Discovering The Young Church – Chapter 4: Stephen the Martyr
Chapter 4. Stephen the Martyr
Jerusalem, not Galilee or Samaria, was central to the Christian church immediately after Pentecost. This was despite the fact that Jesus and most of the disciples came from Galilee and a number of early Christians from Samaria. James and the Jerusalem church, who were strongly supportive of the Law and the Temple, were wary of those from areas of Palestine such as Galilee and Samaria where the Christians under greater Hellenic influence had less obvious respect for Jewish traditions. Stephen was on a collision course with Jerusalem for, as will be shown, he appears to have been a Hellenic Samaritan Christian. To understand the conflict we need to understand Hellenism and Samaritans in the first century.
Hellenism in the first century
The Hellenists were those people, of whatever ethnic origin, who were convinced of the superiority of Greek culture, language and lifestyle, and who adopted it in preference to their indigenous culture, language and lifestyle. Following the conquest of Asia Minor by Alexander the Great, Greek culture, language and lifestyle influenced every nation in the Middle East. Alexander’s successors and the Romans continued this process. The Romans, powerful in war, were overcome in ideology. Captive Greece took Rome captive from within.
The common Greek language was spoken everywhere, intermarriage with Greek colonists was frequent and Greek customs were considered cultured. The Greek practice of colonisation throughout the world meant that centres of Hellenism were established in most countries.
Under the Greeks, the Jews were granted great freedom to pursue culture and learning. The Jewish community at Alexandria in North Africa, for example, became particularly active in intellectual and cultural pursuits. But the enforced Hellenisation of the Jews in Palestine after the succession of the Seleucids in 198 BC led to Jewish resistance under the Maccabees for a couple of decades. Hellenistic influence, however, continued under the Romans down to the time of Jesus.
The spread of Jews about the Mediterranean from the time of the Babylonian exile meant they were separated over centuries from the ritual, the Temple and the intense tradition of their culture in Jerusalem. More than a hundred cities of the ancient world are known to have possessed large Jewish communities. A number of the cities were mentioned as the homes for the Jews listening to Peter on the Day of Pentecost. 1 The impact of this dispersion gradually weakened the influence of the Temple and the traditions found in Judea among those in far-off countries. Occasional visits to Jerusalem showed them a world markedly different from their own. Lacking the Temple, the centre of their life focused on the synagogue, which became the place worship, education, commerce, law and social activities. There was natural tension between the Aramaic-speaking, Temple-centred local Hebrews in Jerusalem and the Greek-speaking, synagogue-centred, Hellenic Jews from other countries.
In Alexandria, the influence of Hellenic culture was very strong. Jewish philosophers like Philo adopted Greek methods of interpretation, especially the allegorical method, and applied them to the Old Testament. This led to conflict with Orthodox Jews who believed sacred truth was being intermingled with pagan philosophy. It was here the Old Testament was translated by seventy scholars into Greek. This translation, known as the Septuagint, made the Hebrew scriptures available to an international audience and became the basis of much discussion of Hebrew monotheism. Some early Christian evangelists used this widely in proclaiming Jesus as Messiah.
Other centres of Hellenic culture in which there were large Jewish populations were Miletus, Ephesus and Tarsus in Asia Minor; Seleucia, Tripolis and Antioch in Syria; and Philippi, Thessalonica and Corinth in Greece. Each of these cities became receptive to the spreading Christian faith. The Jews here were different in their culture, language and lifestyle to the Jews in Judea.
One notable and eloquent Hellenic Jew who became Christian was Apollos from Alexandria. He knew the Greek Old Testament well and used his fluency in Greek and his knowledge of the scriptures to argue that Jesus was the Messiah. He had arrived in Corinth after Paul had established the church there and, after Paul had left, continued in leadership. His powerful expositions won many converts and some claimed to belong to his ’party’. Paul’s fist letter to the Corinthians argues against this party spirit. The way Paul speaks about Apollos 2 indicates he had good relationship with him, for he speaks more freely of him than he does about those who supported the party of Peter with whom he had face-to-face confrontation.
