Acts 6:13

13. Set up Made stand.

False witnesses Before the council or Sanhedrin. The facts adduced by these witnesses were mainly true; but the witnesses infused a false spirit and intent into them as to make facts be lies.

There were five things of which Stephen is charged with blasphemously predicting a change, namely: Moses, Jehovah, (Moses taking precedence in their talk,) this holy place, (the temple and perhaps city,) the law, ( place takes precedence of law with them,) and the customs, or entire body of ritual observances. Touching all these, the predictions of Stephen have become history. The perjury of the witnesses which unjustly produced his death consisted in inventing a blasphemous or hostile animus. Stephen announced the disappearance of all that was transient in these, yet not as necessarily, destroyed, but living essentially in their permanent elements with a renewed vitality in the new Christianity. Hence in his defence Stephen seeks to give such a rehearsal of Israel’s whole history as to show that his Christianity joins on to it as the latest and most natural development of the New from the Old. So far from hostility or blasphemy against these venerable five, he reverently claims them as among the antecedents to the divine consequents embraced in Jesus Messiah, and would urge his countrymen to identify themselves while they may with the coming New.

And here commences the great fracture anticipated in our note on Acts 4:1, between Judaism and Christianity, which scattered the Pentecostal Church, and has lasted for ages. (See note on Acts 10:1.) Its termination is indicated in Romans 11:32-36.