Simon Magus

The Acts of the Apostles introduces Simon as a magician already established in Samaria before the apostles arrive there, a man the text says the Samaritans called "the Great Power of God" and followed with something close to awe. When the deacon Philip preaches in the city and performs healings, Simon is baptized along with many others and, Acts says, was himself amazed at the signs he saw, attaching himself closely to Philip afterward.

The turn comes when the Jerusalem apostles Peter and John arrive to lay hands on the new believers so that they receive the Holy Spirit. Simon, watching the Spirit conferred through the apostles' touch, offers them money for the same power, asking that whoever he lays hands on might also receive it. Peter's rebuke is unsparing: "May your silver perish with you, because you thought you could buy the gift of God with money. You have no part or share in this ministry, because your heart is not right before God." Peter tells him to repent and pray for forgiveness, warning that he is "full of bitterness and captive to sin." Simon's reply in the text is not defiant but frightened, asking Peter to pray for him so that nothing he has said will come upon him, and the episode ends there, without recording whether he repented.

The exchange gave Christian tradition its word for the offense, simony, the buying or selling of ecclesiastical office, position or spiritual benefit, a term with a long afterlife in church law and controversy that far outran the brief scene in Acts that produced it. Nothing else in the canonical New Testament mentions Simon again.

Where Acts leaves Simon as a minor, unresolved figure, later Christian writers built him into something much larger. Irenaeus of Lyons, writing around 180, names Simon the fountainhead of all heresy, the first man to claim that his own teaching, not the apostles', carried the true hidden knowledge of God, and credits him with founding a school later heresiologists called the Simonians. Irenaeus reports that Simon claimed to be a manifestation of divine power and traveled with a woman named Helen, whom his followers were taught to regard as the first thought of God fallen into matter and rescued through him, a doctrine that made Simon himself the object of redemption rather than its agent.

The apocryphal Acts of Peter goes further, staging a public contest between Simon and Peter in Rome: Simon attempts to fly by demonic power in front of the emperor and the crowd, and Peter's prayer causes him to fall to his death. No canonical text records any of this, and the story functions as a legend about the triumph of apostolic authority over rival claimants rather than a historical report.

Modern scholarship treats the whole edifice with caution. How much of "Simon Magus the Gnostic founder" reflects an actual historical teacher, and how much is heresiological construction, in which later polemicists needed an originating villain and folded diverse rival teachings backward onto the one named rival that scripture had already condemned, is a live question rather than a settled one. The Simon of Acts 8 is a magician who tried to buy spiritual power and was refused; the Simon of Irenaeus and the later legend is something closer to an archetype, built to explain everything the mainstream church wanted set outside itself.