This is the twenty-first
entry in the Bible Junkies Online Commentary on the Acts of the Apostles. This entry
concludes 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 Concludes: Joseph and Moses (7:41-53):
41
At that time they made a calf, offered a sacrifice to the idol, and reveled in
the works of their hands. 42 But God turned away from them and handed
them over to worship the host of heaven, as it is written in the book of the
prophets: "Did you offer to me slain victims and sacrifices forty years in
the wilderness, O house of Israel? 43 No; you took along the tent of
Moloch, and the star of your god Rephan, the images that you made to worship;
so I will remove you beyond Babylon.' 44 "Our ancestors had the
tent of testimony in the wilderness, as God directed when he spoke to Moses,
ordering him to make it according to the pattern he had seen. 45 Our
ancestors in turn brought it in with Joshua when they dispossessed the nations
that God drove out before our ancestors. And it was there until the time of
David, 46 who found favor with God and asked that he might find a
dwelling place for the house of Jacob. 47 But it was Solomon who built a
house for him. 48 Yet the Most High does not dwell in houses made with
human hands; as the prophet says, 49 "Heaven is my throne, and the
earth is my footstool. What kind of house will you build for me, says the Lord,
or what is the place of my rest? 50 Did not my hand make all these
things?' 51 "You stiff-necked people, uncircumcised in heart and
ears, you are forever opposing the Holy Spirit, just as your ancestors used to
do. 52 Which of the prophets did your ancestors not persecute? They
killed those who foretold the coming of the Righteous One, and now you have
become his betrayers and murderers. 53 You are the ones that received
the law as ordained by angels, and yet you have not kept it." (NRSV)
Last entry, we examined the bulk of Stephen’s speech, verses
9-40, which covered the stories of Joseph and Moses. This post covers the end
of the speech, 7:41-53. Joseph Fitzmyer, S.J. breaks down this section of the
speech into three parts, calling 7:41-43 “Israel’s First Falling Away,” 7:44-50
“Israel’s Second Falling Away,” and 7:51-53 “Conclusion: Stephen’s Indictment”
(Fitzmyer, Acts, 365).[1]
As one can discern even from the titles of these sections, these last verses in
Stephen’s speech are an unrelenting condemnation.
In Acts 7:41, “at that time they made a calf, offered a sacrifice
to the idol, and reveled in the works of their hands, Stephen quotes
either LXX Exodus 32:1 or 32:23.[2]
The speech clearly references in a number of ways the entire incident found in
Exodus 32 regarding the golden calf. The
phrase “reveling over their work” reflects Exodus 32:6 and “Stephen cites this
incident to stress that from its origins this people has been rebellious and
prone to turn to idols of its own making;” even more, “he tones down Aaron’s
involvement and accuses ‘them’,” as Fitzmyer puts it (Acts, 381). According to Luke Timothy Johnson the phrase ‘make
a calf’ “is based on but not found in LXX Exodus 32:4. It corresponds to the ‘things
made by hand’ (cheiropoiêtai) in Acts 7:48” (Johnson,
Acts, 131).
In a verse Stephen’s speech has reflected the whole of
Exodus 32 and a tradition of turning away from God. This brings us to Acts
7:42a, where Stephen says, “But God turned away from them and handed them over to worship the host
of heaven.” As every commentator on Acts notes, ‘God turned’ could mean
that God “turned away from them” (intransitive verb) or God “turned them” towards
the heavenly host (transitive verb) (Fitzmyer, Acts, 381; Johnson, Acts, 131; Pervo, Acts,
189). There seems to be a definite sense that it is God who “turned away from
them” on the part of most commentators, with which I agree, since it is similar
to the language and theology of Wisdom 14:21-31, Romans 1:18-28, and 2
Thessalonians 2:10-12, in which God turns away from those who have turned from
God, leading to idolatry and subsequent immorality (Pervo, Acts, 189).
The “heavenly host” referenced in Acts 7:42a is thought to reflect passages
such as 1 Kings 22:19, Jeremiah 7:18, 19:13, and Nehemiah 9:6 in which stars and other heavenly bodies, perhaps even spirits
or angels, are offered inappropriate worship.
