This is the nineteenth
entry in the Bible Junkies Online Commentary on the Acts of the Apostles. This entry
begins Stephen’s speech before the council.
For previous entries, please now go to the Complete Acts of the Apostle Commentary, where you can find links to each of the
entries updated after each new blog post.
3. Contents:
D) Persecutions of the “Hellenist” Jewish
Christians and the First Mission outside of Jerusalem (6:1-8:40): Stephen’s
Speech Begins (7:1-8):
1 Then the high priest asked him, "Are
these things so?" 2 And Stephen replied: "Brothers and
fathers, listen to me. The God of glory appeared to our ancestor Abraham when
he was in Mesopotamia, before he lived in Haran, 3 and said to him,
"Leave your country and your relatives and go to the land that I will show
you.' 4 Then he left the country of the Chaldeans and settled in Haran.
After his father died, God had him move from there to this country in which you
are now living. 5 He did not give him any of it as a heritage, not even
a foot's length, but promised to give it to him as his possession and to his
descendants after him, even though he had no child. 6 And God spoke in
these terms, that his descendants would be resident aliens in a country
belonging to others, who would enslave them and mistreat them during four
hundred years. 7 "But I will judge the nation that they serve,'
said God, "and after that they shall come out and worship me in this
place.' 8 Then he gave him the covenant of circumcision. And so Abraham
became the father of Isaac and circumcised him on the eighth day; and Isaac
became the father of Jacob, and Jacob of the twelve patriarchs. (NRSV)
As Stephen’s speech is the “longest single discourse in Acts,”
it must be broken into sections to examine, but also a few words must be said
about the speech as a whole as we begin (Johnson, Acts, 119). Luke
Timothy Johnson promises that no damage is done to the speech as a whole by
breaking into parts, since the focus on historical periods and characters in
the speech lends itself to discrete units. Before looking at the first of these
units, dealing with Abraham, we must give an overview of the speech. While there
is agreement on the topics considered in the speech, there is less agreement on
the purpose of the speech and its historicity.
In terms of historicity, Johnson, whom I will quote at
length, says that
from the beginning, of course, we must listen to the speech
as the creation of Luke and as serving his literary goals. It is futile and
even fatuous to seek to find in these words the special theological outlook of
the historical “Hellenists” represented by Stephen. Not only in style and
diction, but above all in its religious perceptions, this discourse represents
the special vision of Luke himself. Indeed, it is in Stephen’s speech that we
find most clearly articulated not only our author’s interpretation of the
biblical story, but also his understanding of how that story is continued in
Jesus and the apostles. Stephen’s speech is, as a whole, the key Luke provides
his readers for the interpretation of his entire two-volume narrative.” (Johnson,
Acts, 119)
Johnson believes that Stephen’s speech is wholly the creation
of Luke. While it would be rare to find a scholar who believes we have in this
speech simply the words of Stephen, many scholars would seek a middle ground to
the origins of the speech, opting neither to claim that this is a composition completely
written by Luke nor entirely a speech given by Stephen. Richard J. Dillon, for
one, thinks the truth falls in between, namely, that the speech combining historical
summary, the addition of penitential reproaches (vv. 39-42a, 51-53), Moses-prophet typology and formal OT citations
(vv. 42b-43, 48b-50) is certainly edited and shaped by Luke but that it also
contains a core of an historical event (Richard J. Dillon, NJBC, 740-41). That is my sense too.
As to the purpose of the speech, it is quite fascinating
that Stephen does not actually respond to the formal charges against him, which
we saw in entry 18, concerned changing the Law and Jesus destroying the
Temple (Acts 6:13-14). In Acts 7:1 the high priest asks him, "Are these
things so?" But Stephen never answers these questions directly. T.E. Page comes
the closest to saying he does, arguing that
The speech of Stephen must be considered in reference to the
twofold charge (vi. 13, 14) to which it is an answer. The argument is
throughout from Scripture, and it is twofold, but the two threads are not kept
distinct, but interwoven.
