Reading Stephen’s Speech as a Counter-Cultural Discourse on Migration and Dislocation

Albert L A Hogeterp

doi:10.1515/opth-2020-0162

Abstract

AbstractThe speech of Stephen in Acts 7:2–53 contains a wealth of references to biblical migration narratives, but their significance for understanding the message of Luke–Acts has been understudied. This is partly due to a recurrent focus on either accusations against Stephen (Acts 6:8–15) or the polemical conclusion of the speech (Acts 7:47–50.51–53). It also partly relates to a teleological interest in early Christian mission narrative. This article reads Stephen’s speech as a counter-cultural discourse on migration and dislocation. It provides a close reading of its biblical story-telling in conjunction with its polemical upshot, and further compares Lucan narrative choices with early Jewish and Jewish Hellenistic literary cycles about patriarchal and Mosaic discourse. It applies a critical lens to the use of ancient narratives of migration and dislocation in discussions about identity, ethnicity, and “othering;” this is of further importance for contemporary identity politics around migration. Through comparing the speech with intra-Jewish dimensions and Graeco-Roman contexts, Stephen emerges as a counter-cultural speaker whose discourse appeals to human–divine intersectionality, specifically regarding the cause of justice for the ill-treated stranger; at the same time, it avoids cultural stereotyping through categories of Hebrews vs Hellenists, Jews vs Christians, Graeco-Roman elite standards vs supposedly “non-European” profiles.

Highlights

Stephen’s speech in Acts 7:2–53 is full of references to Israel’s history of migration and dislocation. These range from Abraham’s migration from Mesopotamia to Haran (Acts 7:2–4) to his posterity’s alien status in a foreign land for four hundred years (Acts 7:5–6); Joseph being sold into slavery and his family migrating to Egypt (Acts 7:9–15); Moses’ flight to the land of Midian as an exile upon realizing his identity as a nonEgyptian (Acts 7:23–29); his return as ruler and deliverer of the Israelites in their exodus out of Egypt (Acts 7:30–38); the vicissitudes of a congregation in the wilderness (Acts 7:38–43); and ancestral reminiscences, in the form of the tent of witness, of the time in the wilderness until the days of David (Acts 7:44–46)
I trace how the study of past migration narratives impacts contemporary discussions, with a particular view to ethnicity and “othering.”[45] As Felix Wiedemann has shown with regard to nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury historiography of migration in the ancient Near East, mutual relations between the use of an “ethnographic window” for the study of the past and an “archaeological window” for the study of the present indicate the significance of representations of past migration for contemporary identity politics.[46]
Rather than a simple or blanket anti-Judaism, Stephen’s polemic appears to be directed against a specific religio-political milieu – situated somewhere between the Sadducean high-priestly faction and the “fourth philosophy” described by Josephus – which dislocates human values and justice from the center where Stephen argues they belong. These values were divinely sanctioned in biblical migration narratives, as related in the preceding sections of Stephen’s speech: repeatedly, God took up the cause of Israelites ill-treated as strangers in foreign lands (Acts 7:6.19.24.34–35)

Summary

Introduction

Stephen’s speech in Acts 7:2–53 is full of references to Israel’s history of migration and dislocation. This article proposes a reading of Stephen’s speech that differs from previous approaches, which have understood it as “crucial junction in the narrative” relative to subsequent Christian mission.[11] A recent study by Meiken Antje Buchholz interpreted the speech as a template for “followers of Christ,” providing them “with a new hermeneutics for their experience of displacement and life in culturally diverse societies.”[12] Such readings entail a teleological focus on the speech’s function in the life of the early Church, with its itinerant, missionary exposure to multicultural social contexts They leave questions concerning the multicultural settings of Christianity’s Jewish origins unanswered.

Methodological reflections on settings and approach

A comparative overview of biblical story-telling in Acts 7:2–53

Rereading Stephen’s speech as a counter-cultural discourse

Ancient migration narratives and ethnic “othering”

Conclusion