Zealot - The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

holy place [the Temple]
     and the law,” a gang of stone-wielding vigilantes cries out. “We have heard him say
     that Jesus of Nazareth will demolish this place and will change the customs that Moses
     handed down to us” (Acts 6:13–14).
    Luke also provides Stephen with the self-defense that Jesus never received in his
     gospel. In a long and rambling diatribe before the mob, Stephen summarizes nearly
     all of Jewish history, starting with Abraham and ending with Jesus. The speech, which
     is obviously Luke’s creation, is riddled with the most basic errors: it misidentifies
     the burial site of the great patriarch Jacob, and it inexplicably claims that an angel
     gave the law to Moses when even the most uneducated Jew in Palestine would have known
     it was God himself who gave Moses the law. However, the speech’s true significance
     comes near the end, when in a fit of ecstasy, Stephen looks up to the heavens and
     sees “the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God” (Acts 7:56).
    The image seems to have been a favorite of the early Christian community. Mark, yet
     another Greek-speaking Jew from the Diaspora, has Jesus say something similar to the
     high priest in his gospel: “And you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand
     of the Power” (Mark 14:62), which is then picked up by Matthew and Luke—two more Greek-speaking
     Diaspora Jews—in their own accounts. But whereas Jesus in the Synoptics is directly
     quoting Psalm 110 so as to draw a connection between himself and King David, Stephen’s
     speech in Acts consciously replaces the phrase “the right hand of the Power” with
     “the right hand of God.” There is a reason for the change. In ancient Israel, the
     right hand was a symbol of power and authority; it signified a position of exaltation.
     Sitting “at the right hand of God” means sharing in God’s glory,being one with God in honor and essence. As Thomas Aquinas wrote, “to sit on the right
     hand of the Father is nothing else than to share in the glory of the Godhead … [Jesus]
     sits at the right hand of the Father, because He has the same Nature as the Father.”
    In other words, Stephen’s Son of Man is not the kingly figure of Daniel who comes
     “with the clouds of heaven.” He does not establish his kingdom on earth “so that all
     peoples, nations, and languages should serve him” (Daniel 7:1–14). He is not even
     the messiah any longer. The Son of Man, in Stephen’s vision, is a preexistent, heavenly
     being whose kingdom is not of this world; who stands at the right hand of God, equal
     in glory and honor; who is, in form and substance,
God made flesh
.
    That is all it takes for the stones to start flying.
    Understand that there can be no greater blasphemy for a Jew than what Stephen suggests.
     The claim that an individual died and rose again into eternal life may have been unprecedented
     in Judaism. But the presumption of a “god-man” was simply anathema. What Stephen cries
     out in the midst of his death throes is nothing less than the launch of a wholly new
     religion, one radically and irreconcilably divorced from everything Stephen’s own
     religion had ever posited about the nature of God and man and the relationship of
     the one to the other. One can say that it was not only Stephen who died that day outside
     the gates of Jerusalem. Buried with him under the rubble of stones is the last trace
     of the historical person known as Jesus of Nazareth. The story of the zealous Galilean
     peasant and Jewish nationalist who donned the mantle of messiah and launched a foolhardy
     rebellion against the corrupt Temple priesthood and the vicious Roman occupation comes
     to an abrupt end, not with his death on the cross, nor with the empty tomb, but at
     the first moment one of his followers dares suggest he is God.
    Stephen was martyred sometime between 33 and 35 C.E . Among those in the crowd who countenanced his stoning was a pious young Pharisee
     from a wealthy Roman city on the MediterraneanSea called Tarsus. His name was Saul, and he was a true zealot: a fervent follower
     of the Law of Moses who had burnished a reputation for violently suppressing blasphemies
     such as Stephen’s. Around 49 C.E ., a mere fifteen years after he gladly watched Stephen die, this same fanatical Pharisee,
     now an ardent Christian convert renamed Paul, would write a letter to his friends
     in the Greek city of Philippi in which he unambiguously, and