Charles Ellicott Commentary Acts 8:24

"And Simon answered and said, Pray ye for me to the Lord, that none of the things which ye have spoken come upon me." — Acts 8:24 (ASV)

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 instructed him, to the Lord who was ready to forgive, but to a human mediator. Peter must pray for him who lacks 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 about 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, Apology I.26), he received his education at Alexandria, and picked up the language of a mystic Gnosticism from Dositheus (Homilies II.22; Apostolic Constitutions VI.8).

He had for a short time been a disciple of the Baptist (Homilies, chapter 23). He murdered a boy so that his victim's soul might become his familiar spirit and give him insight into the future (Homilies II.26; Recognitions II.9). He was accompanied by a woman of great beauty, named Luna or Helena, whom he represented as a kind of incarnation of the Wisdom or Thought of God (Justin, Apology I.6; Homilies II.25; Eusebius, History II.13). He identified himself with the promised Paraclete and the Christ, and took the name of “He who stands,” as indicating divine power (Recognitions II.7). He boasted that he could turn himself and others into the form of brute beasts and that he could cause statues to speak (Homilies IV.4; Recognitions II.9, III.6).

His life was one of ostentatious luxury. He was accompanied by the two sons of the Syro-Phoenician woman of Mark 7:26 (Homilies I.19). After the episode related in the Acts, he went down to Caesarea, and Peter was then sent there by James, the Bishop of Jerusalem, to confront and hold a disputation with him on various points of doctrine. From Caesarea he made his way to Tyre and Tripolis, and from there to Rome, where he was worshipped by his followers, so that Justin saw an altar there with the inscription, “SIMONI DEO SANCTO” (Apology 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 he employed would support him; but, through the power of Peter’s prayers, he fell down, broke his bones, and then committed suicide (Apostolic Constitutions II.14, VI.9). Another legend represents him as being buried alive at his own request, so that he might show his power by rising on the third day from the dead, and so met his death (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 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 mentioned above. An altar was discovered at Rome in 1574, on the island in the Tiber, with the inscription “SEMONI SANCO DEO FIDIO.” Archaeologists, however, agree that this was dedicated to the Sabine Hercules, who was known as SEMO SANCUS. It has been thought by many writers that Justin may have seen this or some similar altar and, in his ignorance of Italian mythology, imagined that it was consecrated to the Sorcerer of Samaria.

His statement is repeated by Tertullian (Apology, chapter 13) and Irenaeus (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, Fasti VI.213; Livy VIII.20; XXXII.1.