{"commentary":{"id":"jamieson-fausset-brown","name":"Jamieson-Fausset-Brown Bible Commentary","website":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamieson-Fausset-Brown_Bible_Commentary","licenseUrl":"https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/","licenseNotes":null,"licenseNotice":null,"englishName":"Jamieson-Fausset-Brown Bible Commentary","language":"eng","textDirection":"rtl","sha256":"db3d4c8b3c1f32ef9d1430a57392e02bda3a17aac1f9bbe398461de021a3cb13","availableFormats":["json"],"listOfBooksApiLink":"/api/c/jamieson-fausset-brown/books.json","listOfProfilesApiLink":"/api/c/jamieson-fausset-brown/profiles.json","numberOfBooks":66,"totalNumberOfChapters":1187,"totalNumberOfVerses":17056,"totalNumberOfProfiles":0,"languageName":"English","languageEnglishName":"English"},"book":{"id":"ACT","commentaryId":"jamieson-fausset-brown","name":"Acts","commonName":"Acts","introduction":"THIS book is to the Gospels what the fruit is to the tree that bears it. In the Gospels we see the corn of wheat falling into the ground and dying: in the Acts we see it bringing forth much fruit (Joh 12:24). There we see Christ purchasing the Church with His own blood: here we see the Church, so purchased, rising into actual existence; first among the Jews of Palestine, and next among the surrounding Gentiles, until it gains a footing in the great capital of the ancient world--sweeping majestically from Jerusalem to Rome. Nor is this book of less value as an Introduction to the Epistles which follow it, than as a Sequel to the Gospels which precede it. For without this history the Epistles of the New Testament--presupposing, as they do, the historical circumstances of the parties addressed, and deriving from these so much of their freshness, point, and force--would in no respect be what they now are, and would in a number of places be scarcely intelligible.\n\nThe genuineness, authenticity, and canonical authority of this book were never called in question within the ancient Church. It stands immediately after the Gospels, in the catalogues of the Homologoumena, or universally acknowledged books of the New Testament (see Introduction to our larger Commentary, Vol. V, pp. iv, v). It was rejected, indeed, by certain heretical sects in the second and third centuries--by the Ebionites, the Severians (see EUSEBIUS, Ecclesiastical History, 4.29), the Marcionites, and the Manicheans: but the totally uncritical character of their objections (see Introduction above referred to, pp. xiii, xiv) not only deprives them of all weight, but indirectly shows on what solid grounds the Christian Church had all along proceeded in recognizing this book.\n\nIn our day, however, its authenticity has, like that of all the leading books of the New Testament, been made the subject of keen and protracted controversy. DE WETTE, while admitting Luke to be the author of the entire work, pronounces the earlier portion of it to have been drawn up from unreliable sources (New-Testament Introduction, 2a, 2C). But the Tubingen school, with BAUR at their head, have gone much farther. As their fantastic theory of the post-Joannean date of the Gospels could not pretend even to a hearing so long as the authenticity of the Acts of the Apostles remained unshaken, they contend that the earlier portion of this work can be shown to be unworthy of credit, while the latter portion is in flat contradiction to the Epistle to the Galatians--which this school regard as unassailable--and bears internal evidence of being a designed distortion of facts for the purpose of setting up the catholic form which Paul gave to Christianity in opposition to the narrow Judaic but original form of it which Peter preached, and which after the death of the apostles was held exclusively by the sect of the Ebionites. It is painful to think that anyone should have spent so many years, and, aided by learned and acute disciples in different parts of the argument, should have expended so much learning, research, and ingenuity in attempting to build up a hypothesis regarding the origination of the leading books of the New Testament which outrages all the principles of sober criticism and legitimate evidence. As a school, this party at length broke up: its head, after living to find himself the sole defender of the theory as a whole, left this earthly scene complaining of desertion. While some of his associates have abandoned such heartless studies altogether for the more congenial pursuits of philosophy, others have modified their attacks on the historical truth of the New Testament records, retreating into positions into which it is not worth while to follow them, while others still have been gradually approximating to sound principles. The one compensation for all this mischief is the rich additions to the apologetical and critical literature of the books of the New Testament, and the earliest history of the Christian Church, which it has drawn from the pens of THIERSCH, EBRARD, and many others. Any allusions which it may be necessary for us to make to the assertions of this school will be made in connection with the passages to which they relate--in Acts, First Corinthians, and Galatians.