Jesus said that Peter had the keys to His Kingdom, in the sense that it was Peter’s mission to open up the treasury of souls to Jesus. Peter was slow to recognize that the treasury included Gentiles, as well. His Jewish prejudices died slowly, but his caution was not wrong. Peter’s role was to recognize when the Lord laid claim to His new treasures.
Stephen hinted at something that he did not get to say to the Sanhedrin. The accusation against him was that he said the Covenant of Moses had been retired, and that the Presence of God was no longer bound to the Temple. He said this in so many words during his recitation of Hebrew history. He accused the ruling council of resisting the Holy Spirit of God, implying that it was time to move beyond the national boundaries, since the nation had rejected the Messiah and His gospel message of bringing into His Kingdom the Gentiles.
This is what made them so very angry. They were already going to execute him one way or another, but his final moment of vision compelled them to hurry things along. Paul was very pleased with this execution. This Pharisee had a gift from strategic thinking, seeing clearly the implications of where things were going. Furthermore, being from Cilicia, Paul was almost certainly a member of the Freedmen Synagogue, since there were a good number of Cilician Jews there. He had heard Stephen preaching that this message had to go out into all the world.
It was the inclusion of the Gentiles that always triggered a Jewish revulsion. The idea that Jesus was the Messiah was a matter of debate; His power and resurrection was too well established in the Sanhedrin already. The need to reform laws and the way the Sanhedrin had ruled was something they could have agreed to discuss. Keep in mind that it was half Sadducee and half Pharisee, and the former did not endorse the oral traditions of the latter. But the very notion of including the Gentiles in anything that they regarded as an internal Jewish matter was wholly unthinkable. It was a bitter spite that went beyond mere racism; Gentiles weren’t actually human in their minds. Stephen’s emphasis on taking the gospel to those who spoke Greek was already too close to this.
So, while Paul did not participate in the hasty execution of Stephen, he got his turn later, driving out the members of the church most easily identified — the ones who spoke Greek. Getting rid of them would reduce the threat that they might start agitating for opening up the Temple grounds to Gentiles and pull down the existing ruling regime. The local Hebrew Apostles were left alone, because their kind could blend in more easily. But when the dragnet was unleashed in the city, there could be no legal dispute about whose jurisdiction these Hebrew-speaking believers were under. The Greek-speaking Christian Jews might have offer legal challenges on that score. Paul knew this all too well with his own Roman citizenship.
Stephen was buried and duly mourned, and then the church scattered across the region. And wherever they went, they preached the gospel of Jesus. Among the remaining six Greek-speaking elders, Philip was no slacker. He fled into the Samaritan territory and began preaching. The effects were off the charts, as it seemed most of the residents embraced his message. The miracles Philip performed gave the message a real punch. The whole city was celebrating.
In times past, Samaria had been plagued by a magician named Simon. The context indicates this man was a fraud, using trickery that looked like magic among people who lacked any significant science education. Simon himself probably didn’t really understand some of his tricks, and might have believed they were real magic. In those days there was a very busy market in such secrets, and this man had obviously invested quite a bit in his lore of tricks. He made it all back by taking fees for his “work” that made him a local celebrity, treated like nobility.
This Simon was touched by Philip’s message and embraced Jesus as the Messiah. If anyone recognized that the miracles were real, it was Simon the Magician. But it was the duty of Simon Peter to ensure that His Lord was actually present in these people. He would have remembered that time Jesus had ministered among the Samaritans starting with that encounter at Jacob’s Well. Keep in mind that the Samaritans had the Torah with a tiny few edits, and actually possessed a genuine piety most Jews couldn’t surpass. Jesus spoke well of them.
So when Peter with John’s help came to investigate, they began laying hands on the new Samaritan Christians to receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. Did they really belong to Jesus? This is what Jesus meant about Peter holding the keys; he assisted the risen Messiah in claiming His treasures. If they could receive the Holy Spirit, there was no sense denying that they were part of the Kingdom of the Heaven. It was not that the physical contact was necessary, but that the Lord needed His Apostles to directly experience the progression He had prophesied, that the gospel would go to the Jews first, then the Samaritans and then Gentiles in general.
Simon the Magician mistook this as something that fell into the business with which he had long experience. Would the Apostles sell him the secret to this wonderful magic, so he could keep his business model alive and actually do some good? Peter’s rebuke was wholly justified, and actually fairly gentle, all things considered. The former magician had a long way to go to understand his place in this Messianic Kingdom, and such a warning was necessary to jar him awake. Peter warned him against the temptation to be bitter about the loss of his former profession.
Once it was clear that Philip had done the right thing in preaching to the Samaritans, he with Peter and John worked the entire circuit of towns and villages in Samaria. Then they returned to Jerusalem.