Apollos also visited Ephesus where his powerful preaching attracted much attention. Priscilla and Aquila spoke with him privately in their home about their better understanding of baptism and there, with great enthusiasm, he proclaimed and taught correctly the facts about Jesus. With his strong arguments he defeated the Jews in public debates by proving from the scriptures that Jesus was the Messiah. 3 The term ‘eloquent speaker’ was frequently used to describe a person of Hellenic culture. Apollos was typical of the early Christians from Hellenic backgrounds. They became Christians in large numbers, probably outnumbering the Hebraic Jews who became Christians.
Hellenism has had an important impact on various parts of Palestine. In Judea it had little. The use of Aramaic as an everyday language, the proximity of the Temple, and the education system centred upon the synagogue and the teaching of the Torah meant that the Greek influence was limited.
The impact of Hellenism upon Galilee was far greater than any other territory in Palestine. This was partly due to the geography of the area, which allowed easy access to foreigners with their different languages and customs. Through Galilee ran the great trade routes from the east to the west and from the north to the south, and its people were exposed to cosmopolitan influences more frequently than the cities in the Judean hills, including Jerusalem.
The Galileans were sneered at by orthodox Jews in Jerusalem as uncouth, with harsh guttural speech which betrayed them easily. The Galileans’ openness to change meant that they responded to the greater freedom that Jesus spoke about in religious observance. Jesus, not surprisingly, was criticised by the Jews in the highlands of the south for allowing ceremonial laxity and lack of concern for tradition.
But there were many Greek towns in Palestine, not just in Galilee, which became centres of Hellenic influence, many of them with a majority of non-Jewish inhabitants. Caesarea had a Jewish community of 20,000 who were a minority in the city. The Roman amphitheatres and Temple to Augustus dominated the city. Other cities in the Decapolis region, such as Gadara, were all centres of non-Jewish culture, as were Ptolemais and Scythopolis.
South of Galilee, in Samaria, there was also constant dispute with the Jews of Jerusalem and the Hellenic Jews form Galilee. They had their own traditions that varied from those in Jerusalem and had also been influenced by the Greek culture. There were some Christians among them. These Samaritan Christians played an important, though often unrecognised, part in the history of the first century church.
Stephen the Samaritan Christian
Dr Abram Spiro has argued cogently that Stephen was a Samaritan Christian. 4 He presents fourteen scholarly arguments to support his view. His views are compelling, indicating how Stephen reflects the Samaritan view of Old Testament history: the inferior place of Moses, the exaltation of Abraham and his use of the Samaritan version of the Law. 5
The use of the Samaritan text variations was followed by Stephen in more than a score of instances, some of them very significant diversions. The Samaritan text features the addition of participles and prepositions designed to make for smoother reading, the inclusion of expansions sometimes several paragraphs in length to help elaborate or explain a point and Babylonian traditions which support Samaritan historical viewpoints. Some of these are mentioned by Stephen. 6
For example, Stephen consistently quotes Abraham as leaving Harran upon his father’s death, 7 which is a Samaritan viewpoint of history which had old Terah living until he was 145 years of age. However, the Jews quoted from their Masoretic text, used by Christians, which indicates that Terah lived for 205 years, not dying until sixty years after Abraham left Harran. 8 Stephen quotes the words of Moses, ’I am the God of your fathers’, 9 using the plural of the Samaritan text instead of the singular as was found in the Masoretic text. The Samaritans claimed Mt Gerizim and the nearby Shechem as the true place of worship and here a rival temple to that at Jerusalem was constructed. Stephen twice mentions Shechem and the tomb there owned by Abraham and their belief that Abraham was buried there and not, as the Jews believed, in Machpelah. 10
This of course was an insult to the Jews and a key point of dispute. Shechem was the place where God appeared to Abraham, where he built an altar and, in their view, the correct place – ‘holy place’ – for a shrine.
