Inerrancy and Acts 7, Summary of Acts. Acts
If we read Stephen’s
defence—actually it was not a defence, it was a prosecutorial indictment of the
Sanhedrin—it would take, if we read it slowly with effect and grammatically as
it would have been given, then it would take about six to seven minutes to go
through it. So it took Stephen ten minutes at most to make this statement, and
when we look at something of this nature it is good for us to go through the
entirety as it was originally given at one sitting and to understand it in its
entirety and its whole as to what Stephen was accomplishing and what it was
that he was saying.
He is giving his defence in
chapter seven before the same high priest who challenged Jesus. So this is
almost a re-enactment of the trial of Jesus, and there are a lot of parallels
that are brought out for that very reason because it is about two or three
years after the crucifixion and it is as if God is giving the Jewish leadership
a second chance. If we think about the structure of Acts and what we have seen
there is a sermon by Peter on the day of Pentecost which challenged the nation
to repent, a term that goes back to Deuteronomy chapter thirty to turn back to
God. Again in Peter’s message in Acts chapter three after he had healed the
lame man outside the temple challenged the nation to repent, and again they
failed to do that. Then he and John were arrested by the Sanhedrin and
threatened. Later they are arrested again and are beaten. Now as a result of
what Stephen says a persecution will arise. So we see the intensification of
opposition and hostility toward the Christians, those who have accepted Jesus
as Messiah during this time.
In Peter’s first message he
challenges them to repent, in his second message he challenges them to repent,
and this is a major theme in the subsequent message of the apostles we are told
about in chapter five, and now this is going to crystallize the negative
volition of the Sanhedrin, their hostility to Christ.
This is the longest sermon in
Acts and the only sermon in Acts that does not have the gospel in it, because
its point is an indictment of condemnation to the Sanhedrin for their rejection
of not just the Messiah but for their constant rejection of God. Stephen points
out that they have not had respect for the Torah, they have not had respect for
the temple because over the years of Jewish history they have even brought
idols from the other nations in and set them up in the temple, they have been
disrespectful of Moses for they have not obeyed him. And ultimately all of this
reveals that they have been blasphemous of God and they have violated God’s
commandments to worship Him and Him alone again and again and again down
through their history. Stephen brings this to a conclusion and this just
creates an intense fore storm of reaction against him.
Now we want to go back and
look at some details within Stephen’s message that are important for us to pay
a little more attention to.
The definition of inspiration
is based on the Greek theopneustos
[qeopneustoj], a compound noun coined by Paul. It doesn’t mean
inspire. We use the English word “inspire” to communicate someone who has had a
remarkable insight into something, or they are able to reach heights of genius
in art or music or something of that nature. But what the English word
“inspiration” translates is a word that means that God breathed out the
Scriptures. The ultimate source is in God Himself. He breathes it out from His
person and He breathes it into the mind or soul of the individual writer of
Scripture. Then that individual writer of Scripture exhales that, as it were,
into the Scripture—using a breathing metaphor to describe this process of the
writing of Scripture and God’s Word in and through the writer of Scripture, to
guarantee that what the writer of Scripture put down on papyrus was exactly
what God intended and would be without error in any area that is
addressed—whether it was speaking of Geography, history, observation is
creation—and whatever the writer penned would be without error. That only
applies to the original manuscripts, which we don’t have anymore.
What is typical of
evangelicals today is that they know very little about their Bible, very little
about what they believe or why they believe it, and in many cases they don’t
know anything about its origin or transmission. They almost have just this
superstitious view of the text. And there are always those who are over in the
King-James-only crowd who think that actually the King James version
in the English was inspired by God, and that “If the King James was good enough
for the apostle Paul it is good enough for us.” We laugh and chuckle at that
but there are people who actually believe that and there are some who are
scholars who ought to know better but have tried to develop a scholarly defence
of that, and they are out there teaching that.
