Stephen Before the Sanhedrin: Grace, Power, and Accusation

13th Commentary on Acts: Acts 6:8-15

The Church’s appointment of the seven deacons had far-reaching consequences. In essence, the great struggle had begun. The Jews always looked on themselves as the chosen people; but they had interpreted their choice in the wrong way, regarding themselves as chosen for special privilege and believing that God had no use for any other nation. At their worst, they declared that God had created the Gentiles to be fuel for the fires of hell.  At their mildest, they believed that some day the Gentiles would become their servants. They never dreamt that they were chosen for service to bring all men and women into the same relationship with God as they themselves enjoyed.

Here was the thin end of the wedge. This was not yet a question of bringing in the Gentiles. It was Greek-speaking Jews who were involved. But not one of the seven deacons had a Jewish name; and one of them, Nicolaos, was a Gentile who had accepted the Jewish faith.   Stephen, one of the deacons, had a vision of a world for Christ. To the Jews, two things were especially precious – the Temple, the only place where sacrifice could be offered and God could be truly worshipped; and the law, which could never be changed. Stephen, however, said that the Temple must pass away, that the law was only a stage towards the gospel and that Christianity must go out to the whole wide world. No one could withstand his arguments, and so the Jews resorted to force and Stephen was arrested. His career was to be short; but he was the first to see that Christianity was not only for the Jews but was God’s offer to the entire world.

Luke tells us that Stephen was "full of God's grace and power." The word "grace" (charis) had been previously used by Luke as a characteristic of Mary and her son Jesus. It connotes "spiritual charm."  "Power"  connotes divine power expressed in mighty works.  Like Jesus, Stephen was portrayed as having performed "great wonders and miraculous signs among the people." Just what these were, Luke does not say, though we can undoubtedly think of them as being of the same nature as those performed by Jesus and the apostles.

Stephen soon began preaching among his Hellenistic compatriots. Understandably, many commentators have found this to be a problem because Stephen, like the other deacons, was appointed to supervise relief for the poor, not to perform the apostolic function of preaching. Some, therefore, have viewed this as a Lukan discrepancy, whereas others have claimed that Stephen was not really preaching at all but only uttering the name of Jesus and providing a Christian rationale for his divinely empowered acts.

While not minimizing the importance of the apostles to the whole church, we can surmise that in some way Stephen, and perhaps others of the appointed seven may well have been to the Hellenistic believers what the apostles were to the native-born Christians.

Stephen’s main opponents were members of a synagogue devoted to Jews who had been freed from slavery or whose fathers had been freed from slavery, and who had immigrated to Jerusalem from Cyrene and Alexandria both of which were cities in North Africa, and Cilicia which was Paul’s home province in Turkey. Members of this congregation of Freedmen were induced to give false evidence about Stephen. The charges against Stephen echo those  which brought against Jesus in the gospels for 'blasphemy, cf. Lk 22:71; and for threatening the temple, cf. Mk 14:56-8. The  charge of subverting the law is new, and later on will reappear in  the charges against Paul.  Luke concludes the passage by telling us that when Stephen was accused, “All those who sat in the Sanhedrin looked intently at him and saw that his face was like the face of an angel.” It was as if Stephen had been transfigured by the activity of God’s divine Holy Spirit within him, which gave him heavenly wisdom in responding to his accusers. Stephen’s inspired ability to respond to his accusers was an example of doing what Jesus had spoken about, “When you are brought before synagogues, rulers and authorities, do not worry about how you will defend yourselves or what you will say,  for the Holy Spirit will teach you at that time what you should say“ (Lk 12:11-12).