Two questions are raised under this heading—the question whether, as was argued by F. C. Baur, the “Simon Magus” of the “Clementine Recognitions” and “Homilies” is a mask-name for a polemic directed primarily at the Apostle Paul; and the more fundamental question whether the Simon Magus of the Acts is or is not a historical character.

The reasons for holding Simon to be a mythical personage (as apart from the reasons for supposing the Clementine Simon to be meant for Paul, and the story of the Acts to be a misconceiving adaptation of the Clementine narrative) are overwhelming. To begin with, Justin Martyr, a Samaritan born, expressly says1 that almost all the Samaritans worshipped Simon.2 This alone might dispose of the notion that the “Simonians” dated merely from the time of Paul and Peter. It is absurd to suppose that nearly all the Samaritans, a people with old cults, could be converted within a century to a new Deity originating in one man. The cult must date further back than that. And that Justin, though of Samaritan birth, could widely misconceive the cults around him, is pretty clear from his famous blunder of finding his Simon Magus as Simo Sanctus in the Semo Sancus of Rome, the old Sabine counterpart of the Eastern Semo.3

For there is abundant evidence, to begin with, that a name of which the basis is Sem is one of the oldest of Semitic God-names. We have the forms Shem, Sime-on, Sams-on, S(h)amas (the Babylonian name of the sun; Hebrew Shemesh), San-d-on, or Samdan4 Semēn and Sem, all plainly connected with a sun-myth. Shamas or Samas was an Assyrian Sun-God, the duplicate of Melkarth and Hercules. Samson or Simson or Shimshai (= the Sun-man), the Hebrew Sun-hero, is unquestionably a mere variant of that myth. Sand-on, also a Sun-God, is the same myth over again. Baal-Samēn, “the Lord of Heaven,”5 is the same conception as Baal-Melkarth; Baal, “the Lord,” a Sun-God himself as well as Supreme God, being joined with the Sun-God proper. The name Sem, again, is found as signifying Hercules, in conjunction with those of Harpocrates and the Egyptian Hermes,6 and is probably involved in the mythical queen-name Semiramis (Sammuramat), since she in one of the myths gets her name from Simmas, “keeper of the king’s flocks,” who rears her7—another form of the Sun-God, belike. Simeon, in the myth of the twelve tribes, is one of the twin-brethren, who in all mythologies are at bottom solar deities. The “on” means “great,” as in Samson, Dagon, Solomon, etc.;8 and the Dioscuri of the Greek and Roman myth were “the Great Twin Brethren.” It was added to the name of the Samaritan God Êl Êlyon, “Great Êl,”9 who is just the Êl (singular of Elohim) of the Hebrews. But the name Shem itself means “the Lofty”;10 and the name of the mythical ancestor of the Shemites is at bottom a God-name, just as are those of Noach, Abram, Jacob, and Isra-ēl. It may also, it appears, have had the significance of “red-shining.”11 And, last but not least, the same vocable also has the significance of “name,” so that the Semites or sons of S(h)em were also “the men with names”12; and the Hebrew “Shem hemmaphorash” or Tetragrammaton was the name of four letters (IEUE = Yahweh) or “the peculiar name.”13 Lenormant declares14 that this last tenet came from Chaldea, where “they considered the divine name, the Shem, as endowed with properties so special and individual that they succeeded in making of it a distinct person.” But this idea of the sacredness of the God-name was one of the most prevalent of ancient religious notions. It was still devoutly held by the Christian Origen, who argued15 that the Hebrew divine names must be held to because they alone were potent to conjure with. It appears in the Judaic Teaching of the Twelve Apostles in its Christianised form (c. x), in the passage of thanksgiving beginning, “We thank thee, holy Father, for thy holy name, which thou hast made to dwell in our hearts.” In the Jewish Sepher Toledoth Jeschu, Jesus is made to do his magic works by virtue of the “Shem hemmaphorash,” the Tetragrammaton, of which he has furtively possessed himself. Thus could an ancient God-name retain its mysterious prestige even after the mystery-mongers (reversing the process imagined by Lenormant) had taken the name-quality out of it, and left only the word for “name.” In other ways it clung to the Jewish cult. It is highly probable that the pre-eminent Jewish prayer, the “Shema” (or the “Shemoneh Esreh”), of which the name is explained away into insignificance, is an extremely ancient prayer to the Sun-God.16 Even this is sought to be connected with a historical “Simon.”17 And all the while the original God Sem survives in the Jewish mythology as “Shamma-ēl,” the Prince of Demons and angel of death, who has power over all peoples except the Jews;18 and at the same time in the legend of Samu-el, the unshorn, the child of the heretofore sterile mother (vexed by her rival as Rachel by Leah), the potentate who makes and unmakes kings, and who is called up as a “God”19 from the earth by incantation.

