Atos 8:24

Pray ye to the Lord for me. — There is something eminently characteristic in the sorcerer’s words. (1) His conscience reads “between the lines” of St. Peter’s address what was not actually found there. That “if perhaps” is to him as the knell of doom. (2) He prays not for deliverance from “the bond of iniquity,” but only from the vague terror of a future penalty. (3) He turns, not, as Peter had bidden him, to the Lord who was ready to forgive, but to a human mediator. Peter must pray for him who has not faith to pray for himself.

At this point Simon disappears from the history of the Acts, and this seems accordingly the right place for stating briefly the later traditions as to his history. In those traditions he occupies a far more prominent position than in St. Luke’s narrative, and becomes, as it has been said, the “hero of the romance of heresy,” as given in the Homilies and Recognitions of the Pseudo-Clement. Born at Gittom, in Samaria (Justin, Apol. i. 26), he received his education at Alexandria, and picked up the language of a mystic Gnosticism from Dositheus (Hom. ii. c. 22; Constt. Apost. vi. 8). He had for a short time been a disciple of the Baptist (Hom. c. 23). He murdered a boy that the soul of his victim might become his familiar spirit, and give him insight into the future (Hom. ii. c. 26; Recogn. ii. 9). He carried about with him a woman of great beauty, of the name of Luna or Helena, whom he represented as a kind of incarnation of the Wisdom or Thought of God (Justin, Apol. i. 6; Hom. ii. c. 25; Euseb. Hist. ii. 13). He identified himself with the promised Paraclete and the Christ, and took the name of “He who stands,” as indicating divine power (Recogn. ii. 7). He boasted that he could turn himself and others into the form of brute beasts; that he could cause statues to speak (Hom. iv. c. 4; Recogn. ii. 9, iii. 6). His life was one of ostentatious luxury. He was accompanied by the two sons of the Syro-Phœnician woman of Marcos 7:26 (Hom. i. 19). After the episode related in the Acts, he went down to Cæsarea, and Peter was then sent thither by James, the Bishop of Jerusalem, to confront and hold a disputation with him on various points of doctrine. From Cæsarea he made his way to Tyre and Tripolis, and thence to Rome, and was there worshipped by his followers, so that an altar was seen there by Justin with an inscription, “SIMONI DEO SANCTO” (Apol. i. 56). Peter followed him, and in the reign of Claudius the two met, once more face to face, in the imperial city. According to one legend, he offered to prove his divinity by flying in the air. trusting that the demons whom he employed would support him; but, through the power of the prayers of Peter, he fell down, and had his bones broken, and then committed suicide (Constt. Apost. ii. 14; 6:9). Another represents him as buried alive at his own request, in order that he might show his power by rising on the third day from the dead, and so meeting his death (Irenæus, Adv. Hær. vi. 20).

In the midst of all this chaos of fantastic fables, we have, perhaps, one grain of fact in Justin’s assertion that he had seen the altar above referred to. An altar was discovered at Rome in 1574, on the island in the Tiber, with the inscription “SEMONI SANCO DEO FIDIO.” Archæologists, however, agree in thinking that this was dedicated to the Sabine Hercules, who was known as SEMO SANCUS, and it has been thought by many writers that Justin may have seen this or some like altar, and, in his ignorance of Italian mythology, have imagined that it was consecrated to the Sorcerer of Samaria. His statement is repeated by Tertullian (Apol. c. 13) and Irenæus (i. 20). Of the three names in the inscription, Semo (probably connected with Semen as the God of Harvest, or as Semihomo) appears by itself in the Hymn of the Fratres Arvales, and in connection with Sancus and Fidius (probably connected with Fides, and so employed in the formula of asseveration, medius fidius) in Ovid, Fast. vi. 213; Livy, viii. 20; 32:1.