Theopedia

Simon the Magician

Simon the Magician, also called Simon Magus or Simon the Sorcerer, was a first-century Samaritan sorcerer whose appearance in Acts 8:9-24, professing belief under Philip the Evangelist’s preaching and then offering Peter money for the power to impart the Holy Spirit, made him a fixture of later theological argument. Patristic writers, and the Reformed theologians who followed them, treated him as the traditional fountainhead of the Gnostic heresies that came after him and as the paradigm case of a false, temporary profession of faith rather than genuine saving belief.12

Life and Ministry

Before encountering the gospel, Simon practiced sorcery in the city of Samaria and had amazed its people, “giving out that himself was some great one,” so that they called him “the great power of God” (Acts 8:9-11). When Philip the Evangelist preached Christ there, Simon himself professed belief and was baptized, and continued with Philip, “wondering, beholding the miracles and signs which were done” (Acts 8:12-13).

When word reached the apostles in Jerusalem that Samaria had received the word of God, Peter and John came down and laid hands on the new believers, who then received the Holy Spirit (Acts 8:14-17). Simon, seeing that the Spirit was given through the laying on of the apostles’ hands, offered Peter money for that same power (Acts 8:18-19). Peter condemned him for thinking “that the gift of God may be purchased with money” and pronounced him unconverted, “in the gall of bitterness, and in the bond of iniquity,” urging him to repent and pray for forgiveness (Acts 8:20-23). Simon asked Peter to pray for him, that none of what Peter had said would come upon him (Acts 8:24).

Theological Contribution

Patristic and Reformed writers alike named Simon the historical root of heresy in the church. John Gill (1697-1771), tracing the Sabellian confusion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit into a single person back through Noetus, Victorinus, Praxeas, and the Cataphrygians, wrote that the error “may be traced up as high as Simon Magus, who asserted that Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, were only different names of one and the same person, according to his different way of operation: and as before his pretended conversion he gave out that he was some great one… so he did afterwards, and said he was the Father in Samaria, the Son in Judea, and the Holy Ghost in the rest of the nations.”3 Gill’s own study of the church fathers made the same point more directly: citing Irenaeus, he held that “Simon Magus was the founder of all heresies,” a figure who “had the audacity to portray himself as that one God who appeared among the Jews as the Son, in Samaria as the Father, and among the nations as the Holy Spirit,” a judgment Gill reinforced with Augustine’s own writing against heresies and Jerome’s commentary on Matthew.1

Historical Significance

Reformed theologians have used Simon’s profession of faith as a biblical case of belief that is real in some sense but not saving. John Calvin held that Simon was not simply pretending: “overcome by the majesty of the Gospel, he yielded some kind of assent, and so far acknowledged Christ to be the author of life and salvation, as willingly to assume his name,” yet this assent “by no means penetrates to the heart, so as to have a fixed seat there.”2 Gill applied the same episode the same way: the stony-ground hearers of Luke 8:13 had, like Simon, only “a temporary faith… their faith was not the faith of God’s elect.”4

That same episode has served Baptist theologians as evidence that a professing believer’s fall does not disprove the perseverance of true saints. James Petigru Boyce, surveying supposed cases of apostasy, wrote that Peter’s own verdict on Simon, “Thou hast neither part nor lot in this matter: for thy heart is not right before God… I see that thou art in the gall of bitterness and in the bond of iniquity,” gives no reason to think a true believer ever fell from grace.5 Thomas Goodwin drew the same conclusion: an unrenewed heart leaves a man an enemy of God “if there be no more alteration in us. It was the case of Simon Magnus, Acts viii. 23, ‘I perceive thou art still in the gall of bitterness.’ And ver. 21, ‘Thou hast neither lot nor part in this matter,’ though he had been baptized.”6

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Steven Tshombe Godet, “John Gill: Patristic Scholar,” in “The Trinitarian Theology of John Gill (1697-1771): Context, Sources, and Controversy” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2015), 172-73, reporting Gill, Sermons and Tracts, 6:179-80. ↩ ↩2

  2. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845-46), book 3, chap. 2, sec. 10, 477-78. ↩ ↩2

  3. John Gill, A Body of Doctrinal Divinity; or, A System of Evangelical Truths, Deduced from the Sacred Scriptures, 2 vols. (London: Printed for the Author, and Sold by George Keith, 1769), book 1, chap. 26, “Of the Unity of God.” ↩

  4. Gill, A Body of Doctrinal Divinity, book 6, chap. 15, “Of the Perseverance of the Saints.” ↩

  5. James Petigru Boyce, “Chapter XXXVIII. Final Perseverance of the Saints,” in Abstract of Systematic Theology, 2nd printing (Baltimore: H. M. Wharton & Company, 1887), 435. ↩

  6. Thomas Goodwin, The Work of the Holy Ghost in Our Salvation, in The Works of Thomas Goodwin, vol. 6 (Edinburgh: James Nichol, 1863), book 3. ↩