But all this connects decisively with Samaria. It is not improbable that the name Samaria itself was derived from the name of the Sun-God, it being very much more likely that the mountain would be named from the God who was worshipped on it than from a man Shemer.20 The last is obviously a worthless gloss. A reasonable alternative view is that as the God-name Asshur is identified with the name of the Assyrian country and people, whether giving or following their race-name, so the Semitic God-name Shem is bound up with the name Samaria, as that of Athênê with Athens. It is at all events clear that, as is claimed by Volkmar,21 Sem or Simon was the chief God of the Samaritans. They declared to Antiochus, according to Josephus,22 that their temple on Mount Gerizim had no name, but was that of “the greatest God”; and this squares with the other evidence, whether or not it be true that they offered, as Josephus states, to dedicate the temple to Zeus of the Hellenes. For, S(h)em being “the high,” Sem-on would be the Great High One or Greatest God, just as Êl Êlyon was the great Êl, the Great Power, Greatest of Powers. And as Sem-on was also the Great Name, the God was in that sense without a name, which circumstance is the explanation of the otherwise pointless phrase of the Johannine Jesus (John iv, 22) to the Samaritan woman, “Ye worship that which ye know not what.” And all the ideas converge in the phrases in the Acts (viii, 9–10), that Simon claimed to be “some great one” (ἑαυτὸν μέγαν) and was spoken of as “that power of God which is called Great.” In fine, Simon Magus, the Mage, is just a version of Simon Megas, Great Simon.

We know from their version of the Pentateuch that the later Samaritans, being strong “monotheists” in one of the senses of that elastic and misleading term, sought always to substitute angels for Elohim in the old narratives of divine action (e. g. Gen. iii, 5; v, 1; v, 24; xvii, 22), “lest a corporeal existence should be attributed to the Deity.”23 And it is instructive to note how their theological drift exhibits itself in early Christism. The doctrine of the “Logos” is not merely Alexandrian-Christian, it is Judaic. Some of the Aramaic paraphrasts of the Old Testament at times wrote “the Word of Jehovah” instead of the angel of Jehovah, sometimes the “She-kin-ah,” which means “the abode of the Word of Jehovah.”24 On the other hand, we know from the Gospel of Peter that one of the early Christian sects regarded Jesus as having received his dynamis, his power, at baptism, and yielded it up at crucifixion. Here we are close to Samaritanism, in which the angels were regarded25 as “uncreated influences proceeding from God (dynameis, powers),” pretty much as Simon is described in the Acts. Thus “Simon” for the Samaritans would just be “Êl,” which the Samaritan Justin, like the writer of “Peter,” held to mean “Power.” And at the same time, be it observed, Simon was “the Word.”

But still the proof abounds. In Lucian’s account of the Syrian Goddess we are told26 that in the temple at Byblos there was a statue, apparently epicene or double-sexed, called by some Dionysos, by others Deucalion, and by others Semiramis, but to which the Syrians gave no specific name, calling it only Semeion, a word which in Greek properly means “sign,” but may mean image. There can be little doubt that Movers27 was right in surmising this statue to be just the primordial Sem or Sem-on, the Great Sem of the Semitic race. The two-sexed character is in perfect keeping with the ideal duality of the old Assyrian Nature-Gods;28 and the peculiar detail of the name which was not a name brings us again to the Sem-on of the Samaritans.

