Who Was Simon Magus? The First Heretic, Examined

Who was Simon Magus?

Simon Magus — Simon the Magician — was a first-century Samaritan wonder-worker who appears in Acts 8 as a rival to the apostolic mission in Samaria. He is the earliest named individual the Christian church filed as a heretic, the reputed founder of a sect called the Simonians, and the man whose attempted purchase of the Holy Spirit gave canon law the crime of simony.

There are, in practice, two Simons. The first occupies about a dozen verses of Acts and does nothing cosmic at all. The second is a theological construction assembled between roughly 150 and 400 CE by writers whose purpose was to give every heresy they knew a single disreputable ancestor. Keeping the two apart is most of the work of this page.

What does the Bible actually say about Simon?

Acts 8 says he practised magic in a city of Samaria and astonished its people, that he was baptized under Philip's preaching, and that he offered the apostles money for the power to confer the Holy Spirit. Peter refuses in scalding terms. Simon asks for prayer. He is never mentioned again in the New Testament, and no punishment is narrated.

The detail worth pausing on is the crowd's language. Luke says Simon was “giving out that himself was some great one” (Acts 8:9, KJV), and that the Samaritans said of him: “This man is the great power of God” (8:10, KJV). That phrase — in Greek, hē dynamis tou theou hē kaloumenē megalē — looks less like flattery than like a title, and it is the one hint in the whole chapter that Simon headed something with a theology of its own rather than a magic act.

The rebuke is equally specific. Peter answers the money offer with “Thy money perish with thee” (8:20, KJV) and tells Simon he is “in the gall of bitterness” (8:23, KJV). But Luke closes the episode with Simon asking the apostles to pray for him — not with a curse fulfilled. Every later horror in Simon's biography was added by other hands.

How did Simon become “the father of all heresy”?

By genealogy. Irenaeus of Lyon, writing around 180 CE, organized his catalogue of Christian error as a family tree, and a family tree needs a root. Simon of Samaria was ideal: Scripture had already convicted him, he came from outside Judea, and he was safely dead. Everything the second century disliked could then be described as his descendant.

Read down the third column and the pattern is unmistakable: the more spectacular the claim, the later the witness. Tertullian, Hippolytus, Eusebius, and Epiphanius each inherited the arrangement and added to it, which is how a man who asked for prayer in Acts ends up, four centuries on, as the fountainhead of everything the church called Gnosticism. The same instinct filed Marcion and Valentinus as Simon's heirs, though neither had any traceable connection to him — a habit the timeline of the movement makes easy to see once the dates are laid side by side.

The statue in Rome — and the stone that undid it

Justin Martyr told the emperor that Simon had come to Rome under Claudius, was honoured as a god, and had a statue raised on the island in the Tiber between the two bridges, inscribed in Latin “Simoni Deo Sancto” — “To Simon the holy God” (First Apology 26, Ante-Nicene Fathers translation). It is the most concrete evidence anyone ever produced for a Simonian cult in the capital.

In 1574, excavators on that same Tiber island turned up a dedication base reading SEMONI SANCO DEO FIDIO SACRVM — a gift to Semo Sancus Dius Fidius, an ancient Sabine god of oaths, catalogued today among the Latin inscriptions of Rome as CIL VI 567. Semo Sanco, not Simoni Sancto. The consensus since has been that Justin, or a source he trusted, read a pagan Roman dedication as a monument to the Samaritan heretic and reported it in good faith.

What makes the slip instructive rather than merely embarrassing is that Justin was himself a Samaritan, born at Flavia Neapolis, and claimed that most of his countrymen revered Simon. He was as well placed as anyone in the second century to know the truth, and he still got the stone wrong — and Irenaeus and Eusebius passed the error along without checking. The Simon of the fathers grew by exactly this mechanism.

Did Simon Magus fly?

No source within a century of Simon says anything of the kind. The flight comes from the Acts of Peter, an apocryphal romance of the late second century, which stages a public duel of miracles in Rome: Simon rises into the air above the city, Peter prays, and Simon drops and breaks his leg in three places, dying afterwards of his injuries.

Hippolytus preserves a completely different ending — Simon has himself buried alive, promising to rise on the third day, and does not — and the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies and Recognitions keep him alive for chapter after chapter as Peter's debating opponent, arguing about the God of the Hebrew scriptures. Two irreconcilable deaths and a long career of losing arguments: that is a legend developing, not a life being remembered. The nineteenth-century historian Ferdinand Christian Baur went further, arguing that the Simon of the Pseudo-Clementines is a coded stand-in for the apostle Paul; few accept the thesis whole today, but almost everyone concedes the anti-Pauline colouring.

What is simony, and why is it named after him?

Simony is the purchase or sale of church office, ordination, or sacraments, and it is named directly for Acts 8:18–20. The Council of Chalcedon forbade ordination for money in 451 CE; the reforming popes of the eleventh century made simony their defining battle; Dante set the simoniacs head-down in the third pit of the eighth circle of the Inferno, addressing them through Simon's name.

It is a strange afterlife. The one thing Simon does in the New Testament that we can be reasonably confident about — offering cash for a spiritual gift — became a term of medieval canon law still in use, while every florid detail the heresy-hunters added has quietly lapsed.

What did the Simonians actually teach?

Every word we have about Simonian doctrine comes from its enemies; no Simonian text survives. According to Justin and Irenaeus, Simon travelled with a woman named Helena whom he identified as his First Thought, the divine intelligence that descended, generated the angels and powers who made this world, was imprisoned by them in body after body, and ended in a brothel in Tyre — from which Simon came to rescue her, and by extension to free humanity from the world's makers.

The structure will be familiar to anyone who has read the later gnostic systems: a divine feminine principle falls, world-making powers hold her captive, and knowledge sets her free. Whether Simon supplied the pattern for Sophia or the heresiologists simply read the later pattern back into him is the central unsettled question. Hippolytus adds a treatise called the Great Declaration, which describes a boundless power hidden in everything as fire is hidden in fuel — but scholars generally date the text well after Simon's lifetime. Origen, meanwhile, reports that by the mid-third century the sect had shrunk so far he doubted one could find thirty Simonians in the whole world.

Is the historical Simon recoverable?

Barely, and honesty requires saying so. Acts 8 is our only source from within living memory, and it is a theological narrative written perhaps fifty years after the events it describes, by an author with a stake in showing the Spirit refusing to be bought. Justin writes a century after that. Everything richer arrives later still, and each retelling has a motive.

Scholarship splits accordingly. Gerd Lüdemann argued for a real Samaritan preacher with a genuine following that competed with the Christian mission in Samaria and was later dressed in second-century clothes. Karlmann Beyschlag argued that the gnostic Simon is essentially a construction of the heresiologists, projected backwards. Stephen Haar's source-by-source review lands between them; Alberto Ferreiro has traced the legend's growth through the Middle Ages, where Simon becomes a stock devil-magician.

What is left when the legend is stripped away is small but not nothing: a Samaritan teacher called a power of God by his own people, absorbed into the Christian movement and then expelled from it, remembered by the winners as the origin of every idea they rejected. The cheapest way to lose an argument permanently is to become the name your opponents give to error.