Acts 7:45

Acts 7:45. Which also our fathers... brought in with Joshua. Stephen is here rapidly sketching the history of the sacred tent of the Witness, which continued to be the sanctuary not merely in the wilderness, but in the land of Canaan, until the age of King Solomon. Our fathers, he says, received it (the Tabernacle) from Moses, and brought it into the Land of Promise, when, with Joshua as their leader, they commenced to take possession of the nations then occupying Canaan, and the expulsion of these peoples was not completed until the days of David.

Here Wordsworth remarks ‘that the name of Jesus, though ever in the thoughts of St. Stephen, and as it were hovering on his lips in almost every sentence, is never expressed in his speech, but here, when it does not mean Jesus of Nazareth, but Jesus (or Joshua) the son of Nun. How much wisdom was there in this! If he had openly spoken as he felt concerning Jesus of Nazareth, he would have been stopped at once by the rage of his hearers, and the Christian Church would never have had the speech of St. Stephen: there was Divine eloquence in his silence.'