Saint Stephen and the Jerusalem Temple

Abstract

It has often been noted that St. Stephen stands, at first sight, as an isolated figure in the history of the early Church. His theological thought, as expressed in his speech (Acts vii), is very personal and, if compared with other forms of primitive Christian thought, almost completely aberrant. Its main characteristic is a strongly antiritualistic trend, and a fierce hostility towards the Temple, which he obviously considers almost as a place of idolatry. The building up of the Temple by Solomon seems in his eyes to stand on the same plane as the making of the Golden Calf. It is the last of those many and grievous sins and apostasies which mark the whole course of Israelite history. He thus clearly demonstrates that the accusations produced against him by so-called ‘false witnesses’, and which motivated his trial, were perfectly well founded: lie had indeed spoken ‘blasphemous words against this holy place’ and, ipso facto, against at least part of the Law.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 7 citations exist upstream.