earliest, as it is one of the most interesting, documents of the Christian Church. Although it was delivered before the Sanhedrin, there can be little doubt that it was delivered in Greek, which, in the bilingual condition of Palestine—and, indeed, of the civilised world in general— at that time, would be perfectly understood by the members of the Sanhedrin, and which was perhaps the only language which Stephen could speak with fluency.39 The quotations from the Old Testament follow the Septuagint, even where it differs from the Hebrew, and the individuality which characterises almost every sentence of the speech forbids us to look on it as a mere conjectural paraphrase. There is no difficulty in accounting for its preservation. Apart from the fact that two secretaries were always present at the judicial proceedings of the Sanhedrin,40 there are words and utterances which, at certain times, are branded indelibly upon the memory of their hearers; and since we can trace the deep impression made by this speech on the mind of St. Paul, we find little difficulty in adopting the conjecture that its preservation was due to him. The Hagadôthin which it abounds, the variations from historical accuracy, the free citation of passages from the Old Testament, the roughness of style, above all the concentrated force which makes it lend itself so readily to differing interpretations, are characteristics which leave on our minds no shadow of doubt that whoever may have been the reporter, we have here at least an outlineof Stephen’s speech. And this speech marked a crisis in the annals of Christianity. It led to consequences that changed the Church from a Judaic sect at Jerusalem, into the Church of the Gentiles and of the world. It marks the commencing severance of two institutions which had not yet discovered that they were mutually irreconcilable.
Since the charge brought against St. Stephen was partly false and partly true, it was his object to rebut what was false, and justify himself against all blame for what was true. Hence apology and demonstration are subtly blended throughout his appeal, but the apology is only secondary, and the demonstration is mainly meant to rouse the dormant consciences of his hearers. Charged with blasphemous words, he contents himself with the incidental refutation of this charge by the entire tenor of the language which he employs. After his courteous request for attention, his very first words are to speak of God under one of His most awful titles of majesty, as the God of the Shechinah. On the history of Moses he dwells with all the enthusiasm of patriotic admiration. To the Temple he alludes with entire reverence. Of Sinai and the living oracles he uses language as full of solemnity as the most devoted Rabbi could desire. But while he thus shows how impossible it must have been for him to have uttered the language of a blasphemer, he is all the while aiming at the establishment of facts far deeper than the proof of his own innocence. The consummate art of his speech consists in the circumstance that while he seems to be engaged in a calm, historical review, to which any Jewish patriot might listen with delight and pride, he is step by step leading up to conclusions which told with irresistible force against the opinions of his judges. While he only seems to be reviewing the various migrations of Abraham, and the chequered fortunes of the Patriarchs, he is really showing that the covenants of God with His chosen people, having been made in Ur and Haran and Egypt, were all parts of one progressive purpose, which was so little dependent on ceremonials or places as to have been anterior not only to the existence of the Tabernacle and Temple, not only to the possession of the Holy Land, but even to the rite of circumcision itself.41 While sketching the career of Joseph, he is pointing allusively to the similar rejection of a deliverer greater than Joseph. While passing in review the triple periods of forty years which made up the life of Moses, he is again sketching the ministry of Christ, and silently pointing to the fact that the Hebrew race had at every stage been false alike to Moses and to God. This is why he narrates the way in which, on the first appearance of Moses to help his suffering countrymen, they rudely spurned his interference; and how in spite of their rejection he was chosen to lead them out of the house of bondage. In defiance of this special commission—and it is well worth notice how, in order to conciliate their deeper attention, this palmary point in his favour is not triumphantly paraded, but quietly introduced as an incident in his historic summary— Moses had himself taught them to regard his own legislation as provisional, by bidding them listen to a Prophet like unto himself who should come hereafter. But the history of Moses, whom they trusted, was fatal to their pretence of allegiance. Even when he was on Sinai they had been disloyal to him, and spoken of him as “this Moses” and as one who had gone they knew not where.42 And, false to Moses, they had been yet more false to God. The Levitical sacrifices had been abandoned from the very time of their institution, for sacrifices to the host of heaven; and the tabernacle of Moloch, and the star of Remphan,43 had been dearer to them than the Tabernacle of Witness and the Shechinah of God. At last a Jesus—for, in order that he might be heard to due purpose, Stephen suppresses the name of that Jesus of whom his thoughts were full—led them and their Tabernacle into the land of which he dispossessed the Gentiles. That Tabernacle, after an obscure and dishonoured history, had passed away, and it may perhaps be intimated that this was due to their indifference and neglect. David—their own David—had indeed desired to replace it by another, but the actual building of the House was carried out by the less faithful Solomon.44 But even at the very time the House was built it had been implied in the Prayer of David, and in the dedication prayer of Solomon,45 that “the Most High dwelleth not in temples made with hands.” And to guard against the dangerous superstition into which the reverence paid to material places is apt to degenerate—to obviate the trust in lying words which thought it sufficient to exclaim, “The Temple of the Lord, the Temple of the Lord, the Temple of the Lord are these”—the great Prophet had cried, in God’s name,46 “Heaven is my throne, and earth is my footstool; what house will ye build for me, saith the Lord, or what is the place of my abiding? Did not my hand make all these things?” The inference from this—that the day mustcome, of which Jesus had prophesied to the woman of Samaria, in which neither in Gerizim nor yet in Jerusalem should men worship the Father, constituted a perfect defence against the charge that anything which he had said could be regarded as a blasphemy against the Temple.
