SIMONIDES 



SIMON MAGUS 



467 



(suppressed through Bossuet's influence, and only 

 printed entire at Rotterdam in 1685 ) anticipates the 

 most important conclusions of all the later rational- 

 istic scholars of Germany, and also their method of 

 investigation, and, indeed, is the first work which 

 treated the Bible from the point of view of a liter- 

 ary product. For example, he disproves the Mosaic 

 authorship of the Pentateuch, assigning its com- 

 position to the scril>es of the time of Ezra. Other 

 writings of Simon's are Histoire Critique du Texte 

 du Nouveau Testament ( Rotterd. 1689) ; and L'His- 

 toire Critique ties Prindpeaux Commentateurs du 

 Nouneau Testament (Rotterd. J693), in which he 

 assails the theology of the Fathers, and particularly 

 that of Augustine, as a departure from the simple 

 and less rigid doctrines of the primitive church. 

 Amon" the Fathers his most esteemed authority 

 was Chrvsostflm. Bossuet replied to this last work 

 by his Defense fie la Trmlilinii >~t den Saints Peres. 

 Simon frequently published under assumed names 

 as his Dissertation Critique on Du pin's Library 

 of Ecclesiastical Writers, under the name of Jean 

 Reuchlin ; a work, Histoire Critique sur la Creance 

 et des Coutumes des Nations du Levant, under the 

 anagram of Monis ; and a Histoire de I'Origine et 

 iln I'rnrjrts des Revenus Ecclesiastiques, under the 

 name of Jerome Acosta. 



See the Life by K. H. Graf in Strastburger tficolog. 

 Beitrage (1847); A. Bornus, Kit-hard Simon et ton ffis- 

 Urire Grit, du V. T. (Laus. 1869), and the same scholar's 

 Notice Bibliographique ( Basel, 188'J ). 



Sillionidcs. a celebrated Creek lyric poet, was 

 born at Iiilis, in the island of Ceos, in the year 556 

 B.C. He repaired to Athens on the invitation of 

 Hipparchus, and after his death took up his resi- 

 dence in Thessaly, under the patronage of the 

 Aleuadie and S<:opad:i>, who appear to have treated 

 him in a very niggardly fashion. Shortly before 

 the invasion of Greece by the Persians he returned 

 to Athens, and devoted his poetic powers to cele- 

 brating the heroes and the battles of that moment- 

 ous struggle in elegies, epigrams, and dirges. He 

 carried off the prize, even from ^-Eschylus, for the 

 elegy on the heroes that fell at Marathon. He 

 won as many as fifty-six times in these. poetical 

 contest*. He spent his last ten years at the court 

 of Hiero of .Syracuse, where he died in 468. Simon- 

 i'lf- appears to have scandalised his contemporaries 

 by writing for hire ; and his great rival Pindar 

 accuses him, apparently not without good reason, 

 of excessive avarice. He brought to perfection 

 the elegy and epigram, and excelled in the dithy- 

 ramb and triumphal ode ; he seems also to have 

 invented the art of artilicial memory. The char- 

 acteristics of his poetry are sweetness (whence his 

 surname of Melicertes), polish combined with sim- 

 plicity, genuine pathos, and power of expression, 

 although in originality ho in much inferior to his 

 contemporary Pindar. The best editions of his 

 fragments are those of Schneidewin (1835) and 

 Bergk (Poetir lurid Greed, vol. 2). Simonides of 

 Ceos must lie carefully distinguished from tin; 

 iambic poet SIMONIDES of Amorgos, who flourished 

 about 660 B.C. 



Simon Maiilis ('Simon the Magician'), the 

 wicked sorcerer who thought that the gift of God 

 might. !>< purchased with money, and for this was 

 excommunicated by Peter. The word Simony 

 (q. v. ) is derived from bis name. When first intro- 

 duced in Acts, viii. 9-24, Simon, apparently about 

 37 A. D. , had already for a long time been a com- 

 manding personality in 'the city" of Samaria 

 Miroofrb Im sorceries. Giving himself ont to be 

 'some great one,' he bad induced the people ' from 

 the least to the greatest* to call him ' that power of 

 God which is called Great.' Simon and the Samar- 

 itans bad lielieved 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 after- 

 wards 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 for- 

 merly been a harlot, they adored as his ' First 

 Idea." Irentens 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 Irenteus, ' all sorts of heresies ' 

 derived their origin, including Antinomian doc- 

 trines. His followers worshipped images of Simon 

 and Helena as Zeus and Athene. Hippolytus, 

 who quotes much from Simon's work ike Great 

 Announcement, says that Simon encountered Peter 

 at Rome, that lie ordered bis followers to bury him, 

 promising to rise the third day, but that he never 

 rose. Ongen questions whether in his time there 

 were more than thirty Simonians in the whole 

 world. In the pseudo-Clenientine Homilies and 

 Recognition* (in their present form not older than 

 the 3rd century ) Simon comes into frequent conflict 

 with Peter at C'jpsarea, Antioch, and elsewhere. 



Baur in 1831 was the first to observe the indis- 

 putable fact that in some portions of these books it 

 ]s the apostle Paul who is caricatured under the 

 guise of Simon portions he believed to come from 

 Ist-century Ebionite sources. Others of the Tubin- 

 gen 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), 

 \ ' Samaritan,' a lil>ertine, and a bewitcher of men. 

 ^ow, however, it is generally agreed that some 

 facts regarding Simon must be accepted as his- 

 torical, and that likely enough a pseudo-Messiah 

 named Simon appeared in Samaria in the fourth 

 decade of the 1st century. Perhaps Klostermann 

 and \Vendt are right in holding that the 'power of 

 God which is called Great ' ( Gr. Meyale) ought to 

 be interpreted according to the Samaritan word 

 Megala ( ' 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 Irenteus that Simon 

 and Helena (called in the Clementines Selene, ' 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 mis- 

 understanding 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 



