Saint Stephen in the context of "Witness"

In Christianity, a martyr is a person who was killed for their testimony for Jesus or faith in Jesus. In the years of the early church, stories depict this often occurring through death by sawing, stoning, crucifixion, burning at the stake, or other forms of torture and capital punishment. The word martyr comes from the Koine word μάρτυς, mártys, which means "witness" or "testimony".

At first, the term applied to the Apostles. Once Christians started to undergo persecution, the term came to be applied to those who suffered hardships for their faith. Finally, it was restricted to those who had been killed for their faith. The early Christian period before Constantine I was the "Age of Martyrs". "Early Christians venerated martyrs as powerful intercessors, and their utterances were treasured as inspired by the Holy Spirit."

Agios Stefanos (Greek: Άγιος Στέφανος, romanized: Ágios Stéfanos, meaning Saint Stephen) is a town and a northern suburb of the Athens agglomeration, Greece. Since the 2011 local government reform it is part of the municipality of Dionysos, of which it is the seat and a municipal unit. The municipal unit has an area of 8.136 km.

Stoning, or lapidation, is a method of capital punishment where a group throws stones at a person until the subject dies from blunt trauma. It has been attested as a form of punishment for grave misdeeds since ancient times.

Stoning appears to have been the standard method of capital punishment in ancient Palestine. Its use is attested in the early Christian era, but Jewish courts generally avoided stoning sentences in later times. Only a few isolated instances of legal stoning are recorded in pre-modern history of the Islamic world. In recent decades several states have inserted stoning and other hudud (pl. of hadd) punishments into their penal codes under the influence of Islamist movements. These laws hold particular importance for religious conservatives due to their scriptural origin, though in practice they have played a largely symbolic role and tended to fall into disuse.

A deacon is a member of the diaconate, an office in Christian churches that is generally associated with service of some kind, but which varies among theological and denominational traditions.

Major Christian denominations, such as the Catholic Church, the Oriental Orthodox Churches, the Eastern Orthodox Church, Lutheranism, Presbyterianism, Methodism, and Anglicanism, view the diaconate as an order of ministry.

A protomartyr (Koine Greek, πρῶτος prôtos 'first' + μάρτυς mártus 'martyr') is the first Christian martyr in a country or among a particular group, such as a religious order. Similarly, the phrase the Protomartyr (with no other qualification of country or region) can mean Saint Stephen, the first martyr of the Christian Church.Saint Thecla the Protomartyr, the first female martyr of the Christian Church, is known as "apostle and protomartyr among women".

Acts 6 is the sixth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles in the New Testament of the Christian Bible. It records the institution of the first seven deacons, and the work of one of them, Stephen. The book containing this chapter is anonymous but early Christian tradition uniformly affirmed that Luke composed this book as well as the Gospel of Luke. Joseph T. Lienhard refers to a "Stephen cycle" evident in the deliberate connection between the institution of the seven and the narrative about Stephen in this chapter and chapter 7.

Marx Reichlich (1460–1520) was an Austrian painter.

Reichlich was a painter of primarily religious works. He painted a number of traditional scenes as commissions for churches, including "Adoration of the Magi", and "The Last Judgement". Some of his works reside at the Kunsthistorisches Museum.