Simon Magus ('Simon the Magician'), the wicked sorcerer who thought that the gift of God might be purchased with money, and for this was excommunicated by Peter. The word Simony (q.v.) is derived from his name. When first introduced in Acts, viii. 9-24, Simon, apparently about 37 A.D., had already for a long time been a commanding personality in 'the city' of Samaria through his sorceries. Giving himself out to be 'some great one,' he had induced the people 'from the least to the greatest' to call him 'that power of God which is called Great.' Simon and the Samaritans had believed and were baptised under the ministry of Philip the Evangelist; and when the apostles Peter and John conferred on Philip's converts the gift of the Holy Ghost (including apparently the gift of tongues) Simon, hoping for new magical powers, went to the apostles and offered money that he might be enabled to confer the same gift. Peter's reply is known; Simon, rebuked, was submissive, and here the narrative of the Acts (written probably before the end of the 1st century) leaves him. But his penitence was only temporary. Justin Martyr says Simon afterwards went to Rome in the reign of Claudius as a wonder worker and was reckoned a god, having a statue erected to him by the senate and people with the inscription 'To Simon the Holy God.' Justin, himself a Samaritan, adds that 'almost all the Samaritans' and 'a few even of other nations' worshipped Simon as the 'First God,' and a woman Helena, who went about with him and had formerly been a harlot, they adored as his 'First Idea.' Irenæus follows Justin in the main, and adds that Simon professed to have appeared among the Jews as the Son, in Samaria as the Father, and to other nations as the Holy Spirit. From Simon, according to Irenæus, 'all sorts of heresies' derived their origin, including Antinomian doctrines. His followers worshipped images of Simon and Helena as Zeus and Athene. Hippolytus, who quotes much from Simon's work The Great Announcement, says that Simon encountered Peter at Rome, that he ordered his followers to bury him, promising to rise the third day, but that he never rose. Origen questions whether in his time there were more than thirty Simonians in the whole world. In the pseudo-Clementine Homilies and Recognitions (in their present form not older than the 3rd century) Simon comes into frequent conflict with Peter at Cæsarea, Antioch, and elsewhere.
Baur in 1831 was the first to observe the indisputable fact that in some portions of these books it is the apostle Paul who is caricatured under the guise of Simon—portions he believed to come from 1st-century Ebionite sources. Others of the Tübingen school went further and traced the whole story of Simon to the antipathy of the Jewish Christians against the apostle Paul, whom they regarded as a pretender (the false as opposed to the true Simon), a 'Samaritan,' a libertine, and a bewitcher of men. Now, however, it is generally agreed that some facts regarding Simon must be accepted as historical, and that likely enough a pseudo-Messiah named Simon appeared in Samaria in the fourth decade of the 1st century. Perhaps Klostermann and Wendt are right in holding that the 'power of God which is called Great' (Gr. Megalē) ought to be interpreted according to the Samaritan word Megaia ('Revealer'). Simon's 'revelation' or new religion had apparently for its main articles a doctrine of the essential oneness of many widely different cults—hence the attempted fusion of Baal, Zeus, the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit—and a 'syncretistic-gnostic' conception of the world and its creation, together with ethical Antinomianism.
But it is obvious that the story of Simon has received accretions from a variety of extraneous sources. Thus, Justin was wrong about Simon's statue at Rome, the inscription he quotes being almost certainly identical with a dedication (still extant) by a private individual to Semo Sancus, a Sabine deity. The statement of Irenæus that Simon and Helena (called in the Clementines Selēnē, 'the moon') were worshipped under the images of Zeus and Athene may rest on a misapprehension of the Syrian Baal and Astarte worship, or on a misunderstanding of the Semitic word Shem or Sem ('name'). Further, no one now believes that The Great Announcement cited by Hippolytus as Simon's dates from so early a period. Opponents have mixed him up with other sorcerers of Cyprus, Cæsarea, and Rome; and his disciples, anxious to combine as many elements as possible in their new world-religion, added to the confusion by their readiness to identify their master with the most incongruous personalities. Simon is a true magician in this at least, that he still eludes our grasp. The legend of Simon and Helena continued to be read in the middle ages; and several traits of Simon may be recognised in 'Doctor Faustus.'
See Baur's Paul, and his History of the Church in the First Three Centuries (both translated), and earlier works there cited; Hilgenfeld's Clem. Recognitionen u. Homilien (1848); Zeller's Apostelgeschichte (1854); Lipsius in Schenkel's Bibel-Lexicon (1875) and his Apokr. Apostelgeschichten (1877); Harnack's Gnosticismus (1873), and his Dogmengeschichte (1886).