Stephen's death is presented in Acts as the opening of the first organized persecution of the Jerusalem church, which the text says scattered believers out into Judea and Samaria and, indirectly, helped carry the movement beyond a single city. Later Christian tradition reads Stephen's dying prayer, asking that the sin not be held against his killers, as a deliberate echo of the words attributed to Jesus on the cross, and it is this pairing of a violent death with forgiveness of the killers that made Stephen the model for the entire later category of Christian martyrdom; he is called protomartyr, the first martyr, for exactly this reason, and every later account of a Christian dying for the faith is written against the shape Acts gives his story.
A tradition recorded much later, in the fifth century, held that a Jerusalem priest named Lucian had a vision revealing the location of Stephen's forgotten grave, and that his relics were then found and translated first to Jerusalem and eventually, piece by piece, to churches across the Mediterranean world, a relic cult substantial enough that Augustine of Hippo preached several surviving sermons on miracles reported at Stephen's shrines in North Africa. He is depicted in Christian art carrying stones, the instrument of his death, and often wearing the dalmatic of a deacon, the office Acts implies for the seven though it does not use that later technical term.