![]() ![]() When the apostles in Jerusalem heard that Samaria had accepted the word of God, they sent Peter and John to them. And he followed Philip everywhere, astonished by the great signs and miracles he saw. But when they believed Philip as he preached the good news of the kingdom of God and the name of Jesus Christ, they were baptized, both men and women. He boasted that he was someone great, and all the people, both high and low, gave him their attention and exclaimed, "This man is the divine power known as the Great Power." They followed him because he had amazed them for a long time with his magic. ![]() Now for some time a man named Simon had practiced sorcery in the city and amazed all the people of Samaria. ![]() In contravention his supposed conversion, he then proceeds to offend the Apostles by attempting to exchange material wealth for the miraculous ability of transmitting the Holy Spirit through the laying on of hands: The earliest depiction of Simon Magus can be found in the canonical Book of Acts, where he is described as a convert of Saint Philip. It is in this latter form that magic acceptably enters Christian thought." As a result, Simon must be comprehended as part of a historical context where all religious figures (including the apostles, martyrs, and saints) were understood to possess superhuman abilities, and that his sin was not the practicing of such arts but his hubris in practicing them for his own gain. The apostles, on the other hand, used their powers only in recognition that they were simply vessels through which God's power flowed. He wanted to be revered as a God himself…. In this, it fits a common patristic paradigm, whereby the difference between magic (which is demonic) and miracles (which are angelic) is determined by the intentions of their respective practitioners: "Simon Magus used his magical powers to enhance his own status. As such, their issue is a moral one, addressing Simon's alleged claims of divinity and his use of magic to lead Christians from the "righteous path," rather than a factual objection to the assertions that he could levitate, animate the dead, and transform his physical body. More specifically, it must be noted that all depictions of the conjurer, from the Acts onward, accept the existence of his magical powers without question. The story of Simon Magus is perhaps most instructive to modern readers for the light that it sheds on the early Christian world view. In spite of these tantalizingly unattestable fragments, it must be emphasized that the Simon who has been transmitted through history is primarily a legendary caricature of a heretic, rather than an actual individual. The patristic sources describe other Simonian treatises, including the The Four Quarters of the World and The Sermons of the Refuter, but these (and all other textual traces) are lost to us. This being said, small fragments of a work written by him (or by one of his later followers using his name), the Apophasis Megalé ("Great Pronouncement") are still extant, and seem to reveal a fairly well-developed Gnostic metaphysics. As mentioned above, this means that virtually all of the surviving sources for the life and thought of Simon Magus are contained in the polemical treatises of the ancient Christian Orthodoxy, including the Acts of the Apostles, patristic works (such as the anti-heretical treatises written by Irenaeus, Justin Martyr, and Hippolytus), and the apocryphal Acts of Peter and Clementine literature. ![]() Indeed, these texts savagely denounced him, stating that he had the hubris to assert that his own divinity and to found a religious sect (Simonianism) based on that premise. The figure of Simon appears prominently in the accounts of several early Christian authors, who regarded him as the first heretic. Given its primarily derogatory meaning, "Simon Magus" and "Simonianism" also became generic terms used by ancient Christians as derogatory epithets for schismatics. ![]()
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