\n\nThe manifest connection between this book and the third Gospel--of which it professes to be simply the continuation by the same author--and the striking similarity which marks the style of both productions, leave no room to doubt that the early Church was right in ascribing it with one consent to Luke. The difficulty which some fastidious critics have made about the sources of the earlier portion of the history has no solid ground. That the historian himself was an eye-witness of the earliest scenes--as HUG concludes from the circumstantiality of the narrative--is altogether improbable: but there were hundreds of eye-witnesses of some of the scenes, and enough of all the rest, to give to the historian, partly by oral, partly by written testimony, all the details which he has embodied so graphically in his history; and it will appear, we trust, from the commentary, that De Wette's complaints of confusion, contradiction, and error in this portion are without foundation. The same critic, and one or two others, would ascribe to Timothy those later portions of the book in which the historian speaks in the first person plural--\"we\"; supposing him to have taken notes of all that passed under his own eye, which Luke embodied in his history just as they stood. It is impossible here to refute this gratuitous hypothesis in detail; but the reader will find it done by EBRARD (The Gospel History, sect. 110, Clark's translation; sect. 127 of the original work, Wissenschaftliche Kritik der Evangelische Geschichte, 1850), and by DAVIDSON (Introduction to New Testament, Vol. II, pp. 9-21).\n\nThe undesigned coincidences between this History and the Apostolic Epistles have been brought out and handled, as an argument for the truth of the facts thus attested, with unrivalled felicity by PALEY in his HorÃ&brvbr PaulinÃ&brvbr, to which Mr. BIRKS has made a number of ingenious additions in his HorÃ&brvbr ApostolicÃ&brvbr. Exception has been taken to some of these by JOWETT (St. Paul's Epistles, Vol. I, pp. 108 ff.), not without a measure of reason in certain cases--for our day, at least--though even he admits that in this line of evidence the work of PALEY, taken as a whole, is unassailable.\n\nMuch has been written about the object of this history. Certainly \"the Acts of the Apostles\" are but very partially recorded. But for this title the historian is not responsible. Between the two extremes--of supposing that the work has no plan at all, and that it is constructed on an elaborate and complex plan, we shall probably be as near the truth as is necessary if we take the design to be to record the diffusion of Christianity and the rise of the Christian Church, first among the Jews of Palestine, the seat of the ancient Faith, and next among the surrounding Gentiles, with Antioch for its headquarters, until, finally, it is seen waving over imperial Rome, foretokening its universal triumph. In this view of it, there is no difficulty in accounting for the almost exclusive place which it gives to the labors of Peter in the first instance, and the all but entire disappearance from the history both of him and of the rest of the Twelve after the great apostle of the Gentiles came upon the stage--like the lesser lights on the rise of the great luminary. \n\n\n\nNext: Acts Chapter 1\n\n","order":44,"numberOfChapters":28,"sha256":"c94aad3dd7e20061c0935f668f020beecd42d660333a1ba60e42c592e5a6a94e","firstChapterNumber":1,"firstChapterApiLink":"/api/c/jamieson-fausset-brown/ACT/1.json","firstChapterReference":{"commentaryId":"jamieson-fausset-brown","book":"ACT","chapter":1},"lastChapterNumber":28,"lastChapterApiLink":"/api/c/jamieson-fausset-brown/ACT/28.json","lastChapterReference":{"commentaryId":"jamieson-fausset-brown","book":"ACT","chapter":28},"totalNumberOfVerses":775},"chapter":{"number":7,"content":[{"type":"verse","number":4,"content":["when his father was dead, he removed into this land--Though Abraham was in Canaan before Terah's death, his settlement in it as the land of promise is here said to be after it, as being in no way dependent on the family movement, but a transaction purely between Jehovah and Abraham himself.\n\n"]},{"type":"verse","number":6,"content":["four hundred years--using round numbers, as in Gen 15:13, Gen 15:16 (see on Gal 3:17).\n\n"]},{"type":"verse","number":7,"content":["after that shall they come forth, and serve me in this place--Here the promise to Abraham (Gen 15:16), and that to Moses (Exo 3:12), are combined; Stephen's object being merely to give a rapid summary of the leading facts.\n\n"]},{"type":"verse","number":8,"content":["the covenant of circumcision--that is, the covenant of which circumcision was the token. \n\nand so--that is, according to the terms of this covenant, on which Paul reasons (Gal. 3:1-26). \n\nthe twelve patriarchs--so called as the founders of the twelve tribes of Israel.