This reading is borne out by Acts 7:42b-43, which reads: “as it is written
in the book of the prophets: ‘Did you offer to me slain victims and sacrifices
forty years in the wilderness, O house of Israel? No; you took along the tent
of Moloch, and the star of your god Rephan, the images that you made to worship;
so I will remove you beyond Babylon.’” Stephen here quotes LXX Amos
5:25-27 almost exactly, the major alteration being the shift from “Damascus” in
the original text to “Babylon” in Acts reflecting the actual historical
experience of the nation (Johnson, Acts, 131-32). The point in Stephen’s speech is clear:
“from its historic beginnings as God’s Chosen People in Egypt and its
desert wanderings, ‘the house of Israel’ constantly has gone astray, and as a
result it suffered exile in Babylon” (Fitzmyer, Acts, 367).
The mention of the wilderness idolatry sets the stage for
the next portion of the speech. Fitzmyer sums up this section from Acts 7:44-50
by saying, “In
part V Israel’s falling away is further recounted in its substitution of a
temple of its own making for the tabernacle made after the divine pattern and
given to it by God through Moses in the desert. ‘Yet the Most High dwells not
in buildings made by human hands’ (7:48). This misguided act has made Yahweh
like a heathen idol. So Stephen criticizes the Jerusalem Temple” (Fitzmyer, Acts,
367). Richard Pervo puts a sharper
and more poetic point on it: “By inference, innuendo and insinuation, the
temple of Solomon (and its successors) is drawn into the belly of the golden
calf” (Pervo, Acts, 189). Remarkably, it is not the abuse of the temple
which is under attack in this speech, but the institution itself.
Stephen speaks fondly now, after attacking the wilderness idolatry of
the Israelites, when he says that "Our ancestors had the tent of testimony
in the wilderness, as God directed when he spoke to Moses, ordering him to make
it according to the pattern he had seen” (Acts 7:44). The language of “pattern”
certainly has in mind the instructions for building the tent that come from
Exodus 25:9 and 40, but it also replicates Platonic language found in Hebrews
8:5 and Philo of Alexandria, Moses 2.74, 76 regarding the temple (Pervo,
Acts, 190). Whether Luke knew this language and tradition in Hellenistic
Judaism is another question which cannot be answered definitively.
What we can say is that the “tent of testimony or witness” (tou
martyriou) is the name derived from the LXX Exodus 27:21, 28:43, and 33:7
translating the Hebrew “tent of meeting” (‘ōhel mô’ēd). It stands in
sharp contrast also to “tent of Moloch” in 7:43 (Johnson, Acts, 132). In
Acts 7:45, Stephen’s speech describes how the tent of witness was “brought...in with Joshua when they dispossessed the nations that God drove out before our
ancestors. And it was there until the time of David.” The actual events are
described in Joshua 3:11-4:18, which narrates bringing the ark “across the
Jordan into Canaan” (Fitzmyer, Acts, 383), and in Joshua 18:1,
where “the tent of witness is set up in Shiloh” (Johnson, Acts, 132). Fitzmyer
also believes that the name of Joshua might be significant here because in the
LXX the name becomes Jesus (Iêsous), but it would be
difficult to describe this historical narrative without using Joshua’s name (Acts,
383).
The tent was still there, Stephen stresses, “until the time of David, who
found favor with God and asked that he might find a dwelling place for the
house of Jacob” (Acts 7:45b-46). It is
true, of course that “the tent of witness is still functioning at Shiloh in 1
Sam 2:22, and when David brings the ark to Jerusalem, he puts it in a tent (2
Sam 6:17)” (Johnson, Acts, 132), but Pervo argues that “with carefully
chosen words the narrator tiptoes around the biblical account of David’s
unworthiness to build the temple” (Pervo, Acts, 190).
In 2 Samuel 7:1-16 David wants to build a house for God and is initially
told by the prophet Nathan that he can. But God comes to Nathan by night and
says that David should not for God will build him a house. “House” in this
passage at various times means palace, temple, and dynastic house. For whatever
reason, it was not David’s task to build a house for God, though it was his
desire.
