Who was Stephen in the Bible?

One of the Seven

The Jerusalem church of Acts 6 has two groups. The Hebrews are local Jews who speak Aramaic. The Hellenists are Greek-speaking Jews from around the Mediterranean who have settled in the city. The Hellenists complain that their widows are being missed in the daily distribution of food. The Twelve will not leave their preaching to wait on tables, so the community picks seven men to run it.

They chose Stephen, a man full of faith and of the Holy Spirit, Philip, Prochorus, Nicanor, Timon, Parmenas, and Nicolaus, a proselyte of Antioch

All seven names are Greek. Stephen’s, Stephanos, means crown or wreath, the kind a winner wore. The apostles pray and lay their hands on them.

The debater

Acts never shows Stephen at a table. Three verses later he is working “great wonders and signs” (6:8) and arguing in a synagogue of Freedmen, whose members came from Cyrene, Alexandria, Cilicia and Asia. Cilicia was the home province of a young man from Tarsus called Saul. A Greek inscription found in Jerusalem in 1913 records a synagogue built by a priest named Theodotus, with rooms for visitors from abroad: the same world of Jews come home from the Diaspora.

When his opponents cannot answer him, they bring witnesses Acts calls false. He speaks against the Temple and the law, they say, and claims Jesus will destroy “this place” (6:13–14). The council stares at him and sees a face “like it was the face of an angel” (6:15).

A speech about a God on the move

His defense, in Acts 7, is the longest speech in the book. He retells Israel’s history, and every great moment happens far from the Temple. God appears to Abraham in Mesopotamia, stays with Joseph in Egypt and speaks to Moses from a burning bush in the desert. Solomon builds God a house, Stephen grants, and then he turns the point around.

However, the Most High doesn’t dwell in temples made with hands

He ends by calling the council stiff-necked, like the ancestors who persecuted the prophets (7:51–52).

The stones

The council erupts when he cries out that he sees “the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God” (7:56). Outside the Gospels, the New Testament almost never uses that title. Readers have long asked why Jesus is standing, when Psalm 110 seats him: to welcome Stephen, perhaps, or as a witness rising in court. They drag him out of the city and stone him. Many historians think it was closer to a lynching than a sentence, since Rome kept the death penalty for its governors (John 18:31).

They stoned Stephen as he called out, saying, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit!” He kneeled down and cried with a loud voice, “Lord, don’t hold this sin against them!”

Both prayers echo Jesus on the cross in Luke: “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit” and “Father, forgive them” (Luke 23:34, 46). Luke wrote both books, and he wants the echo heard.

First martyr, first deacon?

Persecution follows, and the believers scatter through Judaea and Samaria, then as far as Phoenicia, Cyprus and Antioch (Acts 8:1; 11:19). Christians call Stephen the protomartyr, the first martyr, from the Greek martys, a witness. Was he a deacon? Acts never uses the noun. It calls the work diakonia, service. By about AD 180, Irenaeus of Lyon was already calling Stephen the first deacon, and the title stuck.

In 415 a priest named Lucian announced that a dream had led him to Stephen’s grave, near Jerusalem. Fragments of the bones reached North Africa, where Augustine recorded healings at Stephen’s shrine. Western churches keep his feast on December 26, the “feast of Stephen” of the carol Good King Wenceslas, and Eastern churches on December 27. The man who held the coats never forgot it (Acts 22:20).