“he entered house after house, seizing men and women and sending them to prison.”27 He did not shrink from brute force and would later remind his followers of “how savagely I persecuted the church of God and tried to destroy [eporthoun] it,” the Greek verb implying utter annihilation.28 Some of his victims may have been condemned to thirty-nine lashes in the synagogue; others may have been beaten up or even lynched like Stephen, until finally the Greek-speaking community of Jesus’s followers had been eliminated from Jerusalem.
