For we have heard him say, that this Jesus of Nazareth shall destroy this place, and shall change the customs which Moses delivered us.
For we have heard him say, that this Jesus of Nazareth shall destroy this place, and shall change the customs which Moses delivered us. It is surely catching at a straw for the Tubingen critics (Baur and Zeller), in their eagerness to disprove the authenticity of this book, to charge its author with falsehood, in calling these men "false witnesses" (Acts 6:13), since Stephen's own speech in the next chapter proves that he must have said the very things which those witnesses testified against him. The falsehood of their charges against Stephen (as of those against our Lord Himself) lay not in the statements they charged Stephen with, but in the turn they gave to them, and especially in the hostility to the religion of their fathers, which they insinuated that he had displayed. What Stephen certainly announced was the approaching change in the divine economy; and as a Jew of foreign extraction (which he appears to have been), he was a peculiarly fitting preacher of this to his foreign brethren of the synagogue above mentioned. But, as the result showed, he was too far in advance of them.