(1)
He meets the charge of
‘speaking against this Holy Place’ – a charge no doubt founded on the fact of
his having taught that worship in the Temple was not essential to the worship
of God – by shewing that the worship of God is not confined to Jerusalem or the
Jewish Temple…
(2)
As regards the charge of
changing ‘the customs which Moses delivered’, he points out that God had had
many dealings with their fathers before the
giving of the law (e.g., in the covenant of circumcision ver. 8), and that, far
from contradicting Moses, Jesus is the very successor whose coming Moses had
foretold (ver. 37).” (Page, Acts,
119)
Page skirts the question of the “formal” charges by arguing
that Stephen in fact answers these questions theologically, and that is indeed
Johnson’s approach also.
Johnson writes, “Does Stephen answer the question concerning
the Law and the Temple? In one obvious sense, no, for he does not even take up
the charges in the form they were made. But in a more important sense, he
responds to the real issue underlying those attacks: are the Messianists
renegade Jews, or do they have a legitimate reason to claim that they are the
authentic realization of the people of God?” (Johnson, Acts, 119). He
continues on to claim that “readers who
object that the greater part of Stephen’s speech is beside the point simply
show that they have not grasped what the point is…what all such recitals have
in common is the way in which they select and shape a tradition in order to
justify or support a specific
understanding of it.” (Johnson, Acts, 120).
Luke’s goal in this speech is not to answer specific charges,
but he “seeks to legitimate the messianic appropriation of Torah by showing how
Torah itself demanded such an appropriation” (Johnson, Acts, 120). In
Luke’s speech, therefore, “Abraham is not ‘your father,’ but ‘our father.’ The
debate, therefore, is within the family as to what constitutes authentic family
membership” (Johnson, Acts, 121).
Gary Gilbert, however, writing in the Jewish Annotated
New Testament sees something else at play than legitimation of the “Messianists,”
to use Johnson’s description, but a focus on Jewish disobedience and a
de-legitimation of the Temple, a place where the followers of Jesus have
continued to worship throughout the first chapters of Acts.
“…they bring him {Stephen} before the council where they
present false witnesses who charge him with saying things against the Temple
and law (6:8-15; see Mark 15:46 for a parallel in Jesus’ trial). Stephen
launches into a speech, the longest in Acts, that rehearses Israel’s history,
beginning with Abraham. The speech develops two themes that become a major part
of the larger Lukan narrative, particularly in its representation of Jews.
First, it highlights Jewish disobedience. The speech, rather than offering any
response to the high priest’s question, rehearses major events in Israel’s
sacred narrative. After mentioning Abraham, Joseph, and other early ancestors,
the focus shifts to Moses and the continual disobedience of Israel. The speech
presents Moses’ story in terms of Israel’s primal disobedience to God and God’s
messengers, and it identifies the present generation as persisting in the same
spirit. By contrast, Nehemiah 9 also combines historical review with rebuke of
the people’s rebellious nature, yet God is merciful and faithful to the
covenant (see also Ps 78). Second, the
critical references to the building of the Temple elevate the value of God’s
universal presence over a possible implicit belief that God is particularly
present in the Temple. Stephen’s consequent martyrdom continues the parallel
with Jesus in his quotation from Ps 31.6 and his plea for forgiveness of his
persecutors (Lk 23.34, 46).” (JANT, 211)
While Johnson is correct that Stephen presents his speech in
the context of “our father,” the subsequent split of the disciples of Jesus
from Judaism leaves already in Acts a presentation of the Jews as disobedient
and the Temple as in some ways irrelevant. These are themes we must pay close
attention to throughout the narrative of Acts.
