Stephen the Protomartyr

The account in the Acts of the Apostles, chapters six and seven, places Stephen among the earliest converts in the Jerusalem church, chosen along with six other men, all bearing Greek names, to administer the community's daily distribution of food after Greek-speaking widows complained of being overlooked in favor of Hebrew-speaking ones. The text describes Stephen as full of faith and of the Holy Spirit, and says he performed great wonders and signs among the people, drawing opposition from members of a synagogue of Greek-speaking Jews who disputed with him and, unable to answer him, brought false witnesses to accuse him before the Sanhedrin of speaking against the Temple and the Law.

Acts records a long speech Stephen gave in his own defense before the council, retelling the history of Israel from Abraham through Moses and the prophets and arguing that the people had always resisted the Holy Spirit and killed those who foretold the coming of the righteous one, and it ends with Stephen declaring that he saw the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God. The council, reading this as blasphemy, dragged him outside the city and stoned him. Acts names Saul of Tarsus as present and consenting to the killing, holding the cloaks of the men who threw the stones, the same man who would become Paul the Apostle after his own conversion.

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.