Simon the Magician at Rome

But now that faith in our Savior and Lord Jesus Christ was being spread among all people, the enemy of human salvation schemed to seize the imperial city in advance. He brought there the Simon mentioned earlier, and by helping the man’s skillful sorceries he won over many of the inhabitants of Rome to his error. [a] This is shown by Justin, who distinguished himself in our teaching not long after the apostles, and about whom I will give the proper account at the right time. In his first defense of our teaching, addressed to Antoninus, he writes as follows: [b] “After the Lord’s ascension into heaven, the demons put forward certain men who said they were gods, and who were not only left unpersecuted by you but were even thought worthy of honors. One was Simon, a Samaritan from the village called Gitta, who in the time of Claudius Caesar, by the art of the demons at work in him, performed feats of magic in your imperial city of Rome. He was thought to be a god, and as a god he has been honored by you with a statue, which stands in the Tiber River between the two bridges and bears this inscription in Latin: SIMONI DEO SANCTO, that is, To Simon the holy god. [c] And nearly all the Samaritans, and a few in other nations too, confess him as the first god and worship him. And a certain Helena, who went around with him at that time and who had earlier stood in a brothel in Tyre of Phoenicia, they call the first Thought that came forth from him.”

So says Justin. Irenaeus agrees with him in the first book of his work Against Heresies, where he describes the man together with his unholy and foul teaching. It would be superfluous to list it here, since anyone who wishes can learn the origins and the lives of each of the heresy-founders who came after him, the premises of their false doctrines, and the practices of them all, which are set out with care, not in passing, in the book of Irenaeus just named. [d]

We have received the tradition that Simon was the first founder of every heresy. From him down to the present, those who follow his heresy put on a show of the sober philosophy of the Christians, famous everywhere for its purity of life. Yet they take up once more the idol superstition they seemed to have left behind. They fall down before pictures and images of Simon himself and of the Helena who was with him, and they set about worshiping them with incense and sacrifices and drink offerings. As for their more secret rites, they say that anyone hearing them for the first time will be astonished, and, in the words of a written saying of theirs, “struck with amazement.” In truth those rites are full of amazement, of derangement and madness. They are such that they cannot be committed to writing, nor can decent men so much as speak them aloud, so extreme is their obscenity and their unspeakable conduct. For whatever can be imagined more foul than anything shameful, the utterly loathsome heresy of these men has outdone it all. They make sport of wretched women who are truly loaded down with every kind of evil. [e]