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.
III
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 terms[42] 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.
IV
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 Gospels[48] 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 here[49] 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.