“But it was Solomon who built a house for him” (Acts 7:47), as outlined
in 1 Kings 5-7. Fitzmyer says that “in
Stephen’s view Israel substituted a human construction for the divinely
inspired desert tabernacle” (Fitzmyer, Acts, 383), even though 2
Samuel 7:13 says about David’s son that “he shall build a house for my name,
and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever” (see also 2 Chronicles
6:9). Pervo’s language again gets to the heart of the matter: “the implication
is that, if a tent were good enough for God and Moses, it should have been good
enough for Solomon” (Pervo, Acts, 190).
Acts 7:48, “Yet the Most High does not dwell in houses made with human
hands,” does support Pervo’s and Fitzmyer’s position. It is the case that even
Solomon acknowledged in his dedication prayer in 1 Kings 8:27 that God does not
need to live in a house and cannot be contained by it, but it does seem that
throughout this passage the temple itself is criticized, not an abuse of the
temple (Pervo, Acts, 190).
Stephen within the speech certainly draws on a number of passages which
minimize the role and function of the temple and does not include any positive
passages regarding the temple; any positive statement about worship has to do
with the tent of testimony. And so the citation in Acts 7:49-50, drawn from LXX
Isaiah 66:1-2, with a couple of grammatical changes (Fitzmyer, Acts, 384;
Johnson, Acts, 133), continues the theme of lessening the significance
of the temple. The passage reads: “Heaven is my throne, and the earth is my
footstool. What kind of house will you build for me, says the Lord, or what is
the place of my rest? Did not my hand make all these things?” (Acts 7:49-50).
The speech “reserves its criticism for the Temple and its cult” (Fitzmyer,
Acts, 367), which is odd since Peter and the other apostles all
worship there. But the criticism goes beyond how the Temple was operating to a
criticism of the Temple in and of itself, which is also more than the Qumran
sectarians, for instance, who also criticized the temple in their day offered.
The speech and Stephen himself, as a result, “represent the beginning of Luke’s
account of the break of Christianity from its Jewish matrix” (Fitzmyer, Acts,
368). While I take issue with the claim
that at this early stage we have “Christianity” and “Judaism” as separate
entities, Stephen’s criticism is harsh, for his position is not just that the
people of Israel have disobeyed God, but that their institution is false and
improper. Jesus and Stephen fit in the line of Abraham, Joseph and Moses, but the present
Judeans and the Temple do not.[3]
The criticism of the temple is also a means of criticizing its current
leaders and their practices. Fitzmyer
says of Acts 7:51-53 that “Stephen concludes his speech by indicting
contemporary leaders of Israel. He bursts into an invective that is directly
related to the central argument of his defense, but after rehearsing Israel’s
past stubbornness and its reluctance to fulfill its true calling, he accuses
these leaders of resisting the Holy Spirit… That is why they have not
recognized ‘the coming of the Upright One,’ Jesus of Nazareth” (Fitzmyer, Acts,
367). Johnson supports Fitzmyer, writing “the speech takes another rhetorical turn to direct
denunciation” (Johnson, Acts, 133), as does Pervo, who says “the attack here
becomes direct” (Pervo, Acts, 192).
Stephen speaks directly to the council when he says in Acts 7:51, “You
stiff-necked people, uncircumcised in heart and ears, you are forever opposing
the Holy Spirit, just as your ancestors used to do.” According to Stephen the
council represent idolatrous Israel, while he represents faithful Israel. So
they are a part of the same family, but not the good part. Johnson states that
the phrase “uncircumcised in heart and ears,” drawn from Leviticus 26:41, is
“tantamount to a charge of not belonging to the people,” but I would argue that
it is a claim of the council belonging to the unfaithful part of the family (Johnson,
Acts, 134). The council is “forever opposing the Holy Spirit,” “just as their
“ancestors used to do,” a passage likely based on Isaiah 63:10 (Johnson, Acts,
134), because they do belong to the same people and the same God.