Stephen went further in his address indicating that Solomon’s Temple was not only in the wrong place, but was of human origin. When Stephen quoted the scriptures: ‘What kind of house would you build for me? Where is the place for me to live in? Did not I myself make all these things?’ 11 he was quoting from the Samaritan source which makes three questions and changes the context of the Jewish text. Even the quoting of these changed verses would have brought the ire of the Jews upon him.
A further insight into Stephen’s Samaritan background is the way he quotes God dealing personally with Abraham, whereas he claims God dealt with Moses only through an angel in the giving of the Law. 12 This shows the superiority of Abraham over Moses, but it is in direct conflict with the Jewish tradition. 13
There is strong evidence, therefore, for Stephen’s Samaritan origin.
The tensions between Jews and Samaritans and strong historical and theological roots, and the Christians who developed in both communities shared the difference of traditions and theologies, including their knowledge of the scriptures. The Jewish hatred of the Samaritans is illustrated in many parts of the New Testament. Jesus spoke against it with telling effect in his famous parable of the good Samaritan. 14 To most, this was a contradiction in terms, for Samaritans were thought of in terms of traitors and heretics.
Electing the first deacons
The Samaritans were the only people for centuries to call themselves ‘Hebrews’. The Jews of the first century were never called Hebrews, neither did they describe themselves as Hebrews, and it was only in the second century that the Jews were referred to by this term. The ‘Hebrews’ in Acts 6:1, therefore, are clearly Samaritan Christians, a minority group among the Christians – as were the Hellenic Jewish Christians. It was these two groups that argued about the neglect of their widows in the daily food distribution. The tension over this issue in the early church necessitated the appointment of some additional church officers to oversee the caring and administrative functions of the church. In the dispute over the administration of relief, and in the answer of the appointment of the deacons, the Jerusalem Christians and the apostles, who were in Jerusalem, took no part. To the Jewish Christians, both the Samaritan and the Hellenic Christians were people who had deviated from the orthodox Jewish traditions. This issue over the administration of relief was a dispute between the two minority groups.
The seven chosen deacons were thought to be full of the Holy Spirit and wisdom and were well equipped to set about their task of administering social relief. They were certainly not just ‘table waiters’ as their title suggests, for they also started preaching and evangelising. Without delay Stephen moved throughout the Hellenic synagogues preaching the Lordship of Jesus with powerful effect. Up to now, the main activity of the gospel lay in the apostles proclaiming in the Temple. Now Stephen was disputing in the synagogues. The locus of proclamation had changed for all time, and thereafter Paul and others would find the synagogue the centre of their debate and proclamation.
His preaching in the Hellenic synagogues was to cause much strife, a charge before the Jewish Sanhedrin and his death. Stephen no sooner enters church history than he leaves it, but not without having profound effect. He would declare that the new had come, therefore the old must go; the Sanhedrin declared the old must stay, therefore the new must go.
Stephen before the Sanhedrin
The report of Stephen’s defence is one of the longest speeches in the whole Bible, is the longest in Acts and is even longer than the three sermons of Paul put together. He outlines the history of the Jewish race and quotes many Old Testament passages in support of his argument. As indicated earlier, he relied very much on the Samaritan text. Further, he mentions that favourite word of Hellenic philosophy, wisdom, four times, even though it is nowhere else mentioned in Acts.
Stephen’s powerful witness created a backlash. Many today have misunderstood the reasons for which Stephen was condemned. None of the reasons was distinctively part of the Christian gospel, but reflect the conflict between the Hellenic Jews and the Samaritan Christians.
