Zealot - The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

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     alone his bodily resurrection. The prophet Isaiah speaks of an exalted “suffering
     servant” who would be “stricken for the transgressions of [God’s] people” (Isaiah
     52:13–53:12). But Isaiah never identifies this nameless servantas the messiah, nor does he claim that the stricken servant rose from the dead. The
     prophet Daniel mentions “an anointed one” (i.e., messiah) who “shall be cut off and
     shall have nothing” (Daniel 7:26). But Daniel’s anointed is not killed; he is merely
     deposed by a “prince who is to come.” It may be true that, centuries after Jesus’s
     death, Christians would interpret these verses in such a way as to help make sense
     of their messiah’s failure to accomplish any of the messianic tasks expected of him.
     But the Jews of Jesus’s time had no conception whatsoever of a messiah who suffers
     and dies. They were awaiting a messiah who triumphs and lives.
    What Jesus’s followers were proposing was a breathtakingly bold redefinition, not
     just of the messianic prophecies but of the very nature and function of the Jewish
     messiah. The fisherman, Simon Peter, displaying the reckless confidence of one unschooled
     and uninitiated in the scriptures, even went so far as to argue that King David himself
     had prophesied Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection in one of his Psalms. “Being a
     prophet, and knowing God had sworn an oath to him that the fruit of his loins, of
     his flesh, would be raised as the messiah to be seated on his throne,” Peter told
     the pilgrims gathered at the Temple, “David, foreseeing [Jesus], spoke of the resurrection
     of the messiah, saying that ‘his soul was not left in Hades, nor did his flesh see
     corruption’ ” (Acts 2:30–31).
    Had Stephen been knowledgeable about the sacred texts, had he been a scribe or a scholar
     saturated in the scriptures, had he simply been an inhabitant of Jerusalem, for whom
     the sound of the Psalms cascading from the Temple walls would have been as familiar
     as the sound of his own voice, he would have known immediately that King David never
     said any such thing about the messiah. The “prophecy” Peter speaks of was a Psalm
     David sang about
himself:
    Therefore my heart is glad, and my honor rejoices;
    my body also dwells secure.
    For you did not forsake my soul to Sheol [the underworld or “Hades”],
    or allow your godly one to see the Pit.
    [Rather] you taught me the way of life;
    in your presence there is an abundance of joy,
    in your right hand there is eternal pleasure.
    P SALMS 16:9–11
    But—and here lies the key to understanding the dramatic transformation that took place
     in Jesus’s message after his death—Stephen was not a scribe or scholar. He was not
     an expert in the scriptures. He did not live in Jerusalem. As such, he was the perfect
     audience for this new, innovative, and thoroughly unorthodox interpretation of the
     messiah being peddled by a group of illiterate ecstatics whose certainty in their
     message was matched only by the passion with which they preached it.
    Stephen converted to the Jesus movement shortly after Jesus’s death. As with most
     converts from the distant Diaspora, he would have abandoned his hometown, sold his
     possessions, pooled his resources into the community, and made a home for himself
     in Jerusalem, under the shadow of the Temple walls. Although he would spend only a
     brief time as a member of the new community—perhaps a year or two—his violent death
     soon after his conversion would forever enshrine his name in the annals of Christian
     history.
    The story of that celebrated death can be found in the book of Acts, which chronicles
     the first few decades of the Jesus movement after the crucifixion. The evangelist
     Luke, who allegedly composed the book as a sequel to his gospel, presents Stephen’s
     stoning as a watershed movement in the early history of the church. Stephen is called
     a man “full of grace and power [who] did great wonders and signs among the people”
     (Acts 6:8). His speech and wisdom, Luke claims, were so powerful that few could stand
     against him. In fact, Stephen’s spectacular death in the book of Acts becomes,for Luke, a coda to Jesus’s passion narrative; Luke’s gospel, alone among the Synoptics,
     transfers to Stephen’s “trial” the accusation made against Jesus that he had threatened
     to destroy the Temple.
    “This man [Stephen] never ceases blaspheming against this