<p>7:57 <em>But</em>- I suggest this means that they ignored Stephen's appeal to 'behold' the vision of the risen Lord which he was seeing. The power and reality of the Lord Jesus was subsumed beneath a wave of legalism and anger at injured positions and the desperate desire to deny that... they might just have been wrong. And so the real Christ has been obscured, it seems to me, to so many angry legalists, even Christian ones.</p><p><em>They cried out with a loud voice</em>- Not, as we might expect grammatically, 'with loud voices' in the plural. They were united, and that unity is stated later in the verse- they &quot;rushed upon him with one accord&quot;. Just as Pilate and Herod, and the warring Jewish factions, were united in the condemnation of the Lord Jesus. Their unity, and crying out with a loud voice as the Lord did on the cross, all makes them a kind of anti-Christ, a synagogue of satan. The very words are used of how Stephen &quot;cried with a loud voice&quot; (:60). They were no longer merely folks who held a different theological view; their conscious rejection of God's appeal in Christ made them an utterly false system which merited only complete destruction.</p><p><em>And stopped their ears</em>- See on :51 <em>Heart and ears</em>.</p><p><em>And rushed upon him with one accord</em>- The very same words used of how the Jews did the same to Paul and his brethren (Acts 19:29). This means that what Saul and his then brethren did to Stephen, was done to Paul. He came to realize how it felt. And the Lord leads us to the same realization, not to punish us, but to lead us to self-understanding and eternal unity with our brethren whom we have hurt.</p>