Everything in the Christian legend falls in with this identification. The Fathers29 tell us of one Helen, a prostitute from Tyre, with whom Simon went about, and whom he gave out to be a reincarnation of Helen of Troy, and also his “Thought.” Helen is almost unquestionably, as Baur30 surmised, the Selene or Luna of the old sun-cultus. In the paragraph following his account of the Semeion, Lucian tells us that in the forepart of the same temple stands the throne of Helios, but without a statue; Helios and Selene, the sun and moon, being the only divinities not sculptured in the temple—though he goes on to mention that behind the throne is a statue of a clothed and bearded Apollo, quite different from the Greek form. Here, again, we have a mystic conception of the Sun-God, a conception necessarily confusing to ordinary visitors, even supposing the priests themselves to have had any consistent ideas about it; and the fact31 that the temple further contained among other statues one of Helena (herself an old Moon-Goddess), gave ample opportunity for the usual mythological variants. Thus it came about that while Justin and Irenæus connect Simon Magus with Helen, Irenæus says the Simonians have “an image of Simon in the likeness of Jupiter, and of Helen in that of Minerva”—a curious statement, which at once recalls that of Lucian32 that the Hêrê of the temple of Byblos “has something of Athênê and Aphrodite, of Selene and Rhea, of Artemis, of Nemesis, and of the Parcæ.” This again squares with the fact that in the Chaldeo-Babylonian system Samas was associated with the goddess Gula, “triform as personating the moon, and sometimes replaced by a group of three spouses of equal rank, Malkit, Gula, and Anunit.”33 And in the Latin translation by Rufinus of the pseudo-Clementine “Recognitions,” for Helena we actually have Luna.

The chain is complete. We are dealing not with a historic person or persons, but with an ancient cult, which Christian ignorance and Judaic “monotheism” between them strove to reduce somehow to a historical narrative, as the myths of Abraham and Samson and Israel and Elijah and a dozen others had been reduced, as the mythic ritual had been in the gospels, and as indeed the rituals of Paganism had been in the current pagan mythologies. There was no Samaritan Simon the Mage, who met a Christian Peter; it was not a preaching Simon who taught of himself, but the Samaritan populace who traditionally believed of their God Sem or Simon, that “he appeared among the Jews as the Son, while in Samaria he descended as the Father, and in the rest of the nations he came as the Holy Spirit.”34 The parallel holds down to the last jot. The Semeion of the temple of Byblos had a dove on his head,35 and there are abundant Jewish charges as to the worship of a dove by the Samaritans at Mount Gerizim;36 so that Simon was the Logos receiving the Holy Spirit, the dynamis, just as Jesus did in the Gospels; and the Christists’ doctrine that the Holy Spirit should be given to the nations is simply an adaptation of the Samaritan syncretism, which they sought to override by a syncretism of their own in their latest gospel, where it comes out that their Galilean Jesus was called a Samaritan by Jews,37 a charge which curiously enough he does not dispute, denying only that he has “a daimon.” This is exactly the myth of Simon turned into a story of an incarnate Messiah, who affirms his reality.38 Well might the Fathers call their imaginary “Simon” the Father of all heresies. He was the “Father” in a sense of their own creed, as well as of all the Gnosticisms into which it broke.

What hinders ordinary students from accepting Baur’s view of the “Clementine” Simon, which we have here sought to support, is the existence of the fragments of writings attributed to Simon, together with the circumstantialities of the story in the Acts and the Fathers. But these circumstantialities are just the marks of all the ancient myths, Jewish, Christian, and Gentile; and the attribution of writings to Simon Magus no more proves his historical existence than the same process proves the historical existence of Orpheus and Moses.39 The fragments and paraphrases preserved by the Fathers are just part of the mass of ancient Occultism; and their connection with the name of Simon the Mage is merely a variation of the Jewish myth which attributes the authorship of the Zohar to Simon Ben Jochaï, a mythical or mythicised personage if ever there was one. He is fabled to have lived in a cave for twelve years, studying the Cabbala, during which time he was visited by Elias. At his death fire was seen in the cave, and a voice from heaven was heard saying, “Come ye to the marriage of Simon Ben Jochaï: he is entering into peace, and shall rest in his chamber.” At his burial there was heard a voice crying, “This is he who caused the earth to quake and the kingdoms to shake.”40 Simon is said to have belonged to the first century of the Christian era; while the Zohar is held to have been composed in the 13th century.41 In all probability the matter of the Zohar is largely ancient; and the association of it (as of the Shema or Shemoneh Esreh prayer) with the name Simon points distinctly to a traditional vogue of the name in Semitic Gnosticism. But there is no more reason to believe that an actual Simon composed the Zohar, or the “Great Denial” (perhaps = antinomy) attributed to Simon the Mage, than to believe in the above stories of the voices from heaven and those of the miracles of the Mage in the Acts. The Talmudic legends clearly point to a sun myth, bringing Simon into connection with Elias, Eli-jah, an unquestionable Sun-God, who combines the names El and Jah, though reduced by the Judaic Evemerising monotheists to the rank of a judge-prophet, as was Samu-el, and as Sams-on was made a “judge.” It lay in the essence of ancient religiosity to do this, and at the same time to seek to father all its documents on sacrosanct names. That a real Samaritan Simon of the first century should write a new occultist book and publish it as his own, is contrary to the whole spirit of the time. Only centuries after the period of its composition could such a book be attributed to an ordinary human author by those who accepted it. If it was current in the first century, it must have been either fathered on an ancient and mythical Simon or regarded as a book of the mysteries of the God Simon. The opinions or statements of the Christian Fathers concerning it are quite worthless save as embodying a name-tradition.