It was the Hellenic members of the synagogues of the Freedmen, which included Jews form Alexandria, Cyrene, Cilicia and Asia Minor, who instigated complaints against Stephen’s preaching in their midst on the grounds that ’we have heard him speaking against Moses and God’. 15 Now this is obviously not part of the gospel, but it was part of the Samaritan-Jewish conflict. Stephen’s detractors thought he elevated the role of Abraham and denigrated the role of Moses. Furthermore, Stephen was charged with speaking firstly against the Temple in Jerusalem – an echo, surely, of the Samaritan woman talking to Jesus about Mt Gerizim being the proper place to worship God instead of the Temple in Jerusalem – and secondly against the Law of Moses. These were typical charges against Samaritan teaching. Only the reference to Jesus destroying the Temple has any Christian content. 16
His speech, which occupies most of Acts 7, is carefully constructed. We will not examine the speech in detail here except to say that Stephen neither defends himself against the charge, nor does he proclaim the gospel as did Peter and John. In fact, the name of Jesus Christ is not mentioned. He was perhaps cut short before he came to proclaiming the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. Instead, he concentrates on the Law and Temple and how his listeners have resisted the Holy Spirit and murdered the righteous servant of God.
Stephen was possibly the first to realise the temporal nature of the Law, the Temple and the ritual that surrounded it. His criticism of the Temple, and the attitudes that followed from the way the Temple was promoted, was also made by others, in a less radical form, at the time.
The Essene community at Qumran, for example, was critical of the high priesthood whom they claimed was illegitimate and needed to be replaced by the true high priestly line from Zadok, and critical, too, of the whole worship cult centring on the Temple. They awaited the Messianic age when they would return to Jerusalem and restore the Temple and the high priesthood to its true worship and legitimacy. Oscar Cullmann has suggested that from the Qumran community were some of the ’great number of priests who accepted the faith’. 17
All that was central to the life of the Jews was now fulfilled and focused in Jesus Christ. In this insight was the seed of the equality of Jew and Gentile within the church and the end of the unique place of Judaism. Little wonder the Jerusalem Jews, and even other Hellenic Jews, felt him to be a traitor and his teaching heretical. Death had to follow. Stephen had first criticized the institutions and the Temple in the Synagogue of the Freedmen, which had resulted in a great deal of argument there. The Hellenists, with their love for logic, were the first to see the implications of Stephen’s preaching. It is to be doubted that even the apostles had followed through the logic of it. Paul understood: that is why he approved of Stephen’s murder.
Whether Stephen’s address was a frequently used formula or not we don’t know, but certainly the early church developed the theme used here of the people of God becoming the divine dwelling-place and Paul, Peter, John and the author of The Letter to the Hebrews all wrote on that subject.
Stephen’s martyrdom
Stephen was the first Christian to lay down his life for his faith. He became the important historical and theological link between Peter and Paul, between the church of the Jews and the church of the Gentiles, between the church in Judea and the church of the uttermost parts of the world. Cameos of his death that have survived from the days of the young church testify to the importance of this event.
When the Council members became furious, gnashing their teeth, rushing upon him, in anger striking him, Stephen calmly looked at the open heavens and saw the ascended Jesus by the side of God. He was thrown outside the city walls and stoned to death. As they continued to stone him, he knelt and, like the Lord Jesus, prayed for his tormentors’ forgiveness and entrusted himself into the hands of Jesus.
The scene was probably more violent than that. He was probably thrown down from a twenty metre high wall and large boulders dropped upon his kneeling, then prostrate, body.
Stephen was not put to death solely because of his proclamation of the Christian gospel, but partly because, being a Samaritan Christian, he infuriated the Jews and the Hellenists by rejecting their Law, their Temple, Moses, and their Mosaic customs and by spreading Samaritan concepts.
