Acts 6


Acts 6 is the sixth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles in the New Testament of the Christian Bible. It records the institution of the first seven deacons, and the work of one of them, Stephen. The book containing this chapter is anonymous but early Christian tradition uniformly affirmed that Luke composed this book as well as the Gospel of Luke. Joseph T. Lienhard refers to a "Stephen cycle" evident in the deliberate connection between the institution of the seven and the narrative about Stephen in this chapter and chapter 7.

Text

The original text was written in Koine Greek. This chapter is divided into 15 verses. In terms of the number of verses, this is the shortest chapter in the Acts of the Apostles.

Textual witnesses

Some early manuscripts containing the text of this chapter are:
In this section, Luke provides "a tantalizingly brief glimpse into the inner workings of the church", combined with "two summary verses". The candidates to perform the ministerial functions within the growing "company of believers" were marked out as "full of the Spirit". The "transmission of authority from the apostles" is "very deliberately assured through prayer and the laying on of hands".

Verse 1

The distinction made here concerns those Jews joining the community of believers who had been born outside the Holy Land, who spoke the Greek language and had adopted much of the ancient Greek culture, and the native-born Jews who spoke Hebrew and/or Aramaic and lived according to Jewish custom.

Verse 5

All the selected seven men have Greek names suggesting a 'diaspora connection', although many Palestinian Jews at the time also spoke Greek.

Stephen on trial (6:8–7:1)

One of the seven, Stephen, soon gets into dispute, not with the temple hierarchy, but with members of a group of diaspora synagogues in Jerusalem.

Verse 9

  • "Synagogue of the Freedmen" : A particular synagogue in Jerusalem which is attended by former slaves, or "freemen", and may include their descendants. The word "Freedmen" or ""libertine" is from a Latin title libertini indicating "a group of Jews of Italian origin who were now settled in Jerusalem" and this term is also known from Latin sources, such as Tacitus, Annals, 2:85. The Theodotus inscription provides the evidence that 'there was at least one Greek-speaking synagogue in Jerusalem in the first century'.

    Verse 14

  • "This Jesus of Nazareth shall destroy this place": The words of the accusation may come in part from, partly on the prediction in, which 'Stephen must have known, and may well have reproduced'.