There remains to be considered the theory of the Tübingen school that the Christian legend of Simon Magus is to be found in its earliest form in the “Clementines,” that body of early sectarian forged literature which has been made to yield so much light as to the early history of the Christist Church. Here, in a set of writings (“Recognitions” and “Homilies,” of which books one is a redaction of the other), purporting to be by Clement of Rome, we have a propaganda that is on the face of it strongly Petrine, and that turns out on analysis to be strongly anti-Pauline, though the gist of the matter is a series of disputations between Peter and Simon the Mage. It is impossible at present to settle what was the first form of these documents, which as they stand bear marks of the third century, and survive only in the Latin translation of Rufinus (d. 410); but it is plain that they preserve elements of the early Ebionitic or Judæo-Christian opposition to the Gentile Christism of Paul. The Tübingen theory is that under the name of Simon Magus Paul is attacked throughout. This, at first sight, certainly seems a fantastic thesis; but an examination of the matter shows that it is very strongly founded. A leading feature in the conduct of Simon Magus in the Clementines, as in the Acts, is his attempt to purchase apostleship with money. Now, this corresponds very closely with the act of Paul in bringing to Jerusalem a subsidy from the Western churches, an act which, on the part of one not recognised as an apostle, and exhibited in the Epistles as always on jealous terms42 with the Jerusalem apostles, would naturally rank as an attempt to purchase the Holy Ghost with lucre. Again, Simon Magus in the Clementines claims to rest his authority on divine visions, which is exactly the position of Paul;43 and Peter denies that visions have such authority. Once recognise the primary strife between Judaising and Gentilising Christians, of which there are so many traces in New Testament and Patristic literature, and it is easy to see that these are the very points on which the anti-Paulinists would most bitterly oppose Paul and his movement. In the Clementines, Peter not only opposes the Magus in Palestine, but follows him to Rome, thus carrying the antagonism between the two sects over the whole theoretic field. The fact that both Simon Peter and Simon Magus, Cephas and Paul, are made to journey from East to West, and to die in the West, like the immemorial Sun-God, is suggestive.

That the Judaists should give Paul a symbolical name, again, was quite in keeping with the usual dialectic of the time, in which Rome, for instance, figured as “Babylon,” the typical great hostile city of Jewish remembrance. Just as Babylon symbolised heathen oppression, Samaria typified heathen heresy, the divergence from the Jewish cult in a heathen direction. Such divergence was the Judaist gravamen against Paul, who broke away from the law; and as Simon, Semo, typified Samaritan heresy in general, it was peculiarly suited to the arch-heretic who sought to overthrow the supreme privilege of Jerusalem. Simon was the Samaritan “false Christ,” and Paul’s preaching falsified the Judaic Christ.44 And nothing is more remarkable in the matter than the way in which the plainly patched-up reconciliatory narrative of the Acts squares with this theory. The book of Acts is explicable only on the hypothesis that it was designed, in its final form, to reconcile the long-opposed sects by reconciling Peter and Paul in a quasi-historical narrative. The narrative plainly clashes with Paul’s alleged Epistles. For the rest, it is managed largely on the plan of duplicating the exploits of the two heroes, so that Paul confutes Elymas as Peter does Simon, and closely duplicates one of Peter’s miracles.45 Some legends were in existence to start with, and others were invented to match them. Similarly the dispute between Paul and Barnabas at Antioch was to supersede the strife there between Paul and Peter.46 If then the composer of the Acts had before him a legend of Peter confuting Simon the Mage, it would suit him to retain it, since thus would he best dissociate the Mage from Paul. But, as Zeller points out, he is careful, first of all, to place the story of the Mage before Paul’s conversion; and at the same time he shows he knows the original significance of the charge against Simon Magus as to offering money, by ignoring the most important of Paul’s subsidies.47

