Simon on coming back thought it better to dissemble, and, pretending friendship for Dositheus, accepted the second place. But on the death of John he was away in Egypt for the practice of magic, and one Dositheus, by spreading a false report of Simon's death, succeeded in installing himself as head of the sect. One of these thirty leading men was a woman called Helen, and the first and most esteemed by John was Simon. There was one John the Baptist, who was the forerunner of Jesus in accordance with the law of parity and as Jesus had twelve Apostles, bearing the number of the twelve solar months, so had he thirty leading men, making up the monthly tale of the moon. He did indeed preach righteousness and judgment to come: but this was merely a bait for the unwary. In place of the Christ of the Christians he proclaimed himself and the Law he allegorized in accordance with his own preconceptions. He denied Jerusalem, and introduced Mount Gerizim in its stead. He did not believe that the God who created the world was the highest, nor that the dead would rise. Which name he used to indicate that he would stand for ever, and had no cause in him for bodily decay. And sometimes he "darkly hinted" that he himself was Christ, calling himself the Standing One. He studied Greek literature in Alexandria, and, having in addition to this great power in magic, became so ambitious that he wished to be considered a highest power, higher even than the God who created the world. The name of his father was Antonius, that of his mother Rachel. Simon was a Samaritan, and a native of Gitta. They are of uncertain date and authorship, and seem to have been worked over by several hands in the interest of diverse forms of belief. The Clementine Recognitions and Homilies give an account of Simon Magus and some of his teachings in regards to the Simonians. In Acts 8:20, Peter denounces Simon's attitude, and declares, "May your money perish with you!" Verse 6.19 of the Apostolic Constitutions also accuses him of antinomianism. The sin of simony, or paying for position and influence in the church, is named for Simon. And to him they had regard, because that of long time he had bewitched them with sorceries.Īcts tells of a person named Simon Magus practicing magic in the city of Sebaste in Samaria, being (supposedly) converted to Christianity by Philip the Evangelist, but then trying to offer money to the Apostles in exchange for miraculous abilities, specifically the power of laying on of hands. Assuming all references are to the same person, as some (but by no means all) of the Church fathers did, the earliest reference to him is the canonical Acts of the Apostles, verses 8:9-24.īut there was a certain man, called Simon, which beforetime in the same city used sorcery, and bewitched the people of Samaria, giving out that himself was some great one: To whom they all gave heed, from the least to the greatest, saying, This man is the Great Power of God. The different sources for information on Simon contain quite different pictures of him, so much so that it has been questioned whether they all refer to the same person. Peter's conflict with Simon Magus by Avanzino Nucci, 1620. Some scholars have considered the two to be identical, although this is not generally accepted, as the Simon of Josephus is a Jew rather than a Samaritan. Josephus mentions a magician named Simon in his writings as being involved with the procurator Felix, King Agrippa II and his sister Drusilla, where Felix has Simon convince Drusilla to marry him instead of the man she was engaged to. He is also supposed to have written several treatises, two of which bear the titles The Four Quarters of the World and The Sermons of the Refuter, but these are lost to us. There are small fragments of a work written by him (or by one of his later followers), the Apophasis Megale, or Great Declaration. Almost all of the surviving sources for the life and thought of Simon Magus are contained in works from ancient Christian writers: in the Acts of the Apostles, in patristic works ( Irenaeus, Justin Martyr, Hippolytus of Rome, Epiphanius of Salamis), and in the apocryphal Acts of Peter, early Clementine literature, and the Epistle of the Apostles.
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