The name
Eshmun shares the semitic root
SMN with
Simon.
The god Eshmun was mentioned in a Phoenician inscription:
“This statuette was given by Baalshillem, son of king Banaa, king of the Sidonians, to his lord Eshmun of the spring Ydlal. May he bless him.”
https://www.google.com/amp/s/mylebanonm ... aling/amp/
"of the spring" =
Κρηναιος
Therefore Simon Magus is SiMoN/eShMuN
Κρηναιος , confused (more or less deliberately) with Simon
Κυρηναῖος.
Therefore prof Robert Price is right to identify Simon of Cyrene with Simon Magus.
In virtue of this recognition, the Gospel of Mark has to be dated necessarily in a time when simonianism was rival with Christianity. With
115 CE as
terminus post quem.
The Kitos war (
115-117 CE) provoked the great interference of Gnosticism on Christianity. So prof Philip Jenkins:
Anti-Judaism became more common, as did critical attitudes towards Jewish claims to exclusivism. Thinkers were struggling to build a Jewish-derived world-view without the necessity to accept the exclusive God of the Hebrew Bible, with his burdensome Law. Gnosticism is much more than anti-Judaism, but without that element, it is impossible to sustain.
Basilides, Carpocrates, and other Alexandrian Gnostics were working only a very few years after the suppression of the massive Jewish insurgency in that city. That strictly contemporary context gives a special force to the reported theories of Basilides, who described
those angels who occupy the lowest heaven, that, namely, which is visible to us, [who] formed all the things which are in the world, and made allotments among themselves of the earth and of those nations which are upon it. The chief of them is he who is thought to be the God of the Jews; and inasmuch as he desired to render the other nations subject to his own people, that is, the Jews, all the other princes resisted and opposed him. Wherefore all other nations were at enmity with his nation.
Nor is it coincidental that Marcion’s rejection of the Old Testament follows within at most a decade of the Bar-Kokhba rebellion. As Stephen Wilson writes, “Gnostic anti-Judaism was unique, radical and deeply embedded in a significant portion of the early Christian movement” (
Related Strangers, Fortress Press, 2004, p. 207).
Many of the religious themes that had emerged in the previous two centuries or so now became common currency in the Jewish and near-Jewish world. These included Dualism, images of Light and Darkness, a fascination with heavenly visions and revelations, interest in angels and mighty near-divine beings with great influence over the material world, messianic beliefs, and the exaltation of Wisdom to near-divine status. Also commonplace was the interest in the Creation and the origin of sin, a story told through the narrative of the pre-Flood patriarchs. We also find the tendency to frame those theories in Greek and Platonic modes.
We don’t know exactly who developed the Gnostic synthesis, but these political and cultural events give us the essential background. In the aftermath of the Temple’s Fall, and the subsequent generation of horrors and massacres, the emergence of something like Gnosticism was not surprising.
From a huge literature, one useful book on this era is Carl B. Smith,
No Longer Jews (Hendrickson, 2004). Where I disagree with Dr. Smith is that I stress the endemic crisis of that whole era, rather than just the aftermath of the Kitos War
Note precisely the words:
Where I disagree with Dr. Smith is that I stress the endemic crisis of that whole era, rather than just the aftermath of the Kitos War