The application of a great mass of the polemic against Simon Magus in the Clementines is so obvious that the evasion of the problem by Harnack and Salmon and others on futile pleas of “false appearances” and “common-sense” is simply a confession of defeat. Baur’s case, after being dismissed on pretexts of “common-sense” by those who could not meet it, is irresistibly restated by Schmiedel, on a full survey of its development by Lipsius and others. The only solution is, that the Clementines adapt for new purposes a mass of old anti-Pauline matter. At the time at which they were redacted, Paul had been established as a “catholic” figure; and there could be no such hatred to him as breathes through the fierce impeachments of the teaching of the Paulines in the Recognitions and Homilies. For it is at the Epistles that the bulk of the attacks are directed. What has been done is to use up, for a new polemic with heretics, a quantity of old anti-Pauline literature in which the disguising of Paul under the name of Simon Magus probably blinded the redactors to its purpose. For them Simon was simply the arch-heretic, and it was against his detested memory and persisting influence that they operated.

The theory is no doubt a complicated one; but when taken in its full extent, as recognising the addition of the heresy of the Gnostic Paulinist Marcion to that of Paul, it is perfectly consistent with the documents; and there is really no other view worth discussing, as regards the connection of Simon Magus with Peter. The orthodox belief that Simon was an actual Samaritan who suddenly persuaded the people of Samaria to regard him as a divine incarnation, as told in the Acts, will not explain the mass of identities in the Clementines between the teaching ascribed to him and the actual Pauline Epistles. In explaining the choice of the name Simon for Paul by his Judaic antagonists, the myth-theory is far more helpful than the view of Simon’s historicity. A “false God” Simon, the God of the typically misbelieving Samaritans, would be by Jews reduced to human status as a matter of course, unless he were simply classed as a “daimon.” A “Simon the Mage” was for them just the type they wanted wherewith to identify Paul, the new False Teacher. To identify, on the other hand, a contemporary or lately deceased Paul with a contemporary or lately deceased Simon would be an idle device, missing the end in view. The name of such a Simon would for purposes of aspersion be worth little or nothing. The name had to be a widely and long notorious one, and the myth supplied it.

In conclusion, let it be noted that the bearing of the myth of Simon Magus on Christianity is not limited to the explanation of the Samaritan origins and the elucidation of the Paul-and-Peter antagonism. The more the matter is looked into, the more reason is seen for surmising that Samaria played a large part in the beginnings of the Christian system. Samaria seems to have been beyond all other parts of Palestine a crucible in which manifold cult-elements tended to be fused by syncretic ideas; and the extent to which Samaria figures in the fourth gospel is a phenomenon not yet adequately explained. The fact that Jesus is there said to have been called a Samaritan reminds us that among the movements of the “false Christs” so often alluded to in the Gospels48 a Samaritan cult of the mystic Christ may have counted for much. The fourth gospel itself would come under the anti-Pauline ban, inasmuch as, while Simon Magus is said to have sought to substitute Mount Gerizim for Jerusalem, Jesus here49 is made to set aside both the Samaritan mountain and Jerusalem. The very fact that the Samaritan woman professedly expects the coming of Messiah, is a hint that the story of the well and the living water may be of Samaritan Messianic origin. Nay more, since we know that the Samaritans in particular laid stress on the Messiah Ben Joseph rather than on the Messiah Ben David, they regarding themselves as of Josephite descent, it is probable that the very legend of Jesus being the putative son of one Joseph, which we know was absent from the Ebionite version of Matthew, was framed to meet the Samaritan view. These matters are still far from having been exhaustively considered.