By the time Stephen gets to the question of Acts 7:52, “which of the
prophets did your ancestors not persecute? They killed those who foretold the
coming of the Righteous One, and now you have become his betrayers and
murderers,” we can imagine that Stephen’s fate is sealed. Certainly the “killing
the prophets” motif is common in the Old Testament (Fitzmyer, Acts, 385),
emerging in Elijah’s complaint to God in 1 Kings 18:4, 13, 19:10, 14, but given
that it is directed at Stephen’s accusers alone, how could they respond with
equanimity to it? It is also a theme of Luke’s in the Gospel (Luke 6:23, 26),
in which the true prophets are killed and the false prophets “treated well” (Johnson,
Acts, 134). The climax of Stephen’s charge, as Fitzmyer says (Acts,
385), is that the council are “betrayers and murderers.” The charge is
similar to that made by Peter in Acts
3:14 (entry 9). Finally, Stephen’s speech ends by saying, “you are the ones
that received the law as ordained by angels, and yet you have not kept it”
(Acts 7:53). Fitzmyer, Acts, 385 sees this charge as added to
“compound the guilt of such religious authorities,” but we can also say it
covers both main pillars of religious life for which the council was responsible:
Torah and temple. According to Stephen, they have botched it all.
But even if it is the case that Stephen’s speech is highly critical of
temple and Torah, is that the main point? Richard Pervo says that “those who hold that
Stephen’s speech is critical of temple and Torah have a better argument than their
adversaries, but that argument is largely extraneous to the author’s
project…The temple is long gone and this is no tragedy, for it belonged to an
earlier era. The world is God’s temple” (Pervo, Acts, 193).
Pervo argues that 7:2-53, as a whole, is “not an effort to deal with
issues between Christians and Jews. It justifies the separation of the two
bodies in the light of subsequent intra-Christian debate” (Pervo, Acts, 193).
Of this I am not certain only because I am not certain even in Luke’s day we are
yet dealing with Christians and Jews or even have a sense of who represents the
Jews as a whole. Luke gives us a window into that early debate by arguing that
the followers of Jesus are the true Israelites. History, naturally, will allow
us to see the separation between “Church” and “Synagogue” but I am not
convinced we see that separation yet. Luke’s point is only that a new stage of
Jewish history has arrived and those who follow Jesus are the inheritors of
that history, the faithful family members. As Fitzmyer states, “the notion that
the contemporary Judeans have consummated the rebellion of previous generations
in Israel thus becomes a point of controversy between Christians and Jews, and
it will continue long beyond Luke’s day. Yet Stephen’s accusation is hardly
different from the accusations uttered by the Essenes of Qumran against the
rest of the people in Judea” (Fitzmyer, Acts, 367). We are still
witnessing an internecine debate with Stephen’s speech, though with dire repercussions
as history would move forward.
Next entry, Stephen
is martyred.
John W. Martens
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This entry is cross-posted at America Magazine The Good Word
[1]
For Fitzmyer Acts 7:1-8 is Part I of the
speech, Part II is 7:9-16, Part III is 7:20-38, while Part IV is 7:41-43 and
Part V is 7:44-50. He does not mention 7:51-53 as Part VI in his breakdown of
the speech on page 365, but he does refer to it as Part VI in his discussion on
page 367. Although these final verses comprise short sections of the speech as
a whole, Fitzmyer sees them as highly significant parts of the speech. As I
mentioned in entry
20, Richard Pervo, Acts, 171-174
makes no divisions in the text, until verse 54, treating 7:2-53 as one unit.
[2]
For those just beginning with the
commentary, LXX is the short form for the Septuagint.
[3]
Does this mean that Luke has a separate source for Stephen’s speech, since the
criticism of the Temple goes beyond the positive portrayal of the apostolic
worship there? Fitzmyer,
Acts, 368 believes that these details of the speech might have
“been inherited by Luke from a preexisting source” and that is a possibility,
but as Fitzmyer himself says this is now “the turn” against the Temple and its
cult and so it could be a part of the larger schema of Acts itself.
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