The Expositor's Bible: The Acts of the Apostles, Vol. 1Stokes, George Thomas
Religion
The Expositor's Bible: The Acts of the Apostles, Vol. 1
Stokes, George Thomas
Bible. Acts -- Commentaries; Bible. Acts -- Criticism, interpretation, etc.
Reformed or unreformed, will prove that the West also has followed
primitive custom in calling upon the name and invoking the help of the
Lord Jesus Himself. And then when Stephen had given us these two
lessons, one of faith, the other of practice; when he had taught us
the doctrine of Christ's divinity and the worship due to Him, and the
practice of Christian charity and the forgiving spirit which flows
forth from it, even towards those who have treated His servants most
cruelly, then Stephen "fell asleep," the sacred writer using an
expression for death indicative of the new aspect which death had
assumed through Christ, and which henceforth gave the name of
cemeteries to the last resting-places of Christian people.
[137] See on this point a note in Liddon's _Bampton Lectures_,
14th edition, pp. 531-43, on the worship of Jesus Christ in the
services of the Church of England.
V. The execution of St. Stephen was followed by his funeral. The
bodies of those that were stoned were also suspended on a tree, but
there was no opposition to their removal, as afterwards in the great
persecutions. The pagans, knowing that Christians preached the
doctrine of the resurrection of the body, strove to prove the
absurdity of this tenet by reducing the body to ashes. The Christians,
however, repeatedly proved that they entertained no narrow views on
this point, and did not expect the resurrection of the identical
elements of which the earthly body was composed. They took a broader
and nobler view of St. Paul's teaching in the fifteenth of 1st
Corinthians, and regarded the natural body as merely the seed out of
which the resurrection body was to be developed. This is manifest from
some of the stories told us by ancient historians concerning the
Christians of the second century. The martyrs of Vienne and Lyons have
been already referred to, and their sufferings described. The pagans
knew of their doctrine of the resurrection of the body, and thought to
defeat it by scattering the ashes of the martyrs upon the waters of
the Rhone; but the narrative of Eusebius tells us how foolish was this
attempt, as if man could thus overcome God, whose almighty power
avails to raise the dead from the ashes scattered over the ocean as
easily as from the bones gathered into a sepulchre. Another story is
handed down by a writer of Antioch named John Malalas, who lived about
A.D. 600, concerning five Christian virgins, who lived some seventy
years earlier than these Gallic martyrs, and fell victims to the
persecution which raged at Antioch in the days of the Emperor Trajan,
when St. Ignatius perished. They were burned to death for their
constancy in the faith, and then their ashes were mingled with brass,
which was made into basins for the public baths. Every person who used
the basins became ill, and then the emperor caused the basins to be
formed into statues of the virgins, in order, as Trajan said, that "it
may be seen that I and not their God have raised them up."[138]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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