Inspiration is the belief
that God the Holy Spirit as the agent of inspiration so supernaturally guided
and supervised the human writers that without waving their individual
personality so that their own human style, vocabulary, personality, personal
feelings all come across in the text. So we can read in the original languages
Peter’s epistles, John’s epistles or Paul’s epistles and get a real sense of
who they were. We understand their distinctions in their personality and their
writing styles and their vocabulary. The Holy Spirit doesn’t override any of
that but nevertheless God who is so powerful that He is override or supervise
their writing in such a way that what they write is exactly what He intends
without violating their personality so that what they write is without error in
the origin autograph [writings].
John 10:35; Matthew 5:18; 2
Timothy 3:16; 2 Peter 1:21; 1 Corinthians 2:14-16 are just some of the passages
that support this view.
We may not have full copies
of the New Testament that go back within 200 years of the original writings but
we do have a number of fragments of different manuscripts that go back within
that period of time, and we also have numerous quotations and citations in
early church fathers going back to Clement of Rome who wrote during the
apostolic period. They quoted Scripture again and again and again, and in all
of these particular writings plus in various lectionaries (a scrap of paper
where they wrote the Scripture reading down for that particular service) that
were read in public, and they go back to this period. Even though we don’t have
the original we can reconstruct the original by comparing manuscripts [MSS].
Inerrancy is a word that was
coined in the mid-twentieth century because what we used to be able to say and
mean in the nineteenth century—Do you believe the Bible is the Word of
God—later had to be said that that the Bible was the infallible Word of God.
Then it went to, Do you believe the Bible is the
infallible, plenary, inspired Word of God. Then it was necessary to say that
the Bible was the authoritative, inerrant, infallible, inspired, plenary,
verbally inspired Word of God. This had to be added just to say what people
meant when people a couple of hundred years said they believed the Bible was
the Word of God. There are always people who come along and try to find room so
that they don’t have to really believe that everything that is written down in
the text is from God.
The word “inerrancy” was
coined to emphasize the fact that in the original writings there are no errors,
that we can recover the wordings of those early MSS and they’re all free from any
falsehood, fraud or deceit. So when the Bible speaks of anything that it
addresses—geography, weather, agriculture, anything empirical when it speaks of
anything in the creation/science—it is without error. There are a lot of
challenges that are made on this basis but usually what we discover is that we
don’t know enough information—not of Scripture but whatever the claim is, for
example, up until 1927 the claim was made that there was no ancient literature
that ever mentioned the Hittites, therefore the Bible was not true. But in
Acts chapter seven has
several places in it that are under attack. The reason we review inerrancy is
because this is stating that in the original autographs the writers of
Scripture are recording exactly what happened. That means that at the very
least (let’s say Stephen makes mistakes in what he said) Luke is accurately
recording what Stephen said. Stephen’s speech here is not of the same order as
Paul writing an epistle to the Ephesians or David writing the Psalms. It is
Stephen standing up before the Sanhedrin giving an oral defence of his position
and indicting them on the basis of Old Testament history. So what he says could
contain errors but that is not what we are claiming is inspired. What is
inspired is Luke’s recording of Stephen’s message. So at the very least if (a
big if) there are errors in Stephen’s message then Luke is just faithfully
recording those. Satan tells a lie, the writers of Scripture faithfully record
the lie. The inerrancy of Scripture doesn’t say that there are no lies in the
Scripture. There are lies recorded in the Scripture but they are accurately
recorded by the writers of Scripture as lies.
The first “contradiction”
that is usually brought up as a problem is found in Acts 7:6 NASB “But
God spoke to this effect, that his DESCENDANTS WOULD BE ALIENS IN A FOREIGN
LAND, AND THAT THEY WOULD BE ENSLAVED AND MISTREATED FOR FOUR HUNDRED YEARS.”
This is in the first section of Stephen’s defence where he is rehearsing the
history of God’s call of Abraham. Critics will come and go to Exodus
We arrive at the date of the Exodus is by
looking at the date of the dedication of the temple—about 376 BC.
