God Made Flesh
Stephen—he who was stoned to death by an angry mob of Jews for blasphemy—was the first of Jesus’s followers to be killed after the crucifixion, though he would not be the last. It is curious that the first man martyred for calling Jesus “Christ” did not himself know Jesus of Nazareth. Stephen was not a disciple, after all. He never met the Galilean peasant and day laborer who claimed the throne of the Kingdom of God. He did not walk with Jesus or talk to him. He was not part of the ecstatic crowd that welcomed Jesus into Jerusalem as its rightful ruler. He took no part in the disturbance at the Temple. He was not there when Jesus was arrested and charged with sedition. He did not watch Jesus die.
Stephen did not hear about Jesus of Nazareth until after his crucifixion. A Greek-speaking Jew who lived in one of the many Hellenistic provinces outside the Holy Land, Stephen had come to Jerusalem on pilgrimage, along with thousands of other Diaspora Jews just like him. He was probably presenting his sacrifice to the Temple priests when he spied a band of mostly Galilean farmers and fishermen wandering about the Court of Gentiles, preaching about a simple Nazarean whom they called messiah.
By itself, such a spectacle would not have been unusual in Jerusalem, certainly not during the festivals and feast days, when Jews from all over the Roman Empire flocked to the sacred city to make their Temple offerings. Jerusalem was the center of spiritual activity for the Jews, the cultic heart of the Jewish nation. Every sectarian, every fanatic, every zealot, messiah, and self-proclaimed prophet, eventually made his way to Jerusalem to missionize or admonish, to offer God’s mercy or warn of God’s wrath. The festivals in particular were an ideal time for these schismatics to reach as wide and international an audience as possible.
So when Stephen saw the gaggle of hirsute men and ragged women huddled beneath a portico in the Temple’s outer court—simple provincials who had sold their possessions and given the proceeds to the poor; who held all things in common and owned nothing themselves save their tunics and sandals—he probably did not pay much attention at first. He may have pricked up his ears at the suggestion that these particular schismatics followed a messiah who had already been killed (crucified, no less!). He may have been astonished to learn that, despite the unalterable fact that Jesus’s death by definition disqualified him as liberator of Israel, his followers still called him messiah. But even that would not have been completely unheard of in Jerusalem. Were not John the Baptist’s followers still preaching about their late master, still baptizing Jews in his name?
What truly would have caught Stephen’s attention was the staggering claim by these Jews that, unlike every other criminal crucified by Rome, their messiah was not left on the cross for his bones to be picked clean by the greedy birds Stephen had seen circling above Golgotha when he entered the gates of Jerusalem. No, the corpse of this particular peasant—this Jesus of Nazareth—had been brought down from the cross and placed in an extravagant rock-hewn tomb fit for the wealthiest of men in Judea. More remarkable still, his followers claimed that three days after their messiah had been placed in the rich man’s tomb, he came back to life. God raised him up again, freed him from death’s grip. The spokesman of the group, a fisherman from Capernaum called Simon Peter, swore that he witnessed this resurrection with his own eyes, as did many others among them.
To be clear, this was not the resurrection of the dead that the Pharisees expected at the end of days and the Sadducees denied. This was not the gravestones cracking open and the earth coughing up the buried masses, as the prophet Isaiah had envisioned (Isaiah 26:19). This had nothing to do with the rebirth of the “House of Israel” foretold by the prophet Ezekiel, wherein God breathes new life into the dry bones of the nation (Ezekiel 37). This was a lone individual, dead and buried in rock for days, suddenly rising up and walking out of his tomb of his own accord, not as a spirit or ghost, but as a man of flesh and blood.
Nothing quite like what these followers of Jesus were contending existed at the time. Ideas about the resurrection of the dead could be found among the ancient Egyptians and Persians, of course. The Greeks believed in the immortality of the soul, though not of the body. Some gods—for instance, Osiris—were thought to have died and risen again. Some men—Julius Caesar, Caesar Augustus—became gods after they died. But the concept of an individual dying and rising again, in the flesh, into a life everlasting was extremely rare in the ancient world and practically nonexistent in Judaism.
And yet what the followers of Jesus were arguing was not only that he rose from the dead, but that his resurrection confirmed his status as messiah, an extraordinary claim without precedent in Jewish history. Despite two millennia of Christian apologetics, the fact is that belief in a dying and rising messiah simply did not exist in Judaism. In the entirety of the Hebrew Bible there is not a single passage of scripture or prophecy about the promised messiah that even hints of his ignominious death, let alone his bodily resurrection. The prophet Isaiah speaks of an exalted “suffering servant” who would be “stricken for the transgressions of [God’s] people” (Isaiah 52:13–53:12). But Isaiah never identifies this nameless servant as the messiah, nor does he claim that the stricken servant rose from the dead. The prophet Daniel mentions “an anointed one” (i.e., messiah) who “shall be cut off and shall have nothing” (Daniel 7:26). But Daniel’s anointed is not killed; he is merely deposed by a “prince who is to come.” It may be true that, centuries after Jesus’s death, Christians would interpret these verses in such a way as to help make sense of their messiah’s failure to accomplish any of the messianic tasks expected of him. But the Jews of Jesus’s time had no conception whatsoever of a messiah who suffers and dies. They were awaiting a messiah who triumphs and lives.
