St. Stephen the Protomartyr
Chosen as one of seven men to see that the Greek-speaking widows were not passed over in the daily distribution, he preached as well as served, reading the Old Testament as a book about Christ, and died asking God not to charge the killing to the men who were stoning him.
Canonized
No year is recorded here for either end of his life, because no document held for him gives one. The encyclopedia offers no birth year and no death year, and neither does Benedict XVI. The one calculation anywhere in this corpus that would date his death was made about somebody else and does not hold: reasoning from Paul calling himself an old man, Benedict XVI put Paul's birth near the year 8, so that he "would therefore have been about 30 at the time of the stoning of Stephen", which lands the stoning near the year 38. A week later the same pope dated Paul's conversion to "at the beginning of the 30s in the first century", after a stretch of persecuting that had begun with this stoning. The stoning cannot be both before the early 30s and near 38, so neither figure is used.
Stephen's name is Greek, which suggests he came from the Greek-speaking Jewish diaspora rather than from Judea. Almost nothing else about his early life survives. The encyclopedia says it "remains for us almost entirely in the dark", and adds that we do not know when or in what circumstances he became a Christian.
The church in Jerusalem was quarrelling about food. Its Greek-speaking widows were being passed over in the daily distribution, so the apostles, keeping prayer and preaching for themselves, had seven men chosen to take it on. Stephen is named first of the seven. Tradition has long called them the first deacons; Benedict XVI points out that the word itself is not used in Acts.
He did not stop at relief work. He argued in the synagogues of the Greek-speaking Jews, reading Israel's scriptures as a book about Christ and saying the worship of the Temple was finished. Those who disputed with him could not answer, so they produced witnesses to swear he had blasphemed against Moses and against God. Brought before the Sanhedrin, he replied with the history of Israel and ended by charging his judges with betraying the Just One. Then he said he saw heaven open.
They took him out of the city and stoned him. The encyclopedia is careful that this was not mob violence: the men doing it took themselves to be carrying out the law, and it names the statute they followed. Stephen asked God not to charge them with the killing. The witnesses left their coats at the feet of a young man named Saul, who would spend his life preaching what Stephen had preached.
His killing set off the first persecution the Church suffered. It drove the Jerusalem Christians out into the countryside, where they went on preaching, and for centuries afterwards nobody knew where his grave was.
What they carried
False witnesses were suborned against him, and the council that heard him was, the encyclopedia says, "made up not of judges, but of foes". He was seized with some violence, condemned, and stoned outside the city. Nothing held for him records an interior struggle, and none is supplied.
State of life
deacon · martyr
Themes
preaching · care of the poor · courage under pressure · speaking truth to power · forgiveness · persecution · martyrdom · the cross
Benedict XVI on Stephen, the Protomartyr (General Audience, 10 January 2007)
- There are two St Stephens and this record is the first of them. The other is Stephen of Hungary, the first king of that country, whose day is 16 August and who lived a thousand years later; the Catholic Encyclopedia's index describes him as "Baptized at the age of 10 by St. Adalbert, and died in 1038". He already appears elsewhere in this corpus: the article on Margaret of Scotland opens by making her mother a kinswoman of Gisela, the wife of St Stephen of Hungary. A candidate named Stephen may be thinking of either man, and they are not the same saint.
- The feast is 26 December, and it is a feast rather than a memorial. The Universal Calendar of the Bishops' Conference of England and Wales prints under 26 December "St Stephen, the first Martyr" and the rank word feast beneath it. https://www.liturgyoffice.org.uk/Calendar/Universal/DecUC.shtml The United States calendars agree and print him unbracketed, which is how that calendar marks a day that is not optional: "Saint Stephen, The First Martyr", in red, at 26 December. https://www.usccb.org/resources/2026cal.pdf
- Whether Stephen should be called a deacon is not settled between the two documents held for him, and this record keeps both sides. The encyclopedia says it flatly, in its first words: "One of the first deacons and the first Christian martyr; feast on 26 December", and it has the seven specially ordained by the apostles. Benedict XVI qualifies it. Speaking of the same seven he says "Tradition sees in this group the seed of the future ministry of" deacons, and then adds that the word is not used in the Book of Acts. So the older source states the office and the newer one says the name for it came later. The summary follows Benedict XVI and says the word is not used in Acts. The word is kept in this record because tradition has used it of him for a very long time, which is what Benedict XVI himself reports when he says tradition sees in the seven the seed of the future ministry of deacons.
- The two published editions of Benedict XVI's catechesis do not deny the same thing, and the record follows the Italian, which is the language the audience was delivered in. The Italian says the tradition sees in the seven the seed of the future ministry of deacons, "anche se bisogna rilevare che questa denominazione è assente nel Libro degli Atti" - the DESIGNATION is absent from Acts, that is, the word. The English renders the same clause as "this category is not present in the Book of Acts" - the CATEGORY, that is, the thing. A reader of the English has the pope denying that the office existed; a reader of the Italian has him saying only that Acts does not use the term. This record says the word is not used in Acts, which is what the Italian supports.
- Where a papal catechesis exists in more than one language, this corpus reads the language it was delivered in and treats the others as translations of it. That is why both editions of the 10 January 2007 audience were fetched before anything was written from either.
