Smith's Bible Dictionary.pdf - Online Christian Library

Smith's Bible Dictionary
impulse upon him, and dragged him out of the city to the place of execution. Those who took the
lead in the execution were the persons wile had taken upon themselves the responsibility of
denouncing him. (17:7) comp. John 8:7 In this instance they were the witnesses who had reported
or misreported the words of Stephen. They, according to the custom, stripped themselves; and one,
of the prominent leaders in the transaction was deputed by custom to signify his assent to the act
by taking the clothes into his custody and standing over them while the bloody work went on. The
person was officiated on this occasion was a young man from Tarsus, the future apostle of the
Gentiles. [Paul] As the first volley of stones burst upon him, Stephen called upon the Master whose
human form he had just seen in the heavens, and repeated almost the words with which he himself
had given up his life on the cross, “O Lord Jesus receive my spirit.” Another crash of stones brought
him on his knees. One loud, piercing cry, answering to the shriek or yell with which his enemies
had flown upon him, escaped his dying lips. Again clinging to the spirit of his Master’s words, he
cried “Lord, lay not this sin to their charge” and instantly sank upon the ground, and, in the touching
language of the narrator who then uses for the first time the words afterward applied to the departure
of all Christians, but here the more remarkable from the bloody scenes in the midst of which death
took place, fell asleep . His mangled body was buried by the class of Hellenists and proselytes to
which he belonged. The importance of Stephen’s career may be briefly summed up under three
heads:
•He was the first great Christian ecclesiastic, “the Archdeacon,” as he is called in the eastern Church.
•He is the first martyr—the protomartyr. To him the name “martyr” is first applied. (Acts 23:20)
•He is the forerunner of St. Paul. He was the anticipator, as, had he lived, he would have been the
propagator, of the new phase of Christianity of which St. Paul became the main support.
Stocks
(An instrument of punishment, consisting of two beams, the upper one being movable, with
two small openings between them, large enough for the ankles of the prisoner.—ED.) The term
“stocks” is applied in the Authorized Version to two different articles one of which answers rather
to our pillory, inasmuch as the body was placed in a bent position, by the confinement of the neck
and arms as well as the legs while the other answers to our “stocks,” the feet alone being confined
in it. The prophet Jeremiah was confined in the first sort, (Jeremiah 20:2) which appears to have
been a common mode of punishment in his day, (Jeremiah 29:26) as the prisons contained a chamber
for the special purpose, termed “the house of the pillory.” (2 Chronicles 16:10) (Authorized Version
“prison-house”). The stocks, properly so called, are noticed in (Job 13:27; 33:11; Acts 16:24) The
term used in (Proverbs 7:22) (Authorized Version “stocks”) more properly means a fetter.
Stoics
The Stoics and Epicureans, who are mentioned together in (Acts 17:18) represent the two
opposite schools of practical philosophy which survived the fall of higher speculation in Greece.
The Stoic school was founded by Zeno of Citium (cir. B.C. 280) and derived its name from the
painted “portico” (stoa) at Athens in which he taught. Zeno was followed by Cleanthes (cir. B.C.
260); Cleanthes by Chrysippus (cir. B.C. 240) who was regarded as the founder of the Stoic system.
“They regarded God and the world as power and its manifestation matter being a passive ground
in which dwells the divine energy. Their ethics were a protest against moral indifference, and to
live in harmony with nature, conformably with reason and the demands of universal good, and in
the utmost indifference to pleasure, pain and all external good or evil, was their fundamental
maxim.”—American Cyclopaedia. The ethical system of the Stoics has been commonly supposed
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William Smith