Acts 7 explained: Stephen's Defense and Death

From Abraham to Joseph (vv. 1-16)

Asked to answer the charges from Acts 6, Stephen retells his people's story, noting that God spoke to Abraham far away in Mesopotamia and stayed with Joseph in Egypt after his own brothers sold him. A few details differ from Genesis: the family count of 75 follows the old Greek translation (the Hebrew has 70), and the Shechem tomb seems to merge two separate burial accounts, which scholars still discuss.

Moses rejected, then sent (vv. 17-36)

Moses, raised in Pharaoh's household, killed an Egyptian who was harming an Israelite, but his own people refused him as their leader; forty years later God spoke to him from a burning bush in the desert and sent him back to free them. Stephen seems to be making two points: God can make any place holy ground, even far from the temple, and the people have a habit of rejecting the very person God sends.

A prophet and a calf (vv. 37-43)

Moses foretold that God would raise up another prophet like himself, which Christians read as pointing to Jesus, yet the people pushed Moses aside, made a calf idol, and later worshiped the stars. Stephen quotes the prophet Amos from the old Greek translation, which names gods (one called Rephan) that differ from the Hebrew text and remain uncertain, and where Amos warned of exile past Damascus, Stephen says past Babylon.

Tent and temple (vv. 44-50)

The ancestors carried a portable worship tent, made to the pattern God showed Moses, into the land, and only much later did Solomon build the temple that David had hoped to build. Quoting Isaiah, Stephen says the Most High does not live in buildings people make, which answers the charge that he spoke against the temple; Solomon himself said much the same when he dedicated it.

Stephen's sharp rebuke (vv. 51-53)

Speaking as a fellow Jew who had called them brothers and fathers (v. 2), Stephen calls the council stubborn, with hearts and ears uncircumcised, meaning closed to God, the same charges Moses and the prophets made against their own people. He says they are just like their ancestors, who persecuted the prophets, and that they have now betrayed and murdered the Righteous One, meaning Jesus, while failing to keep the law they claim to defend.

Vision, stoning, forgiveness (vv. 54-60)

When Stephen says he sees heaven open and Jesus, the Son of Man, standing at God's right hand, echoing what Jesus told this same council at his trial, they rush at him, drag him outside the city and stone him, with no verdict recorded. He dies praying, much as Jesus did on the cross, that his spirit be received and that this sin not be counted against his killers, while the witnesses leave their outer clothes with a young man named Saul, later known as Paul.

Key verse: Acts 7:48

Where Christians differ

Interpreters differ on whether Stephen rejects the temple itself, since he describes it with the same hand-made language he used for the calf idol in verse 41, or only the belief that a building can contain God, something Solomon and Isaiah had already said.

Something to think about

Stephen's last words ask that his killers not be held guilty; what do you make of someone responding to violence that way?