Thus far he had fulfilled all the objects of his speech, and had shown that injurious words had been as far as possible from his thoughts. It had become clear also from his summary of the national story that the principles which he had advocated were in accordance with the teaching of those past ages; that the rejection of Christ by the rulers of His nation was no argument against His claims; that the Temple couldnot have been meant to be the object of an endless honour; lastly, that if he had said that Jesus should change the customs which Moses had delivered, Moses himself had indicated that in God’s due time his entire dispensation was destined to pass away. And he had stated the grounds from which these conclusions followed, rather than urged upon them the inferences themselves. He had done this in deference to their passions and prejudices, and in the hope of bringing the truth gently into their hearts. He might have continued the story through centuries of weak or apostate kings, stained with the blood of rejected prophets, down to the great retribution of the exile; and he might have shown how, after the exile, the obsolete idolatry of gods of wood and stone had only been superseded by the subtler and more self–complacent idolatry of formalism and letter–worship; how the Book had been honoured to the oblivion of the truths which it enshrined; how in the tithing of mint and anise and cummin there had been a forgetfulness of the weightier matters of the Law; how the smoke of dead sacrifices had been thought of more avail than deeds of living mercy; how circumcision and Sabbatism had been elevated above faith and purity; how the long series of crimes against God’s messengers had been consummated in the murder of the Lord of glory. A truth which is only suggested, often comes home to the heart with more force than one which is put in words, and it may have been his original design to guide rather than to refute. But if so, the faces of his audience showed that his object had failed. They were listening with stolid self–complacency to a narrative of which the significant incidents only enabled them to glory over their fathers. It was, I think, something in the aspect of his audience—some sudden conviction that to such invincible obstinacy his words were addressed in vain—which made him suddenly stop short in his review of history, and hurl in their faces the gathered thunder of his wrath and scorn.
“Stiff–necked!” he exclaimed, “and uncircumcised in your heart and in your ears, yeare ever in conflict with the Holy Spirit; as your fathers, so ye! Which of the prophets did not your fathers persecute? and they killed those who announced before respecting the coming of the Just, of whom ye now proved yourselves betrayers and murderers; ye who received the Law at the ordinance of angels,47 and kept it not!”48
A denunciation so scathing and so fearless, from the lips of a prisoner whose life depended on their will, might well have startled them; and this strong burst of righteous indignation against those whom he had addressed as “brethren and fathers,” can only be accounted for by the long–pent feelings of one whose patience has been exhausted. But he could hardly have addressed them in words more calculated to kindle their fury. The very terms in which he characterised their bearing, being borrowed from their own Law and Prophets, added force to the previous epitome of their history;49 and to call them uncircumcised inheartandearswas to reject with scorn the idle fancies that circumcision alone was enough to save them from God’s wrath, and that uncircumcision was worse than crime.50 To convict them of being the true sons of their fathers, and to brand consciences, already ulcerated by a sense of guilt, with a murder worse than the worst murder of the prophets, was not only to sweep away the prestige of an authority which the people so blindly accepted, but it was to arraign his very judges and turn upon them the tables of accusation. And this he did, not only in the matter of their crucifixion of the Messiah, but also in the matter of disobedience to that Law ordained by angels of which they were at that very moment professing to vindicate the sanctity and the permanence.