The result of this martyrdom was that ‘all believers, except the apostles, were scattered throughout the provinces of Judea and Samaria’. 18
Some of the believers who were scattered by the persecution which took place when Stephen was killed, went as far as Phoenicia, Cyprus and Antioch, telling the message to Jews only. But other believers, men from Cyprus and Cyrene, went to Antioch and proclaimed the message to Gentiles also, telling them the good news about the Lord Jesus. 19
The result was that the church in Jerusalem became more conservative and, with the majority of the Hellenists forced to flee, much more Hebrew in its composition. Ironically, their leader James, who attended the Temple daily and was known for his devotion in prayer and the Law, was himself eventually brought before he Sanhedrin and also executed by stoning like Stephen.
Stephen’s influence on Paul
Stephen’s lasting impact, however, was in the effect the manner of his death had upon Saul of Tarsus. Saul watched with approval. That approval, a consent that is deliberately written into the account, burned itself deep into Saul’s mind and decades later he remembered: ’when Stephen was put to death, I myself was there, approving of his murder and taking care of the cloaks of his murderers.’ 20
In the death of this Samaritan Christian who spoke against the Jewish heritage he held so dear, Saul saw a man dying in faith. His own confidence in the ritual of the Temple and the traditions of the Jerusalem Jews was shaken. Saul’s conversion experience, which was to culminate on the Damascus Road, began at that point. As Augustine said centuries later: ‘If Stephen had not prayed, the church would not have had Paul.’ 21
As a native of Cilicia, Paul may have been one of Cilician members of the synagogue of the Freedmen who had charged Stephen before the Council of the Sanhedrin which meant that, as an accuser, he was required by law to be present at his execution. Certainly, in the persecution of Christians that broke out just after, Paul took a leading part and, as he said, ‘I was devoted to the Jewish religion and I persecuted without mercy the church of God and did my best to destroy it.’ 22
The impact of the brief ministry of Stephen is seen in his importance as a bridge between the ministries of Peter and Paul, an example of the ministries of Samaritan Christians who first faced persecution for their faith, and as a noble witness to Jesus in his preaching, his trials and his death. Although brief, his ministry was crucial in the history of the young church.
Endnotes:
1. Acts 2:8-11
2. 1 Corinthians 3:1-9
3. Acts 18:24-19:1
4. Abram Spiro, ‘The Acts of the Apostles ’ in The Anchor Bible, J. Munk, New York, 1967, p.284
5. F.F. Bruce in New Testament History warns against a too ready acceptance of Spiro’s view, though he notes with appreciation ‘all the striking affinities between Stephen’s exposition and Samaritan traditions to which Spiro draws attention’.
6. See The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, supplementary volume, pp.772-775
7. Acts 7:4
8. Genesis 11:32
9. Acts 7:32
10. Genesis 23:1-20; 49:31
11. Acts 7:49-50
12. Acts 7:2,30,35,38,44
13. Exodus 19 and 20; 33:11; Numbers 12:8
14. Luke 10:30-37
15. Acts 6:9-11
16. Acts 6:13,14
17. Acts 6:7
18. Acts 8:1
19. Acts 11:19, 20
20. Acts 22:20
21. Zondervan Pictorial Encyclopedia of the Bible, Vol.5, p. 516
22. Galatians 1:13
For personal reading
Theme: The first martyr
Monday : A need (Acts 6:1-7)
Tuesday : Arrest (Acts 6:8-15)
Wednesday : Defence 1 (Acts 7:1-29)
Thursday : Defence 2 (Acts 7:30- 53)
Friday : Death (Acts 7:54-8:3)
Saturday : Results 1 (Acts 9:1-22)
Sunday : Result 2 (Acts 22:3-21)
For group reading
Topic: Faith and tradition
1. Why did some Jews not like the influences of Greek culture on their religion?
2. How are we able to distinguish the cultural aspects of our faith from the heart of the gospel?
3. How can we avoid the danger of following tradition rather than the word of God?
4. What was there about Stephen’s speech before he died that made Saul start to think about his new faith (Act 7:1-53)?
5. What can Stephen teach Christians today?
