Acts 7:57-59 - Joseph Benson’s Commentary on the Old and New Testaments

Then they cried out with a loud voice Being provoked to such a degree that they could not contain themselves, and meaning to drown the voice of Stephen; and stopped their ears As if they could not bear to hear such blasphemy as they wished to have it thought he had spoken. And ran upon him Greek, ωρμησαν, rushed on him with one accord, before any sentence was regularly passed; and cast Greek, εκβαλοντες εξω της πολεως, casting him out of the city It seems by a gate near the place where the sanhedrim sat; and as soon as they had got without the boundaries of that sacred place, of which they judged it would be a profanation to stain it with human blood, they stoned him This, like the stoning of Paul at Lystra, seems to have been an act of popular fury, exceeding the power which the Jews regularly had; which, though it might have extended to passing a capital sentence, was certainly not sufficient for carrying it into execution, without the consent of the Romans. The Jews were more than once ready to stone Christ, not only when by their own confession they had not power to put any one to death, (John 18:31,) but when nothing had passed which had the shadow of a legal trial. How far they now might have formed those express notions of what the rabbis call the judgment of zeal, is not easy to say; but it is certain they acted on that principle, and as if they had thought every private Israelite had, like Phinehas, who is pleaded as an example of it, a right to put another to death on the spot, if he found him in a capital breach of the divine law; a notion, by the way, directly contrary to Deuteronomy 17:6, which required at least two witnesses in capital cases, where there was a legal process. And the two witnesses Whose hands were first upon him to put him to death; laid down their clothes, &c. In executions of this kind, it was usual for those who had borne witness against the criminal to cast the first stones at him; and for this purpose they were wont to put off their upper garments, and gave them to be kept by persons equally hearty in the prosecution with themselves; and on this occasion the witnesses laid their clothes at the feet of Saul, afterward called Paul, who, it seems, willingly took charge of them, to show how heartily he concurred with them in the execution. O Saul! wouldst thou have believed, if one had told thee, while thou wast urging on the cruel multitude, that the time would come when thou thyself shouldst be twice stoned in the same cause, and shouldst triumph in committing thy soul likewise to that Jesus whom thou wast now blaspheming? His dying prayer reached thee, as well as many others. And the martyr Stephen, and Saul the persecutor, (afterward his brother, both in faith and martyrdom,) are now joined in everlasting friendship, and dwell together in the happy company of those who have washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.