https://thegodabovegod.com/great-declaration-simon-magus/
Introduction and translation by Robert Price
Simon Magus (the Mage, the Magician) is a fascinating character whom
we meet in Acts 8, where he is depicted as a charlatan, though perhaps
with real supernatural powers. He is a temporary and easily vanquished
competitor of Christianity in Samaria. There he is said to have
aggrandized himself as the Great Power, i.e., God himself come to earth.
A number of Church Fathers mention him, too. They speak of him as the
father of all heresies, and of Gnosticism in particular. Some speak of
him as accompanied by one Helen, a woman he rescued from a brothel in
Tyre once he recognized in her the incarnation of heavenly Wisdom (the
Epinoia, or Ennoia, the First Thought). She had been abducted and
ravished by the evil angels who made the world, and then she had passed
into forgetfulness, to be reincarnated ever and again into one earthly,
fleshly life after another till Simon, having himself entered the
time-stream, came to earth to deliver her. In her, the Mother of all
souls, he had redeemed all the souls of the elect, contained in her. And
one might attain salvation, return to the Godhead, by accepting the
saving grace of Simon Magus. Simon taught that his previous appearances
on earth included one in Judea, where he had been crucified but only
appeared to suffer. This implicit identification with Jesus probably has
something to do with the Synoptic story about the cross of Jesus being
born instead by Simon of Cyrene, a Phoenician, especially since Simon
Magus, hailing from Gitta, might be either a Samaritan or a Phoenician
(Gitta = Gath, Goliath’s hometown), and Phoenicians were called the
Kittim, easily confused with Gitta. So Simon of Cyrene and Simon of
Gitta might easily be intended as the same character.
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