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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.
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Peter's conflict with Simon Magus by Avanzino Nucci, 1620.
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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.