It would be difficult in the entire range of literature to find a speech more skilful, more pregnant, more convincing; and it becomes truly astonishing when we remember that it seems to have been delivered on the spur of the moment.51
But the members of the Sanhedrin were roused to fury by the undaunted audacity of Stephen’s final invective. The most excitable of Western nations can hardly imagine the raging passion which maddens a crowd of Eastern fanatics.52 Barely able to continue the semblance of a judicial procedure, they expressed the agony of hatred which was sawing their hearts asunder, by outward signs which are almost unknown to modern civilisation—by that grinding and gnashing of the teeth only possible to human beings in whom “the ape and the tiger” are not yet quite dead. To reason with men whose passions had thus degraded them to the level of wild beasts would have been worse than useless. The flame of holy anger in the breast of Stephen had died away as suddenly as the lightning. It was a righteous anger; it was aimed not at them but at their infatuation; it was intended not to insult but to awaken.53 But he saw at a glance that it had failed, and that all was now over. In one instant his thoughts had passed away to that heaven from which his inspiration had come. From those hateful faces, rendered demoniac by evil passion, his earnest gaze was turned upward and heavenward. There, in ecstacy of vision, he saw the Shechinah—the Glory of God—and Jesus “standing” as though to aid and receive him “at the right hand of God.” Transported beyond all thought of peril by that divine epiphany, he exclaimed as though he wished his enemies to share his vision: “Lo! I behold the heavens parted asunder,54 and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God.” At such a moment he would not pause to consider, he would not even be able to consider, the words he spoke; but whether it was that he recalled the Messianic title by which Jesus had so often described himself on earth, or that he remembered that this title had been used by the Lord when He had prophesied to this very Sanhedrin that hereafter they should see the Son of Man sitting on the right hand of power—certain it is that this is the only passage of the New Testament where Jesus is called the Son of Man by lips other than His own.55
But those high words were too much for the feelings of his audience. Stopping their ears as though to shut out a polluting blasphemy, they rose in a mass from both sides of the semi–circular range in which they sat, and with one wild yell56 rushed upon Stephen. There was no question any longer of a legal decision. In their rage they took the law into their own hands, and then and there dragged him off to be stoned outside the city gate.57
We can judge how fierce must have been the rage which turned a solemn Sanhedrin into a mob of murderers. It was true that they were at this moment under Sadducean influence, and that this influence, as at the Trial of Christ, was mainly wielded by the family of Hanan, who were the most merciless members of that least merciful sect. If, as there is reason to believe, the martyrdom took place A.D. 37, it was most probably during the brief presidency of the High Priest Jonathan, son of Hanan. Unhappy family of the man whom Josephus pronounces to have been so exceptionally blest! The hoary father, and his son–in–law Caiaphas, imbrued their hands in the blood of Jesus; Jonathan during his few months’ term of office was the Nasî of the Sanhedrin which murdered Stephen; Theophilus, another son, was the High Priest who, during the utmost virulence of the first persecution gave Saul his inquisitorial commission to Damascus; Matthias, another son, must, from the date of his elevation, have been one of those leading Jews whom Herod Agrippa tried to conciliate by the murder of James the son of Zebedee; and another Hanan, the youngest son of the “viper brood” brought about with illegal violence the murder of James the brother of the Lord.58 Thus all these judicial murders—so rare at this epoch—were aimed at the followers of Jesus, and all of them directed or sanctioned by the cunning, avaricious, unscrupulous members of a single family of Sadducean priests.59
Stephen, then, was hurried away to execution with a total disregard of the ordinary observances. His thoughts were evidently occupied with the sad scene of Calvary; it would come home to him with all the greater vividness because he passed in all probability through that very gate through which Jesus, four short years before, had borne His cross. It was almost in the words of his Master60 that when the horrid butchery began—for the precautions to render death speedy seem to have been neglected in the blind rage of his murderers—he exclaimed, “Lord Jesus receive my spirit.”61 And when bruised and bleeding he was just able to drag himself to his knees it was again in the spirit of that Lord that he prayed for his murderers, and even the cry of his anguish rang forth in the forgiving utterance—showing how little malice there had been in the stern words he had used before—“Lord, lay not to their charge this sin.”62 With that cry he passed from the wrath of men to the peace of God. The historian ends the bloody tragedy with one weighty and beautiful word, “He fell asleep.”63
To fulfil their dreadful task, the witnesses had taken off their garments;64 and they laid them “at the feet of a young man whose name was Saul.”
It is the first allusion in history to a name, destined from that day forward to be memorable for ever in the annals of the world. And how sad an allusion! He stands, not indeed actively engaged in the work of death; but keeping the clothes, consenting to the violence, of those who, in this brutal manner, dimmed in blood the light upon a face which had been radiant as that of an angel with faith and love.
Stephen was dead, and it might well have seemed that all the truth which was to be the glory and the strength of Christianity had died with him. But the deliverance of the Gentiles, and their free redemption by the blood of Christ, were truths too glorious to be quenched. The truth may be suppressed for a time, even for a long time, but it always starts up again from its apparent grave. Fra Dolcino was torn to pieces, and Savonarola and Huss were burnt, but the Reformation was not prevented. Stephen sank in his blood, but his place was taken by the young man who stood there to incite his murderers. Four years after Jesus had died upon the cross of infamy, Stephen was stoned for being His disciple and His worshipper; thirty years after the death of Stephen, his deadliest opponent died also for the same holy faith.