St. Stephen the Protomartyr

The Greek-speaking widows of the Jerusalem church were being overlooked in the daily distribution, and the apostles would not leave the word of God to serve tables, so the assembly chose seven men of good report, full of the Spirit and of wisdom, and Stephen is named first among them. That is where the diaconate begins.

The Acts says he did great wonders and signs among the people, and that men from the synagogue of the Freedmen disputed with him and were not able to resist the wisdom and the spirit by which he spoke. They brought false witnesses and charged him with speaking against the Temple and the Law, and the council looked at him, the text says, and saw his face as it had been the face of an angel.

His answer is the seventh chapter of Acts: the whole history of Israel retold from Abraham forward as a history of God meeting His people outside the land and outside the Temple, and of the people refusing the ones He sent. It ends with the charge that they had betrayed and murdered the Righteous One, and they stopped their ears.

They ran him out of the city and stoned him, and the witnesses laid their clothes at the feet of a young man named Saul. He saw the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God, and he died praying for the men who were killing him, which is the second time in the New Testament that prayer is made and the first was from the Cross.

His relics were found at Kaphar Gamala near Jerusalem in the year 415, an event the Church commemorates in its own right, and were translated to Constantinople and later to Rome. The Church keeps his memory on the twenty seventh of December, on the day after the Nativity, and again on the second of August for the translation of the relics.