Sec. 3. Appointment of Stephen and the Seven. 377
and V 17 f. were mere warnings and threats, which natu- rally resulted soon in active measures. We cannot easily believe that repressive measures were delayed more than two or three years at the utmost ; we should rather have expected them even sooner.
It is therefore quite fair to date Stephen's death about two and a half or three years after the great Pentecost.
4. PHILIP THE EVANGELIST AND PETER. After the death of Stephen, the history widens, and several threads appear in it. The foundation of a series of Churches over Judaea and Samaria is first described ; and the author's attention is directed chiefly on three steps in the progress towards the Universalised Church, the foundation of an extra-Judaean Church in the city of Samaria, and the admission of an Ethiopian1 and of a Roman centurion as Christians. These steps are connected with the names of Philip and Peter. The institution of a series of Churches in Palestine, a process which must have occu- pied a long time, is briefly but clearly indicated in VIII 40, IX 31-35, 42 f. ; but Luke's personal interest in the expansion of a still purely Judaic Church was not great. Yet the episodes of yEneas and Dorcas, IX 33-42, show that, though the details seemed to Luke not required for his purpose, the spread of the Church over Palestine was conceived by him as an important step in history. These episodes are introduced, because they proved that the Divine power worked in the process whereby the Church of Jerusalem expanded into the Church of all Palestine. In the utter absence of statement as to Luke's authority for the two episodes, they cannot be placed by the historian on a higher level than general 1 He was evidently a proselyte (VIII 27), like Nikolaos.
3J& Chronology of Early Church History. Chap. XVI.
belief. It is remarkable that we have no knowledge whether Luke ever met Peter. The want of any reference to Peter in XXI 18 must, in our view, be taken as a proof that he was not in Jerusalem at the time.
In the midst of the narrative describing this expansion is interposed an account of Saul's life during the three years 33-5 ; x and this arrangement is obviously intended to bring out the long period over which that process of expansion was spread. According to our theory it con- tinued from A.D. 33 until it was checked to some extent by the development of the Pauline idea and the jealousy roused thereby among almost all Jews except the great and leading minds, which were able to rise more or less completely above it. Then came the supreme catastrophe of the great war, the destruction of Jerusalem, and the suppression of " the Nation " of the Jews.
The expansion of the Church beyond Palestine is first alluded to in XI 19, where the dispersion of missionaries over Phoenice, Cyprus, and Syria is mentioned (Ch. Ill, § 1). It is remarkable that Luke never alludes to the developmeut of the Church towards the south or east. Yet the dispersion that followed Stephen's death must have radiated in all directions; and II 7-1 1, and VIII 27 f., lead naturally to some general spread of the new teaching in all directions. It is obvious that Luke has not made it his object to write the history of the whole expansion of the Church ; but selected the facts that bore on a narrower theme, viz., the steps by which the Church of Jerusalem grew into the Church of the Empire,
'We shall speak of 33 as the date of Stephen's death and Paul's conversion, acknowledging, however, that perhaps 32 is the proper year.
Sec. 4. Philip the Evangelist and Peter. 379
and the position of the Church in the Empire. Egypt. Ethiopia, and the East and South are therefore excluded from his narrative.