bacht

It's been suggested that the story of Stephen's execution is based on James' death.

Doug Shaver

What do the people who make that suggestion think the story of James's death, which Acts describes, was based on?

bacht

Good question. You're referring to Acts 12, where James is slain by sword? I get confused about James, the story in Josephus may be the model for Stephen, but I'd have to go through my recent reading to give you a reference. [this all assumes there was a real James, which I'm beginning to wonder about - if he was just invented to be the voice of Jewish-Christianity then questions about his "martyrdom" are moot]

bacht

Earl Doherty has this interpretation:

Before pursuing this line of argument further, we need to take a look at the attestation for the Antiquities 20 reference and the traditions about James’ death. The considerations just outlined render highly dubious the portrait of James by the itinerant Christian historian Hegesippus around 160, as preserved (his works are lost) in Eusebius’ History of the Church, II, 23. According to Eusebius, Hegesippus reported that James was permitted to enter the holy sanctuary of the Temple and to wear priestly robes, this despite the fact that he had publicly declared Jesus to be the Savior and converted many Jews, and was even regarded as the object of ancient prophecies, so that “many even of the ruling class believed.” This is Christian legend and idealization a century after the fact, and none of it can be regarded as remotely reliable. The account of James’ martyrdom in the same Hegesippus passage quoted by Eusebius reaches a zenith of incredibility, with its picture of the Jewish authorities regretting the liberty they had accorded him to win over so many of the people to Jesus, and begging him to rescind his more extravagant claims before the crowds at Passover by making a speech from the height of the Temple wall. When he, like a Shakespearean Mark Antony, took the occasion to turn the tables on them and ‘praise Caesar,’ the Scribes and Pharisees threw him down from the parapet and he was stoned and clubbed to death. That speech and the following murder scene is heavily reminiscent of the Stephen martyrdom in the Acts of the Apostles, the latter account and even the character of Stephen himself being dubiously historical. Either Hegesippus is modeling himself on an Acts which he had come to know when he visited Rome in the mid 2nd century, not long after that document had been concocted, or he is reflecting a legend of James the Just on which the Stephen scene in Acts was also modeled, neither one enjoying any reliable claim to history.

[Jesus Puzzle website, supplementary article "Josephus On The Rocks"]

Doug Shaver

Thanks. I'd read the article shortly after Earl posted the latest update, but I'd forgotten those details.

Doug Shaver

Yes.
It's easy to do. There are several of them in the NT writings. The Catholic Encyclopedia counts five.

I guess it could have been, but it isn't clear to me why there had to be any identifiable model. By the second century, when Acts was probably written, there was clearly a widespread belief among certain Christians that their sect had been violently persecuted during its formative years. There would have been lots of martyrdom stories in circulation, none of which need have had any basis in historical fact.

For my money, Paul's writings are sufficient to establish that somebody by that name was among the leaders of a sect of Christian Jews in Jerusalem sometime before the middle of the first century. We'll probably never know much else about him.

bacht

Fair enough. I appreciate the thoughful response.

So we seem to be back to the "pillars" plus Paul. I've been working with Doherty's assumption that we can use the epistles to determine some things about the early believers, but the more criticism I read the less sure I am of anything historically verifiable from the 1st C. The trend is that apologists want to date everything as early as possible, and skeptics prefer the latest possible dating (eg. mountainman)

I want to believe that there really were Jewish Christians at the bottom of it all, but of course that only speaks to my issues

penguinfan

Acts is considered to have been written before James' death, so I don't see how Stephan's martyrdom could have been based on it.

Toto

Who seriously considers that Acts was written before 62? It is generally agreed that Acts was a sequel to Luke, which is clearly based on Mark's language, and that Mark could not have been written much before 70 CE.

There are a few evangelicals who claim that Acts must have been written before Paul's death, since it does not describe his death . . . but this just does not stand up to examination.

bacht

This is something I've never seen explained: we know, and certainly the early Christians were painfully aware of, the disastrous defeat in 70. Yet nowhere in the NT corpus is this event referred to directly. Mark seems to hint about it, but Acts stops before the climactic events of the later 60s.

I know the reader is expected to believe that all the texts date to before the revolt. Is this the reason why it's never referred to openly? Do the patristic writers speak of it?