Stephen in the Bible Encyclopedia - ISBE

ste'-vn (Stephanos, "crown" (Acts 6:5 through 8:12)): 1. His Personal Antecedents 2. His Character and Activity 3. His Teaching 4. His Arraignment before the Sanhedrin 5. His Defence before the Sanhedrin (1) Personal Defence (2) Defense of His Teaching 6. Martyrdom of Stephen LITERATURE Known best as the proto-martyr of the Christian church, introducing the heroic period of persecutions. He deserves as well to be called the first great apologist for Christianity, since it was this that brought on his death as a martyr (circa 36 or 37 AD). 1. His Personal Antecedents: As his name and his relations in the church at Jerusalem seem to imply (Acts 6:3 ff), he was a Hellenist, i.e. a Greek-speaking Jew. Thus he belonged to that class of Jews usually residing outside of Israel who, though distinguished from the orthodox Palestinian Jew by a broader outlook on life due to a more liberal education, were Jews none the less, the original Jewish element predominating in their character, and who might be true Israelites indeed, as Stephen was. Of his conversion to Christianity we know nothing, though there is a tradition that he was among the Seventy. As Stephen by his life and work marks a period of transition in the development of the early Christian church, so his name is connected with an important new departure within the organization of the church itself, namely, the institution of the office of the Seven (Acts 6:1 ff), who were entrusted with the administration of the work of relief in the church at Jerusalem--the foundation of the diaconate (Iren., Haer., i.26; Cyprian, Epist., iii.3). Of the seven men, all Hellenists, elected to this office at the occasion of a grievance of the Hellenistic Christians in the Jerusalem church against the Hebrew Christians, to the effect that in the distribution of alms their widows were being discriminated against, Stephen, who heads the list, is by far the most distinguished...