.This essay tends to suggest an useful key to understand the enigmatic relationship between the Hebrews and the Hellenists in the earliest stage of Christianity in Jerusalem from the perspective of Social-Scientific approaches to the New Testament tex...
.This essay tends to suggest an useful key to understand the enigmatic relationship between the Hebrews and the Hellenists in the earliest stage of Christianity in Jerusalem from the perspective of Social-Scientific approaches to the New Testament texts. Many have engaged m this enterprise so far, but they do not succeed the limit which has proposed that both parties were the separate groups in the early Jerusalem church, with the linguistic implications. But this work proposes a promising way of investigating the linguistic aspects implied in those distinctive words, to illuminate the their different theological stances to the temple by employing the social-scientific models as an heuristic tools borrowing from the disciplines of social psychology and social linguistics. The result is that the Hellenists and the Hebrews are kinds of labelling the ingroup and the outgroup in the early Christians in terms of the positive or negative attitudes to the temple which was represented lmguistically the use of the Hebrew language. The attitude induced to the group conflict. The negative attitude of the Hellenist for which Stephen was a prominent representative led to the their persecution from the Jewish authorities who had managed the temple The Stephen' speech in Acts 7 is the missionary manifesto of the Hellenist, in which the temple was devastatingly negated in Acts 7.48. This understanding is also in the line with the Lukan attitude to the temple in Luke-Acts throughout.