- Whether Stephen was born into a Jewish family or came to it, and when he became a Christian, are not recorded here, because the encyclopedia says in so many words that they are not known: "Neither do we know when and in what circumstances he became a Christian". His early life, it says, "remains for us almost entirely in the dark". It thinks he was born a Jew rather than a convert to Judaism, and shows its reasoning rather than asserting it: Nicolas is the only one of the seven the text calls a proselyte, which makes it almost certain the others were Jews by birth.
- The fuller account of how he died, which the encyclopedia gives and the summary above deliberately does not. The one thing that must travel with any of it is the encyclopedia's own framing, which it states before the detail and not after: "Stephen's stoning does not appear in the narrative of the Acts as a deed of mob violence; it must have been looked upon by those who took part in it as the carrying out of the law". It then names the law twice - Leviticus 24:14 for taking the condemned man outside the city, Deuteronomy 17:7 for the witnesses having to strike first. Within that, the detail: he was arrested "not without some violence it seems"; custom required that he be set on a height with his hands bound and thrown down; and while the witnesses were thrusting upon him "a stone as much as two men could carry", he was heard to pray "Lord Jesus, receive my spirit" and, before that, "Lord, lay not this sin to their charge".
- The finding of the relics is reported by the encyclopedia, and it is worth noticing how carefully it separates what happened from what is claimed about it. The loss is flat: for centuries the location of the tomb was lost sight of. The finding is dated and the means is named for what it is - in 415 a priest called Lucian "learned by revelation that the sacred body was in Caphar Gamala", north of Jerusalem. The translations are flat again: to the church of Mount Sion, then in 460 to the basilica Eudocia built outside the Damascus Gate. The site of that basilica is given as tradition and said to be so. And the rival site is not merely doubted but dated and dismissed: the opinion that the martyrdom happened east of Jerusalem, by the gate that has been called St Stephen's Gate since, "is unheard of until the twelfth century". Benedict XVI, ninety-five years later, gives the same site as the encyclopedia and also calls it traditional: "The place of St Stephen's martyrdom in Jerusalem has traditionally been located outside the Damascus Gate".
- Anyone checking this record's quotations against a modern Bible should know that the encyclopedia's chapter-and-verse numbers in the stoning sequence run one below the modern ones. It cites the witnesses laying their garments at Saul's feet as vii, 57 where a modern text has Acts 7:58; "Lord Jesus, receive my spirit" as vii, 58 where modern is 7:59; and "Lord, lay not this sin to their charge" as vii, 59 where modern is 7:60. That is the older Douay numbering and it is consistent, not a series of errors. One citation in the same paragraph is a genuine misprint: the burial, "took order for Stephen's funeral, and made great mourning over him", is given as vii, 2 where it is Acts 8:2 - and the article's own last sentence proves it, because it bounds the whole of Stephen's story at Acts 6:1-8:2.
- Stephen is the Greek stephanos, a crown. The forms carried here are the ones a candidate is actually likely to arrive with - Steven and Stephan in English, Esteban in Spanish, Étienne in French, Stefano in Italian, Szczepan in Polish, István in Hungarian - together with Stephanie and Stefania, which are the same name given to a girl.
- No patronage is recorded for him. All three documents held for him were searched for "patron", "Patron", "patrono", "patrona", "protettore" and "protector" and the terms returned zero occurrences - in the encyclopedia article and in both the English and Italian editions of the catechesis. No held document declares one.
- Both sources say Stephen's story is in Acts and nowhere else, and they bound it slightly differently. The encyclopedia's last sentence is the plainest statement of scope either of them makes: "The only first hand source of information on the life and death of St. Stephen is the Acts of the Apostles", which it gives as 6:1-8:2. Benedict XVI counts it as two chapters - Luke, he says, dedicates two whole chapters to him, which is Acts 6 and 7. The difference is the tail: the encyclopedia's span takes in the burial and the persecution that followed, which fall in chapter 8.
- Saul is in this story before he is Paul, and both sources say so. The encyclopedia has the witnesses "laying down their garments at the feet of Saul" so as to be readier for the work. Benedict XVI draws the consequence: the young Saul must have heard the preaching he was standing over, and after the road to Damascus he took up the same reading of the Old Testament, "deepening and completing it", and became the Apostle to the Gentiles. The corpus's record for Paul tells this from the other end.
- Catholic Encyclopedia (Herbermann, 1907-1913), Charles Souvay, "St. Stephen", vol. 14, 1912 - the source for the Greek name and the suggestion that he was a Hellenist, for the appointment of the seven and his being "the first mentioned and the best known" of them, for the synagogues of the Libertines, Cyrenians, Alexandrians, Cilicians and Asians who disputed with him, for the suborned witnesses and the charge of blasphemy, for his answer and the vision, for the stoning and the two prayers, for the burial by devout men, and for the loss and finding of the tomb. https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/14286b.htm
- Benedict XVI, General Audience of 10 January 2007, "Stephen, the Protomartyr", given in the Paul VI Hall - the source for the division between Hebrews and Hellenists, for the widows being at risk in the daily distribution, for the laying on of hands and what it meant, for the point that Stephen preached as well as served ("in addition to charitable services, Stephen also carried out a task of evangelization among his compatriots"), for the Temple as the ground of the condemnation, and for the persecution turning into a mission. Its lesson is stated plainly: "charitable social commitment must never be separated from the courageous proclamation of the faith". https://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/audiences/2007/documents/hf_ben-xvi_aud_20070110.html