What Jesus’s followers were proposing was a breathtakingly bold redefinition, not just of the messianic prophecies but of the very nature and function of the Jewish messiah. The fisherman, Simon Peter, displaying the reckless confidence of one unschooled and uninitiated in the scriptures, even went so far as to argue that King David himself had prophesied Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection in one of his Psalms. “Being a prophet, and knowing God had sworn an oath to him that the fruit of his loins, of his flesh, would be raised as the messiah to be seated on his throne,” Peter told the pilgrims gathered at the Temple, “David, foreseeing [Jesus], spoke of the resurrection of the messiah, saying that ‘his soul was not left in Hades, nor did his flesh see corruption’ ” (Acts 2:30–31).
Had Stephen been knowledgeable about the sacred texts, had he been a scribe or a scholar saturated in the scriptures, had he simply been an inhabitant of Jerusalem, for whom the sound of the Psalms cascading from the Temple walls would have been as familiar as the sound of his own voice, he would have known immediately that King David never said any such thing about the messiah. The “prophecy” Peter speaks of was a Psalm David sang about himself:
Therefore my heart is glad, and my honor rejoices;
my body also dwells secure.
For you did not forsake my soul to Sheol [the underworld or “Hades”],
or allow your godly one to see the Pit.
[Rather] you taught me the way of life;
in your presence there is an abundance of joy,
in your right hand there is eternal pleasure.
PSALMS 16:9–11
But—and here lies the key to understanding the dramatic transformation that took place in Jesus’s message after his death—Stephen was not a scribe or scholar. He was not an expert in the scriptures. He did not live in Jerusalem. As such, he was the perfect audience for this new, innovative, and thoroughly unorthodox interpretation of the messiah being peddled by a group of illiterate ecstatics whose certainty in their message was matched only by the passion with which they preached it.
Stephen converted to the Jesus movement shortly after Jesus’s death. As with most converts from the distant Diaspora, he would have abandoned his hometown, sold his possessions, pooled his resources into the community, and made a home for himself in Jerusalem, under the shadow of the Temple walls. Although he would spend only a brief time as a member of the new community—perhaps a year or two—his violent death soon after his conversion would forever enshrine his name in the annals of Christian history.
The story of that celebrated death can be found in the book of Acts, which chronicles the first few decades of the Jesus movement after the crucifixion. The evangelist Luke, who allegedly composed the book as a sequel to his gospel, presents Stephen’s stoning as a watershed movement in the early history of the church. Stephen is called a man “full of grace and power [who] did great wonders and signs among the people” (Acts 6:8). His speech and wisdom, Luke claims, were so powerful that few could stand against him. In fact, Stephen’s spectacular death in the book of Acts becomes, for Luke, a coda to Jesus’s passion narrative; Luke’s gospel, alone among the Synoptics, transfers to Stephen’s “trial” the accusation made against Jesus that he had threatened to destroy the Temple.
“This man [Stephen] never ceases blaspheming against this holy place [the Temple] and the law,” a gang of stone-wielding vigilantes cries out. “We have heard him say that Jesus of Nazareth will demolish this place and will change the customs that Moses handed down to us” (Acts 6:13–14).
Luke also provides Stephen with the self-defense that Jesus never received in his gospel. In a long and rambling diatribe before the mob, Stephen summarizes nearly all of Jewish history, starting with Abraham and ending with Jesus. The speech, which is obviously Luke’s creation, is riddled with the most basic errors: it misidentifies the burial site of the great patriarch Jacob, and it inexplicably claims that an angel gave the law to Moses when even the most uneducated Jew in Palestine would have known it was God himself who gave Moses the law. However, the speech’s true significance comes near the end, when in a fit of ecstasy, Stephen looks up to the heavens and sees “the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God” (Acts 7:56).
The image seems to have been a favorite of the early Christian community. Mark, yet another Greek-speaking Jew from the Diaspora, has Jesus say something similar to the high priest in his gospel: “And you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of the Power” (Mark 14:62), which is then picked up by Matthew and Luke—two more Greek-speaking Diaspora Jews—in their own accounts. But whereas Jesus in the Synoptics is directly quoting Psalm 110 so as to draw a connection between himself and King David, Stephen’s speech in Acts consciously replaces the phrase “the right hand of the Power” with “the right hand of God.” There is a reason for the change. In ancient Israel, the right hand was a symbol of power and authority; it signified a position of exaltation. Sitting “at the right hand of God” means sharing in God’s glory, being one with God in honor and essence. As Thomas Aquinas wrote, “to sit on the right hand of the Father is nothing else than to share in the glory of the Godhead … [Jesus] sits at the right hand of the Father, because He has the same Nature as the Father.”
