Acts 7:9

9. Simon Celebrated among the early Christian writers as Simon Magus, or Magician. (See note on Matthew 2:1.) The term Magos is not applied to Simon by Luke, but the word for used sorcery ( μαγευων , magizing) is the same word in a verb form. Elymas in Acts 13:8, is a μαγος , magus, rendered sorcerer.

The best and earliest Church fathers, Justin Martyr and Hippolytus, gave credit to Simon for having a sort of theological (or theosophic) doctrine, and held him as the father of heretics. According to Hippolytus, he taught that the original source of all things, the primitive Nature, unfolded itself in a twofold form, the stronger as masculine, and the feebler as feminine. Of this masculine divine energy he was himself the incarnation; and a Tyrian courtezan named Helen, associated with him, the feminine. The passive or feminine principle was, by becoming material, held in bondage; and it was the purpose of the incarnation of the higher power in Simon’s person to redeem it or her. This redemption was to be accomplished by magical incantations and ritual performances. Not rising into the conception of the omnipotent personal God, Simon, of course, had no idea of sin as a transgression of God’s law, and so no idea of sanctification or redemption from sin by a true holiness. Knowing no God but nature, and no sin but physical evil, redemption could be only by magical processes, and consisted in an emancipation from the burden of matter in which all evil resides.

The doctrine that all evil resides in or consists of matter, borrowed from the Oriental system, and widely spread through the world at this time, practically led to opposite moral results. First, it led to asceticism; for the believer held it to be his duty to become spiritual by mortifying and subduing the material body. Second, it led to the sensual; for the believer, contrariwise, could infer that the body was base and worthless, and could be abandoned to all licentiousness without defiling the spirit. (See note Acts 6:5, and Romans 14:1-6) This doctrine of the innate evil of matter may be shown, we think, to have been the vital germ of gnostic heresies, the mystery of iniquity even now working, (2 Thessalonians 2:7,) which in the various forms troubled the Apostolic Church, was fully systematized in the second century, and became permanent in the monasticism of the Romish Church. So there was a deep truth in Simon’s epithet, “the father of heretics.”

Justin Martyr, in the second century, (who was himself a Samaritan, see note on John v,) says that Simon was a native of Gitton, in Samaria. Justin adds that he went to the city of Rome in the time of Claudius, where he gained such reputation as to be worshipped as a god. He professes to have himself seen a statue on an island in the Tiber with the inscription, To Simon, the Holy Deity: Simoni Sancto Deo. It is a very curious fact that in 1574 a stone was found standing on an island in the Tiber bearing the slightly different inscription, Semoni Sanco Deo; that is, To the Deity, Semo Sancus; the name of the Sabine Hercules. This indicates that Justin Martyr really saw what he intended to describe, but mistakenly described what he saw. The learned writer on the article Simon Magus, in “Smith’s Biblical Dictionary,” however, thinks that Justin could have made no such mistake, inasmuch as the full inscription explicitly identifies Semo with Hercules, and excludes its reference to the Magus.

Beforetime Previous to the arrival of Philip.

Bewitched Amazed and seduced the people into belief. After Alexander the Great conquered Persia and India, a high road of communication was opened between Asia and Europe. And this intercourse was completed by the Roman conquests in the East. Thence the stupendous superstitions of the imaginative East, especially from the Brahmins and Buddhists of Asia, passed in varied streams into the West. They broke up the narrow circle of Roman mythology. A dreamy pantheism invaded the religion of Roman Jupiter. A strolling swarm of supernatural pretenders appeared, teaching mystical doctrines, and claiming powers to conjure with the dead, to read the stars, to predict fortunes, to insure life, or health, or safety, or to hold intercourse with invisible powers. A large part of their craft was pure trickery; but another share consisted in an intense cultivation of those parts of our nature most allied to the preternatural and demoniac. (See note on Matthew 5:1, and Acts 2:13.) Their systems lay largely in the mysterious regions of ventriloquism, somnambulism, legerdemain, mesmerism, animal electricity, and diabolism.

Samaria Clearly of the city of that name, for the whole transaction is thus far in the city of Acts 7:5.