Acts 6:12

And they stirred up the people, and the elders, and the scribes, and came upon him, and seized him, and brought him into the council, and set up false witnesses, who said, This man ceaseth not to speak words against this holy place, and the law: for we heard him say, that this Jesus of Nazareth shall destroy this place, and shall change the customs which Moses delivered unto us.

Say ... that Jesus of Nazareth shall destroy this place ... This was a lie in that neither our Lord nor Stephen ever declared that he, Christ, would destroy the temple; what Jesus actually said was that they, the religious leaders, would destroy it, that is, the temple of his body, the same having no reference at all to the secular temple of the Jews. Moreover, at that same moment, Jesus promised that he would "raise it up" (the temple of his body) in three days (John 2:19-22).

Jesus indeed prophesied the destruction of the temple, promising not that he himself would destroy it, but affirming that "The king (God) would send his armies (those of the Romans) and destroy those murderers and burn their city" (Matthew 22:7).

Change the customs ... Only malignant spite could construe Stephen's preaching the very changes God himself had prophesied in the Old Testament Scriptures as blasphemy, either of God or Moses. Thus it was no mere twisting what Jesus or Stephen had said, no mere distortion of their words, which was practiced by the suborned witnesses. Their testimony was totally false.

The Pharisaical plot that led to the murder of Stephen was successful, whereas the opposition of the Sadducees had largely failed; and the circumstances that made it so were: (1) the Pharisees, by far more popular than the Sadducees, were the leaders, their engagement in the opposition deriving, in all probability, from the inroads the new faith had made upon their own party (Acts 6:7); (2) they directed their murderous purpose, not against the Twelve, but against a prominent new personality but recently elevated to popular esteem; (3) it was directed against a single individual, not against a group; (4) they stoned him on the spot, not bothering to procure a verdict; it was exactly the same kind of vicious murder they tried unsuccessfully to perpetrate against Christ himself. The action of the Sanhedrin in this murder was totally illegal, being contrary to the laws both of Rome and of the Jews; and yet it succeeded in their objective of killing their intended victim whose arguments they were unable to answer. Over and beyond the circumstances named above, it was time, in the will of God, for the church to be scattered; and, therefore, God here permitted what he had not permitted before.