In other words, Stephen’s Son of Man is not the kingly figure of Daniel who comes “with the clouds of heaven.” He does not establish his kingdom on earth “so that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him” (Daniel 7:1–14). He is not even the messiah any longer. The Son of Man, in Stephen’s vision, is a preexistent, heavenly being whose kingdom is not of this world; who stands at the right hand of God, equal in glory and honor; who is, in form and substance, God made flesh.
That is all it takes for the stones to start flying.
Understand that there can be no greater blasphemy for a Jew than what Stephen suggests. The claim that an individual died and rose again into eternal life may have been unprecedented in Judaism. But the presumption of a “god-man” was simply anathema. What Stephen cries out in the midst of his death throes is nothing less than the launch of a wholly new religion, one radically and irreconcilably divorced from everything Stephen’s own religion had ever posited about the nature of God and man and the relationship of the one to the other. One can say that it was not only Stephen who died that day outside the gates of Jerusalem. Buried with him under the rubble of stones is the last trace of the historical person known as Jesus of Nazareth. The story of the zealous Galilean peasant and Jewish nationalist who donned the mantle of messiah and launched a foolhardy rebellion against the corrupt Temple priesthood and the vicious Roman occupation comes to an abrupt end, not with his death on the cross, nor with the empty tomb, but at the first moment one of his followers dares suggest he is God.
Stephen was martyred sometime between 33 and 35 C.E. Among those in the crowd who countenanced his stoning was a pious young Pharisee from a wealthy Roman city on the Mediterranean Sea called Tarsus. His name was Saul, and he was a true zealot: a fervent follower of the Law of Moses who had burnished a reputation for violently suppressing blasphemies such as Stephen’s. Around 49 C.E., a mere fifteen years after he gladly watched Stephen die, this same fanatical Pharisee, now an ardent Christian convert renamed Paul, would write a letter to his friends in the Greek city of Philippi in which he unambiguously, and without reservation, calls Jesus of Nazareth God. “He was in the form of God,” Paul wrote, though he was “born in the likeness of man” (Philippians 2:6–7).
How could this have happened? How could a failed messiah who died a shameful death as a state criminal be transformed, in the span of a few years, into the creator of the heavens and the earth: God incarnate?
The answer to that question relies on recognizing this one rather remarkable fact: practically every word ever written about Jesus of Nazareth, including every gospel story in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, was written by people who, like Stephen and Paul, never actually knew Jesus when he was alive (recall that, with the possible exception of Luke, the gospels were not written by those after whom they were named). Those who did know Jesus—those who followed him into Jerusalem as its king and helped him cleanse the Temple in God’s name, who were there when he was arrested and who watched him die a lonely death—played a surprisingly small role in defining the movement Jesus left behind. The members of Jesus’s family, and especially his brother James, who would lead the community in Jesus’s absence, were certainly influential in the decades after the crucifixion. But they were hampered by their decision to remain more or less ensconced in Jerusalem waiting for Jesus to return, until they and their community, like nearly everyone else in the holy city, were annihilated by Titus’s army in 70 C.E. The apostles who were tasked by Jesus to spread his message did leave Jerusalem and fan out across the land bearing the good news. But they were severely limited by their inability to theologically expound on the new faith or compose instructive narratives about the life and death of Jesus. These were farmers and fishermen, after all; they could neither read nor write.
The task of defining Jesus’s message fell instead to a new crop of educated, urbanized, Greek-speaking Diaspora Jews who would become the primary vehicles for the expansion of the new faith. As these extraordinary men and women, many of them immersed in Greek philosophy and Hellenistic thought, began to reinterpret Jesus’s message so as to make it more palatable both to their fellow Greek-speaking Jews and to their gentile neighbors in the Diaspora, they gradually transformed Jesus from a revolutionary zealot to a Romanized demigod, from a man who tried and failed to free the Jews from Roman oppression to a celestial being wholly uninterested in any earthly matter.
This transformation did not occur without conflict or difficulty. The original Aramaic-speaking followers of Jesus, including the members of his family and the remnants of the Twelve, openly clashed with the Greek-speaking Diaspora Jews when it came to the correct understanding of Jesus’s message. The discord between the two groups resulted in the emergence of two distinct and competing camps of Christian interpretation in the decades after the crucifixion: one championed by Jesus’s brother, James; the other promoted by the former Pharisee, Paul. As we shall see, it would be the contest between these two bitter and openly hostile adversaries that, more than anything else, would shape Christianity as the global religion we know today.