\n\n"]},{"type":"verse","number":9,"content":["the patriarchs, moved with envy, sold Joseph into Egypt, but God was with him--Here Stephen gives his first example of Israel's opposition to God's purposes, in spite of which and by means of which those purposes were accomplished.\n\n"]},{"type":"verse","number":14,"content":["threescore and fifteen souls--according to the Septuagint version of Gen 46:27, which Stephen follows, including the five children and grandchildren of Joseph's two sons.\n\n"]},{"type":"verse","number":17,"content":["But when--rather, \"as.\" \n\nthe time of the promise--that is, for its fulfilment. \n\nthe people grew and multiplied in Egypt--For more than two hundred years they amounted to no more than seventy-five souls; how prodigious, then, must have been their multiplication during the latter two centuries, when six hundred thousand men, fit for war, besides women and children, left Egypt!\n\n"]},{"type":"verse","number":20,"content":["In which time--of deepest depression. \n\nMoses was born--the destined deliverer. \n\nexceeding fair--literally, \"fair to God\" (Margin), or, perhaps, divinely \"fair\" (see on Heb 11:23).\n\n"]},{"type":"verse","number":22,"content":["mighty in words--Though defective in utterance (Exo 4:10); his recorded speeches fully bear out what is here said. \n\nand deeds--referring probably to unrecorded circumstances in his early life. If we are to believe JOSEPHUS, his ability was acknowledged ere he left Egypt.\n\n"]},{"type":"verse","number":23,"content":["In Act 7:23, Act 7:30, Act 7:36, the life of Moses is represented as embracing three periods, of forty years each; the Jewish writers say the same; and though this is not expressly stated in the Old Testament, his age at death, one hundred twenty years (Deu 34:7), agrees with it. \n\nit came into his heart to visit his brethren--his heart yearning with love to them as God's chosen people, and heaving with the consciousness of a divine vocation to set them free.\n\n"]},{"type":"verse","number":24,"content":["avenged him that was oppressed, and smote the Egyptian--going farther in the heat of his indignation than he probably intended.\n\n"]},{"type":"verse","number":25,"content":["For he supposed his brethren would have understood, &c.--and perhaps imagined this a suitable occasion for rousing and rallying them under him as their leader; thus anticipating his work, and so running unsent. \n\nbut they understood not--Reckoning on a spirit in them congenial with his own, he had the mortification to find it far otherwise. This furnishes to Stephen another example of Israel's slowness to apprehend and fall in with the divine purposes of love.\n\n"]},{"type":"verse","number":26,"content":["next day he showed himself unto them as they strove--Here, not an Israelite and an Egyptian, but two parties in Israel itself, are in collision with each other; Moses, grieved at the spectacle, interposes as a mediator; but his interference, as unauthorized, is resented by the party in the wrong, whom Stephen identifies with the mass of the nation (Act 7:35), just as Messiah's own interposition had been spurned.\n\n"]},{"type":"verse","number":28,"content":["Wilt thou kill me, as thou didst the Egyptian yesterday?--Moses had thought the deed unseen (Exo 2:12), but it now appeared he was mistaken.\n\n"]},{"type":"verse","number":29,"content":["Then fled Moses, &c.--for \"when Pharaoh heard this thing, he sought to slay Moses\" (Exo 2:15).\n\n"]},{"type":"verse","number":30,"content":["an angel of the Lord--rather, \"the Angel of the Covenant,\" who immediately calls Himself JEHOVAH (Compare Act 7:38).\n\n"]},{"type":"verse","number":35,"content":["This Moses whom they refused, saying, Who made thee a ruler and a judge, &c.--Here, again, \"the stone which the builders refused is made the head of the corner\" (Psa 118:22).\n\n"]},{"type":"verse","number":37,"content":["This is that Moses which said . . . A prophet . . . him shall ye hear--This is quoted to remind his Moses-worshipping audience of the grand testimony of their faithful lawgiver, that he himself was not the last and proper object of the Church's faith, but only a humble precursor and small model of Him to whom their absolute submission was due.\n\n"]},{"type":"verse","number":38,"content":["in the church--the collective body of God's chosen people; hence used to denote the whole body of the faithful under the Gospel, or particular sections of them. \n\nThis is he that was in the church in the wilderness, with the angel . . . and with our fathers--alike near to the Angel of the Covenant, from whom he received all the institutions of the ancient economy, and to the people, to whom he faithfully reported the living oracles and among whom he set up the prescribed institutions. By this high testimony to Moses, Stephen rebuts the main charge for which he was on trial.\n\n"]},{"type":"verse","number":39,"content":["To whom our fathers would not obey, &c.