As to the content of this section of Stephen’s speech, it is
centered on Abraham’s story (references to Abraham in Luke’s story occur in
Luke 1:55, 73; 3:8, 34; 13:16, 28; 16:22-30; 19:9; 20:37; Acts 3:13, 25; 13:26),
though Johnson makes the insightful comment that it is God who is truly the
main actor in 7:2-8 not Abraham (Johnson, Acts, 114). God had in mind
what was to take place with Jesus, the Messiah, so “for Luke the story of
Abraham reaches its true fulfillment only now in the messianic realization of
the promise” (Johnson, Acts, 121).
It is fair to say, however, that in Luke’s Acts and Stephen’s speech,
everything reaches its fulfillment in Israel’s history only now with Jesus.
Stephen says that “the God of glory appeared to our ancestor
Abraham when he was in Mesopotamia, before he lived in Haran” (Acts 7:2). The “God
of Glory” (Ὁ θεὸς τῆς δόξης) might be compared to the Shechinah, “the presence
of God” who “was believed to rest especially on the mercy-seat between the
cherubim” (Page, Acts, 120), but “doxa” (glory) in the LXX is often used for the
Hebrew “kavod,” “the divine attribute of honor or worthiness” (JANT, 210). “Kavod” is more likely since
Stephen is going to argue in this section that God’s presence in the Temple is
not essential and is reported to have left the Temple in Ezekiel 10:1-19. This
image is more probable to explain a rarely used term, found only in LXX Ps 28:3.
More often one finds the phrase, the “glory of the Lord” (Exodus 24:16;
Leviticus 9:6) or the “glory of God” (Ezekiel 10:19) (Johnson, Acts, 114).
While it is true that Acts 7:2, “Luke’s sequence of events
does not agree with the LXX of Gen. 11:3-12:5” (Johnson, Acts, 115), the
more significant issue is that Mesopotamia and Haran refer to “locations
outside Israel; Stephen points to God’s freedom of action in self-revelation
apart from those in the land of promise” (JANT,
210-11).
Acts 7:3, in which Abraham is told to “leave your country
and your relatives and go to the land that I will show you,” is a close
quotation from LXX Genesis 12:1 (Page, Acts,
119; Johnson, Acts, 114) and has similar phrasing to Hebrews 11:8 (“Whichever
I will show you”). Abraham leaves his country of the Chaldeans and “after his
father died” (based on Genesis 11:26-12:4), “God moved him” to the Promised
Land, which builds on LXX Genesis 12:5 (Johnson, Acts, 115).
Luke writes that God “did not give him any of it as a
heritage, not even a foot's length, but promised to give it to him as his
possession and to his descendants after him, even though he had no child” (Acts
7:5). Other than in this passage, the language of “inheritance” and “promise”
is only found together in 2 Maccabees 2:17-18 (Johnson, Acts, 115). But
these promises in general are located in Genesis 13:15, 15:7, 17:8, and 48:4.
Acts 7:6, “And God spoke in these terms, that his
descendants would be resident aliens in a country belonging to others, who
would enslave them and mistreat them during four hundred years,” is a free rendering
of Genesis 15:13. And though in Acts 7:7 Stephen says that “I will judge the
nation that they serve,” there is no mention in the speech of “the punishment
of the Egyptians and the plunder of the Israelites” (JANT, 211). It is further mentioned that “after that they shall
come out and worship me in this place,” but the 430 years as given in Exodus
12:40 and Galatians 3:17 is not noted.
Finally, the Abraham section ends with Acts 7:8, “then he
gave him the covenant of circumcision. And so Abraham became the father of
Isaac and circumcised him on the eighth day; and Isaac became the father of
Jacob, and Jacob of the twelve patriarchs.” This covenant sealed with
circumcision is mentioned in Genesis 15:18, 17:1-4, 10-13, 21:4. Stephen’s speech
recounting Israel’s history has started and there is nothing odd or strange in
it to this point. Clearly, it is all about the end point of this shared history
for Stephen.
Next entry, Stephen
continues his speech.
John W. Martens
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This entry is cross-posted at America Magazine The Good Word
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