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The Fall and Rise of Simon Magus

How the Worst Man in Christendom Saved the Church

By David R. Cartlidge

Simon Magus is arguably the worst of the bad guys in the history of the church.1 One of the major sins, simony, the act of buying an ecclesiastical office, is named for this magician who clashed with the apostle Peter. It gets worse. In the early Christian apocrypha, he is the common enemy who inspires the feuding factions within the earliest church to unite in opposition. According to the church fathers of the second, third and fourth centuries, Simon Magus is 26the founder of all Christian heresies, including Gnosticism, and the champion of all wrong thinking and blasphemous worship. […]

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Footnotes

1.

Scholars believe that the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles are a continuous narrative, known as Luke-Acts, which was written primarily by one person.

Endnotes

1.

We have excluded Judas Iscariot from the list of contestants; according to Luke-Acts, Judas died before Pentecost (Acts 1:15ff.).

2.

E.R. Dodds, Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety (New York: W.W. Norton, 1965), p. 37.

3.

The term is used in Acts. In chapter 13:6–12, Bar-Jesus is named a “magus.” Bar-Jesus comes into conflict with Paul, and that magus receives a worse fate in Acts than does Simon; he is struck blind at the behest of Paul.

4.

On this see Wayne Meeks, “Simon Magus in Recent Research,” Religious Studies Review 3 (1977), pp. 137-142; Stephen Haar, Simon Magus: The First Gnostic? (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2003).

5.

Quotations from the Acts of Peter (often abbreviated APt) are those of J.K. Elliott, The Apocryphal New Testament (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1993).

6.

Pseudo-Clementine Homilies II, 16-17, in Wilhelm Schneemelcher, New Testament Apocrypha (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1992), vol. 2, pp. 535-536.

7.

Schneemelcher, New Testament Apocrypha, vol. 2, p. 535.

8.

For an English translation of the Passion of Sts. Peter and Paul (or Ps-Linus), see The Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 8, pp. 477ff, under the title Acts of the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul.

9.

See Alberto Ferreiro, “Simon Magus: The Patristic-Medieval Traditions and Historiography,” Apocrypha: Revue Internationale des Littératures Apocryphes 7 (1996), pp. 147-156; quotation from p. 156.

10.

Ferreiro, “Simon Magus,” n. 29.

11.

Ferreiro, “Simon Magus,” p. 160

12.

Ferreiro, “Simon Magus,” p. 162