Come and study Holy Scripture with us as Father Stephen DeYoung teaches verse by verse on the podcast,

The Whole Council of God. Father Stephen is a former Protestant pastor and Bible teacher in the

reform tradition, but now an Orthodox priest serving at Archangel Gabriel Orthodox Church in Lafayette, Louisiana.

So we'll go ahead and get started.

And when we start here in a minute,

we'll be starting in Acts of the Apostles, Chapter 8, verse 1.

As usual, by the time anyone is hearing this online,

the first Bible study on the Book of Acts will be already available so you can

go back and listen to my introduction to the book to get us caught up to where we are right now.

The most important thing is that we are, and the story here will continue, it's important to remember, of course,

that there were no chapter and verse breaks in the original text.

And so where the chapters are broken are somewhat arbitrary.

So it are based more on readings of a certain length rather than on always, you know, the breaks that really reflect the text.

So when we pick up here, chapter 8, verse 1, even though we're picking up at the beginning of a chapter, it's really going to be continuing directly off of the end of chapter 7.

And so what we saw in chapter seven was the martyrdom of St. Stephen, who was the first martyr, uh, martyr

per se. I mean, there were certainly other people who died as a result of their testimony to

Christ like St. John, the forerunner, St. John the Baptist. say, I mean, there were certainly other people who died as a result of their testimony to Christ

like St. John, the forerunner, St. John the Baptist, not to mention the innocence killed by Herod

at the time of Jesus' birth, but St. Stephen, because he is the first martyr, sort of post-Pentecost, is sort of the first

Christian martyr, the first martyr of the Christian era, as it were.

And we saw that St. Stephen was basically accused by some rivals who were unable to win some debates with him from the synagogue

of the freedmen. They hauled him in and accused him of blaspheming against Moses and against

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