It says in the text that is was 370 years before that they came out of
The next error people go to is in Acts
7:14 NASB “Then Joseph sent {word} and invited Jacob his father and
all his relatives to come to him, seventy-five persons {in all.}” In Genesis
46:27 we read NASB “and the sons of Joseph, who were born to him in
This gets into some really interesting
things about the transmission of the text. The Massoretic
Text came into existence and was formalised in the canon around 900 AD.
The Massoretes were a school or clan of scribes who
had taken the responsibility of preserving and transmitting text over the
period of several centuries and making sure that the text was accurate. In the
process of doing that they added certain markings and indicative vowels because
originally Hebrew has no vowels. They just looked at consonants. Hebrew doesn’t
have as much vocabulary as English does so it does get a little dicey in places
because without certain vowels that tell us the differences between, say, a piel which is an intensive stem, and the hiphil which is a causative stem, we might not pick it
out—other than the fact that the hiphil has a HE
at the beginning which gives a clue. But getting into some of the more
difficult forms within the paradigm there is a lot of similarity.
The Massoretes
put vowel markings into the text. Early on in the development of Hebrew, some
time around the first century, they started with an early form of vowel points
where they used a few consonants to indicate a vowel. These consonants were
doing double duty. They took two or three different vowels and made them do
double duty as vowels and they called it a Latin name meaning “mother of
letters.” What is interesting about that is that when we look at the text of the
So what is happening here is that Stephen who
is a Hellenistic Jew is quoting from the Bible that he was most familiar with,
which was the LXX, not the Hebrew text. The LXX
doesn’t have some wild number there, it is just
including five people that weren’t included in the account given in the Massoretic Text.
The next discrepancy is in Acts 7:16 NASB
“{From there} they were removed to Shechem
and laid in the tomb which Abraham had purchased for a sum of money from the
sons of Hamor in Shechem.” This
is another more interesting one. As Stephen is just
summarizing the whole movement of the family of Jacob in v. 14 that summarizes
about four chapters in Genesis. He is summarizing, just hitting the high
points, not trying to cover every little detail. In v. 16 who
was carried back to Shechem? In verse 15 we
read “And Jacob went down to
This is interesting because as we look at
verse 16 it says, “…they were removed to Shechem and
laid in the tomb which Abraham had purchased for a sum of money from the sons
of Hamor in Shechem.” But
Abraham didn’t buy anything in Shechem. He bought the
Is this unusual or is this an error? It is
not an error, this is typical of Hebrew literature. In
Hebrews chapter seven Levi paid tithes to Melchizedek. No, he didn’t. Levi
lived two hundred years after Melchizedek. He was a great grandson of Abraham,
but he was not alive when the events of Genesis chapter fourteen took place. Abraham
is and Abraham is the one who paid tithes, but the writer of Hebrews says Levi
paid tithes, as it were, showing in this connection that Abraham was seen as
inferior to Melchizedek, and if Abraham the great grandfather was inferior to
Melchizedek so was Levi. This is the kind of thing where the head of the clan (Abraham)
would be put in the place of his descendants. So this is not atypical of Hebrew
writing, and the reason they would do something like that would be to make a
point of connection. What Stephen is doing here is connecting that; he is not
misspeaking but he is saying that because this is a descendant of Abraham and
he is tracing this back to show the interconnectedness of the people.
There is another interesting situation
that comes up a little later on. It is not a textual problem. It is Acts 7:37 and
this is a quotation of a messianic prophecy. The next person that Stephen
focuses on is Moses, and Moses’ life is rehearsed here and he goes to a
prophecy from Moses. NASB “This is the Moses who said to the sons of
It may be a surprise that many, many
evangelicals today—in fact it has almost become the new avant garde position among evangelicals—try to make the claim
that there were no real messianic prophecies in the Old Testament. It was just
a surprise that Jesus showed up. This is not the traditional Protestant view. Most
Protestants have understood that there were specific direct prophecies in the
Old Testament related to the Messiah, and this is one of them. In Deuteronomy
18:15 Moses said, NASB “The LORD your God will
raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your countrymen, you
shall listen to him… [18] I will raise up a prophet from among their countrymen
like you, and I will put My words in his mouth [intimacy], and he shall speak
to them all that I command him.”
