Stoning of Stephen

[BradK]

An interesting possibility has been advanced that the stoning of Stephen and the stoning of James, the brother of Jesus are actually the same event. In Acts the stoning of Stephen follows a riot that is started by a man named Saul (Saulos). In Antiquities, Josephus describes the stoning of James following a riot started by Saulus. The dates, of course don't match, the stoning of Stephen taking place in the late thirties to early forties and the stoning of James taking place in the sixties, but it wouldn't be so unbelievable that the dates could have been superimposed with one another by 20 years when one considers that the authors were both recounting events in the past and that the earliest manuscripts of either piece we have today was penned hundreds of years after the original.

It isn't unbelievable that the events could have been accidentally superimposed, but the dates are a bit of a problem for this. Acts was probably written late 1st century, but could have been written as late as 100-120 AD. P45 is the earliest manuscript for Acts and does contain the relevant passages in question. It is dated mid-2nd century. So there were almost certainly not "hundreds of years" between the original and the manuscripts we have today. More likely it was around a hundred years, making scribal mistakes or confusion unlikely. If Acts were written earlier than early 2nd century, allowing for more time between its writing and P45, then even less time passed between the original events and the original writing of Acts. This would seem to make it less likely that the author of Acts mistook the events. Either way, only a couple hundred years passed between the recounted events themselves and the date of the earliest extant manuscript of the Acts account of them. If the author conflated James with Stephen, then an intentional conflation (or obfuscation) seems more likely than either an authorial or scribal mistake.