St Stephen was the first Christian martyr, put to death around 35 AD. He is first mentioned in the context of a squabble between those disciples of Jesus who spoke Greek and those whose native tongue was Hebrew.
In Acts 6:1, we find the Hellenists complaining that their widows were being neglected in the daily apportionment of relief. The Apostles declared that they were too busy preaching the Gospel to attend to such a detail. So the meeting chose seven disciples to administer the fund. All of them had Greek names, and one of them was Stephen.
