Acts 7:51

Ye stiffnecked and uncircumcised in heart and ears, ye do always resist the Holy Ghost: as your fathers did, so do ye.

Ye stiff-necked and uncircumcised in heart and ears. [Lachmann adopts the plural kardiais (G2588), for which the external evidence is rather better than for kardia (G2588) of the Received Text. The internal evidence, however, is not so good. Tischendorf adheres to the Received Text.]

Ye do always resist the Holy Spirit: as your fathers did, so do ye. On this verse Olshansen, Humphry, Webster and Wilkinson fall in too readily with the notion of some of the older critics, that symptoms of impatience and irritation in the audience here induced Stephen not only to cut short his historical sketch, but to pass abruptly from calm narrative to sharp invective. But since little further light could have been thrown upon Israel's perversity from subsequent periods of the national history, as recorded in their own Scriptures, it is more natural to view this and the two following verses as a vivid summing up-the concentrated expression and brief import-of the whole Israelite history, in the form of a charge, and certainly the heaviest conceivable, of grossness of heart and continuous resistance of the Holy Spirit in all the divine procedure toward them, from the beginning down to that very moment. (So Meyer, Alford, Baumgarten, Hackett, Alexander, and Lechler.) In using the familiar Old Testament phrases, "stiff-necked and uncircumcised in heart and ears," Stephen doubtless meant to serve his auditors heirs to their fathers' incorrigible perversity and paganish carnality.