--Here he shows that the deepest dishonor done to Moses came from the nation that now professed the greatest jealousy for his honor. \n\nin their hearts turned back . . . into Egypt--\"In this Stephen would have his hearers read the downward career on which they were themselves entering.\"\n\n"]},{"type":"verse","number":42,"content":["gave them up--judicially. \n\nas . . . written in the book of the prophets--the twelve minor prophets, reckoned as one: the passage is from Amo 5:25. \n\nhave ye offered to me . . . sacrifices?--The answer is, Yes, but as if ye did it not; for \"neither did ye offer to Me only, nor always, nor with a perfect and willing heart\" [BENGEL].\n\n"]},{"type":"verse","number":43,"content":["Yea, ye took up the tabernacle of Molech, &c.--Two kinds of idolatry are charged upon the Israelites: that of the golden calf and that of the heavenly bodies; Molech and Remphan being deities, representing apparently the divine powers ascribed to nature, under different aspects. \n\ncarry you beyond Babylon--the well-known region of the captivity of Judah; while \"Damascus\" is used by the prophet (Amo 5:27), whither the ten tribes were carried.\n\n"]},{"type":"verse","number":44,"content":["Our fathers had the tabernacle of witness in the wilderness--which aggravated the guilt of that idolatry in which they indulged, with the tokens of the divine presence constantly in the midst of them.\n\n"]},{"type":"verse","number":45,"content":["which . . . our fathers that came after--rather, \"having received it by succession\" (Margin), that is, the custody of the tabernacle from their ancestors. \n\nbrought in with Jesus--or Joshua. \n\ninto the possession--rather, \"at the taking possession of [the territory of] the Gentiles.\" \n\nunto the days of David--for till then Jerusalem continued in the hands of the Jebusites. But Stephen's object in mentioning David is to hasten from the tabernacle which he set up, to the temple which his son built, in Jerusalem; and this only to show, from their own Scripture (Isa 66:1-2), that even that temple, magnificent though it was, was not the proper resting-place of Jehovah upon earth; as his audience and the nations had all along been prone to imagine. (What that resting-place was, even \"the contrite heart, that trembleth at God's word,\" he leaves to be gathered from the prophet referred to).\n\n"]},{"type":"verse","number":51,"content":["Ye stiffnecked . . . ye do always resist the Holy Ghost, &c.--It has been thought that symptoms of impatience and irritation in the audience induced Stephen to cut short his historical sketch. But as little farther light could have been thrown upon Israel's obstinacy from subsequent periods of the national history on the testimony of their own Scriptures, we should view this as the summing up, the brief import of the whole Israelitish history--grossness of heart, spiritual deafness, continuous resistance of the Holy Ghost, down to the very council before whom Stephen was pleading.\n\n"]},{"type":"verse","number":52,"content":["Which of, &c.--Deadly hostility to the messengers of God, whose high office it was to tell of \"the Righteous One,\" that well-known prophetic title of Messiah (Isa 53:11; Jer 23:6, &c.), and this consummated by the betrayal and murder of Messiah Himself, on the part of those now sitting in judgment on the speaker, are the still darker features of the national character depicted in these withering words.\n\n"]},{"type":"verse","number":53,"content":["Who have received the law by the disposition--\"at the appointment\" or \"ordination,\" that is, by the ministry. \n\nof angels, and have not kept it--This closing word is designed to shut up those idolizers of the law under the guilt of high disobedience to it, aggravated by the august manner in which they had received it.\n\n"]},{"type":"verse","number":54,"content":["When they heard these things they were cut to the heart, &c.--If they could have answered him, how different would have been their temper of mind!\n\n"]},{"type":"verse","number":55,"content":["But he, being full of the Holy Ghost, looked up steadfastly into heaven, and saw the glory of God--You who can transfer to canvas such scenes as these, in which the rage of hell grins horribly from men, as they sit condemned by a frail prisoner of their own, and see heaven beaming from his countenance and opening full upon his view--I envy you, for I find no words to paint what, in the majesty of the divine text, is here so simply told. \"But how could Stephen, in the council-chamber, see heaven at all? I suppose this question never occurred but to critics of narrow soul, one of whom [MEYER] conjectures that he saw it through the window! and another, of better mould, that the scene lay in one of the courts of the temple\" [ALFORD]. As the sight was witnessed by Stephen alone, the opened heavens are to be viewed as revealed to his bright beaming spirit. \n\nand Jesus standing on the right hand of God--Why \"standing,\" and not sitting, the posture in which the glorified Saviour is elsewhere represented? Clearly, to express the eager interest with which He watched from the skies the scene in that council chamber, and the full tide of His Spirit which He was at that moment engaged in pouring into the heart of His heroical witness, till it beamed in radiance from his very countenance.