There are some who deny true literal
messianic prophecies; there are those who claim that this really doesn’t relate
to the Messiah at all. The first view is the non-messianic view. Among the
Jewish rabbis one said this was Jeremiah, another said that it was Joshua. It
can’t be Jeremiah because Jeremiah was not a prophet like Moses. Moses was a
deliverer, a legislator, an executive, a mediator; Jeremiah is none of those
things. Moses’ ministry was the deliverance of the people; Jeremiah’s ministry
was to announce judgment upon the people. Joshua is not like Moses either. In
Deuteronomy the final editor, who probably write those last four verses after
the return from the exile, makes a very strong statement in the Hebrew (emphatic)
that there never has been a prophet like Moses with whom God spoke face to
face. So it can’t be Joshua.
There is the collective messianic view,
the idea that they are just talking about all the prophets. That doesn’t work
because it is a singular prophet, and it is not talking about the office of
prophet but a specific prophet. Then there is the view that this is the
Messiah, the specific individual messianic view. This is supported for a number
of reasons in the grammar and context of the text. For example, the wider
context in Deuteronomy makes it very fitting for Deuteronomy 18:15-19 to refer
to the Messiah as the head of all the offices and authority spoken of in the
surrounding passages. Deuteronomy 18 is talking about the leadership in
Deuteronomy 18:20-22 NASB “But
the [false] prophet who speaks a word presumptuously in My name which I have
not commanded him to speak, or which he speaks in the name of other gods, that
prophet shall die. You may say in your heart, ‘How
will we know the word which the LORD has not spoken?’
1. The individual messianic view is supported by the fact that the
word nabi for prophet is in the singular.
2. The prophet to come is compared to a singular individual, Moses.
3. In the history of the Old Testament no ordinary prophet was
legislative, priestly, executive, and also served as a mediator between the
people and God. There has been on one like that other than Jesus of Nazareth.
4. Other Pentateuchal messianic passages
also give a broader context for this to be a messianic prophecy. Numbers 12:6-8—shows
an intimacy that God had with Moses and Moses alone, in contrast to all of the
other prophets. At the end of Deuteronomy the final editor says that since then
there has not arisen a prophet in
In Acts 7:42, 43 there is a quotation from
Amos 5:25-27. There seems to be a little bit of a difference in he Acts 7
passage.
Amos 5:25-27 NASB “Did you
present Me with sacrifices and grain offerings in the
wilderness for forty years, O house of
Acts 7:42, 43 NASB “But God
turned away and delivered them up to serve the host of heaven; as it is written
in the book of the prophets, ‘IT WAS NOT TO ME THAT YOU OFFERED VICTIMS AND SACRIFICES FORTY
YEARS IN THE WILDERNESS, WAS IT, O HOUSE OF ISRAEL?
The two false gods mentioned: Moloch, the god of the Midianites; Rompha, a pagan deity. Some translators have looked at this and seen some odd things going on in the Hebrew text of Amos. Translations into the LXX sort of modernised the false gods so that they were more recognizable. So in essence it is a kind of paraphrase. Stephen is paraphrasing vv. 42, 43 from Amos 5:25-27 to show that in the ancient world the Israelites had worshipped all of these different idols. And that is his point. He is not trying to give a precise quotation; he is giving a paraphrase of Amos 5 and is focusing on the most well-known gods to emphasize the fact that the Jews in the Old Testament had constantly violated the first two commandments by getting involved with idolatry, as Jeremiah 32 and 2 Kings 23:10 also support.