St. Stephen the Protomartyr and Archdeacon

Stephen was born around the year 5 — a Hellenist Jew, that is, a Greek-speaking Jew of the diaspora, perhaps from Alexandria or one of the Greek cities of Syria. He came up to Jerusalem either as a child with his parents or as a young man for studies. By the year 33 — within months of the Resurrection — he was a baptized member of the new community of disciples in the city.

When the community grew to some thousands and the daily distribution of food to the widows began to break down (the Hellenist widows were being slighted in favor of the Hebrew-speaking widows of the city), the Twelve called a great assembly of the community and proposed the institution of a new order of ministers — deacons — to take responsibility for the daily ministration. Seven men were chosen, all of them Hellenist Jews (in deliberate response to the complaint of the Hellenists). Stephen was the first named: "a man full of faith and of the Holy Spirit." The Twelve laid hands on him and the other six, and the seven deacons of the apostolic Church began their service.

Stephen — and his colleagues Philip and Prochorus, of whom we hear more later — was almost immediately drawn beyond simple administration into the public preaching of the gospel. He worked particularly in the Greek-speaking synagogues of Jerusalem (the city had several, formed by the diaspora Jews resident in or visiting Jerusalem for the festivals and the Temple). His preaching there of the resurrection of Christ provoked particular fury: it was one thing for the Hebrew-speaking apostles to preach in Galilean accent to other Hebrews; it was another for an educated Greek-speaking Jew, equipped with the same Hellenistic rhetoric the rabbis themselves used, to demolish the synagogue arguments against Jesus.

He was seized by the synagogue authorities and brought before the Sanhedrin on charges of speaking against the Temple and the Law. Stephen's response — Acts 7 — is the longest single speech in the New Testament after the Gospels. He traced the whole arc of Israel's history from Abraham forward, showing at each stage how the people had rejected the prophets God had sent — and ending with the unmistakable application: "Ye stiffnecked and uncircumcised in heart and ears, ye do always resist the Holy Ghost: as your fathers did, so do ye." The Sanhedrin "gnashed on him with their teeth"; he looked up "and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing on the right hand of God." His last words — "Lord Jesus, receive my spirit" and then "Lord, lay not this sin to their charge" — were modeled exactly on the Lord's own from the Cross.

He was stoned outside the gate of the city, the witnesses laying their cloaks at the feet of a young Pharisee named Saul of Tarsus — who would not forget what he had seen, and would in a few months become the apostle Paul. Stephen was twenty-eight.

His body was secretly buried by Gamaliel the Pharisee — Paul's old teacher and a secret sympathizer of the new community. The grave was forgotten and uncovered miraculously in the year 415 by the priest Lucian of Caphargamala, who had been led to it by a vision. The relics were translated to Mount Zion, then to Constantinople, then in great part to Rome. The Roman basilica of Santo Stefano Rotondo on the Caelian hill bears his name still.

He is the first martyr of the New Covenant — the protomartyr, "the first to suffer" — and the patron of deacons. The Church remembers him on December 27, the second day of the Nativity feast (so that the joy of the Manger is at once joined to the witness of blood), and again on August 2 (the day in 415 of the finding of his relics).