\n\n"]},{"type":"verse","number":56,"content":["I see . . . the Son of man standing, &c.--This is the only time that our Lord is by human lips called THE SON OF MAN after His ascension (Rev 1:13; Rev 14:14 are not instances). And why here? Stephen, full of the Holy Ghost, speaking now not of himself at all (Act 7:55), but entirely by the Spirit, is led to repeat the very words in which Jesus Himself, before this same council, had foretold His glorification (Mat 26:64), assuring them that that exaltation of the SON OF MAN which they should hereafter witness to their dismay, was already begun and actual [ALFORD].\n\n"]},{"type":"verse","number":57,"content":["Then they cried out . . . and ran upon him with one accord--To men of their mould and in their temper, Stephen's last seraphic words could but bring matters to extremities, though that only revealed the diabolical spirit which they breathed.\n\n"]},{"type":"verse","number":58,"content":["cast him out of the city--according to Lev 24:14; Num 15:35; Kg1 21:13; and see Heb 13:12. \n\nand stoned--\"proceeded to stone\" him. The actual stoning is recorded in Act 7:59. \n\nand the witnesses--whose hands were to be first upon the criminal (Deu 17:7). \n\nlaid down their clothes--their loose outer garments, to have them taken charge of. \n\nat a young man's feet whose name was Saul--How thrilling is this our first introduction to one to whom Christianity--whether as developed in the New Testament or as established in the world--owes more perhaps than to all the other apostles together! Here he is, having perhaps already a seat in the Sanhedrim, some thirty years of age, in the thick of this tumultuous murder of a distinguished witness for Christ, not only \"consenting unto his death\" (Act 8:1), but doing his own part of the dark deed.\n\n"]},{"type":"verse","number":59,"content":["calling upon God and saying, Lord Jesus, &c.--An unhappy supplement of our translators is the word \"God\" here; as if, while addressing the Son, he was really calling upon the Father. The sense is perfectly clear without any supplement at all--\"calling upon [invoking] and saying, Lord Jesus\"; Christ being the Person directly invoked and addressed by name (compare Act 9:14). Even GROTIUS, DE WETTE, MEYER, &c., admit this, adding several other examples of direct prayer to Christ; and PLINY, in his well-known letter to the Emperor Trajan (A.D. 110 or 111), says it was part of the regular Christian service to sing, in alternate strains, a hymn to Christ as God. \n\nLord Jesus, receive my spirit--In presenting to Jesus the identical prayer which He Himself had on the cross offered to His Father, Stephen renders to his glorified Lord absolute divine worship, in the most sublime form, and at the most solemn moment of his life. In this commitment of his spirit to Jesus, Paul afterwards followed his footsteps with a calm, exultant confidence that with Him it was safe for eternity (Ti2 1:12).\n\n"]},{"type":"verse","number":60,"content":["cried with a loud voice--with something of the gathered energy of his dying Lord (see on Joh 19:16-30). \n\nLord--that is, JESUS, beyond doubt, whom he had just before addressed as Lord. \n\nlay not this sin to their charge--Comparing this with nearly the same prayer of his dying Lord, it will be seen how very richly this martyr of Jesus had drunk into his Master's spirit, in its divinest form. \n\nhe fell asleep--never said of the death of Christ. (See on Th1 4:14). How bright the record of this first martyrdom for Christ, amidst all the darkness of its perpetrators; and how many have been cheered by it to like faithfulness even unto death!\n\n\n\n\nNext: Acts Chapter 8\n\n"]}],"introduction":"DEFENSE AND MARTYRDOM OF STEPHEN. (Acts 7:1-60)\n\nThe God of glory--A magnificent appellation, fitted at the very outset to rivet the devout attention of his audience; denoting not that visible glory which attended many of the divine manifestations, but the glory of those manifestations themselves, of which this was regarded by every Jew as the fundamental one. It is the glory of absolutely free grace. \n\nappeared unto our father Abraham before he dwelt in Charran, and said, &c.--Though this first call is not expressly recorded in Genesis, it is clearly implied in Gen 15:7 and Neh 9:7; and the Jewish writers speak the same language.\n\n"},"thisChapterLink":"/api/c/jamieson-fausset-brown/ACT/7.json","thisChapterReference":{"commentaryId":"jamieson-fausset-brown","book":"ACT","chapter":7},"nextChapterApiLink":"/api/c/jamieson-fausset-brown/ACT/8.json","nextChapterReference":{"commentaryId":"jamieson-fausset-brown","book":"ACT","chapter":8},"previousChapterApiLink":"/api/c/jamieson-fausset-brown/ACT/6.json","previousChapterReference":{"commentaryId":"jamieson-fausset-brown","book":"ACT","chapter":6},"numberOfVerses":34}