Simon Magus = Marcion: Who has suggested this?

Discussion about the New Testament, apocrypha, gnostics, church fathers, Christian origins, historical Jesus or otherwise, etc.
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neilgodfrey
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Simon Magus = Marcion: Who has suggested this?

Post by neilgodfrey »

Can anyone direct me to works that have raised the possibility that Simon Magus was a cipher for, or in some way confused with, Marcion?

I came across a reference that this has been done from time to time:
This leads us to ask whether the confusion of Simon with Paul (and sometimes with Marcion) . . . .
  • Petrement, Simone. A Separate God: The Christian Origins of Gnosticism. Translated by Carol Harrison. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1993.
Thanks for any help.


(P.S. I do not want replies from either Stephen Goranson or Secret Alias)
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Leucius Charinus
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Re: Simon Magus = Marcion: Who has suggested this?

Post by Leucius Charinus »

Is Marcion Simon Magus? - Dr. Robert M. Price
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7o5pE_T4DU



The Amazing Colossal Apostle:
The Search for the Historical Paul (2012)
by Robert M. Price
https://www.amazon.com/Amazing-Colossal ... 156085216X

The story of Paul is one of irony, the New Testament depicting him at the martyrdom of Stephen holding the assassins' cloaks. Then this same Paul is transformed into the biblical archetype for someone suffering for their faith. He becomes so entrenched, it would appear that he had walked with the Christians all his life, that he was the one who defined the faith, eventually being called the “second founder of Christianity.” But much of what we think we "know" about Paul comes from Sunday school stories we heard as children. The stories were didactic tales meant to keep us reverent and obedient.

As adults reading the New Testament, we catch glimpses of a very different kind of disciple—a wild ascetic whom Tertullian dubbed “the second apostle of Marcion and the apostle of the heretics.” What does scholarship tell us about the enigmatic thirteenth apostle who looms larger than life in the New Testament? The epistles give evidence of having been written at the end of the first century or early in the second—too late to have been Paul’s actual writings. So who wrote (and rewrote) them?

F. C. Baur, a nineteenth-century theologian, pointed persuasively to Simon Magus as the secret identity of “Paul.” Robert M. Price, in this exciting journey of discovery, gives readers the background for a story we thought we knew.

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Re: Simon Magus = Marcion: Who has suggested this?

Post by Giuseppe »

The more complete case to my knowledge is found in Paul-Louis Couchoud, Jésus le dieu fait homme (Creation of Christ).
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neilgodfrey
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Re: Simon Magus = Marcion: Who has suggested this?

Post by neilgodfrey »

Thanks, LC and G

What surprised me a little was that Simone Pétrement's reference indicates that the idea has been floated in mainstream scholarship. I take it we don't know of any mainstreamers who have published the notion.
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Re: Simon Magus = Marcion: Who has suggested this?

Post by Chrissy Hansen »

neilgodfrey wrote: Thu Oct 06, 2022 6:04 pm Thanks, LC and G

What surprised me a little was that Simone Pétrement's reference indicates that the idea has been floated in mainstream scholarship. I take it we don't know of any mainstreamers who have published the notion.
Simone Pétrement was born in 1907 in France, so in their life they probably bore witness to the debates with Paul-Louis Couchoud, Prosper Alfaric, Georges Ory, Guy Fau, and others there advocating the Christ Myth theory. In my experience of reading their works, French academics (while still basically universally accepting that Jesus existed) tended to be a little bit more willing to entertain ideas and theories proposed by CMT proponents. So, my guess is that he picked this up from CMT people. I don't know of any mainstream scholars at the time who endorsed it.
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neilgodfrey
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Re: Simon Magus = Marcion: Who has suggested this?

Post by neilgodfrey »

Chris Hansen wrote: Thu Oct 06, 2022 6:21 pm
neilgodfrey wrote: Thu Oct 06, 2022 6:04 pm Thanks, LC and G

What surprised me a little was that Simone Pétrement's reference indicates that the idea has been floated in mainstream scholarship. I take it we don't know of any mainstreamers who have published the notion.
Simone Pétrement was born in 1907 in France, so in their life they probably bore witness to the debates with Paul-Louis Couchoud, Prosper Alfaric, Georges Ory, Guy Fau, and others there advocating the Christ Myth theory. In my experience of reading their works, French academics (while still basically universally accepting that Jesus existed) tended to be a little bit more willing to entertain ideas and theories proposed by CMT proponents. So, my guess is that he picked this up from CMT people. I don't know of any mainstream scholars at the time who endorsed it.
Stop looking everyone! ;-)

I found it:


Thanks to a thesis completed just down the road from where I live...

  • Haar, Stephen. Simon Magus: The First Gnostic? De Gruyter, 2003.


Yes, CH -- it's as you surmised a French work, and one that met with the same maverick status as Simone Pétrement's book that was first published 1984:

Generally the research community222 has been unimpressed by SALLES-DABADIE'S work. Despite some worthwhile observations, SALLES-DABADIE was not successful in proving either that the Apophasis was an early Gnostic document, or that Simon was its author.

222 Cf. WILSON 1979: 488. Wilson comments that the work of Salles-Dabadie "has on the whole met with rather a cool reception." BEYSCHLAG (1974: 92-93) describes the conclusions of Salles-Dabadie as "sensational" and "naïve."

(Haar, 98)

The 1958 article proposes that the Simon Magus in the Clementine novel was a cipher for Marcion.
Last edited by neilgodfrey on Thu Oct 06, 2022 11:11 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Leucius Charinus
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Re: Simon Magus = Marcion: Who has suggested this?

Post by Leucius Charinus »

neilgodfrey wrote: Thu Oct 06, 2022 7:35 pm I found it:
///

The 1958 article proposes that the Simon Magus in the Clementine novel was a cipher for Marcion.
Do you happen to know what authorship date Salles uses for the Clementine literature?
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neilgodfrey
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Re: Simon Magus = Marcion: Who has suggested this?

Post by neilgodfrey »

My bad.

There are two works by Dabadie-Salles. The work that Haar said had not been well received in the scholarly community was his 1969 work arguing Simon Magus was the author of the Great Pronouncement/Revelation.

Translating Salle's earlier article that I originally referred to, in the opening paragraph:
Since the work of Waitz, critics have unanimously agreed, with a few nuances, that the character of Simon in the Clementine Novel is an arbitrary and fanciful creation of the compiler (for the novel is in reality a vast compilation of very diverse sources) 3, and that the adversary referred to under this assumed name is not the modest and mythical Magician, but an heretic of quite different importance, Marcion. From this it is concluded that the Clementine novel could only have been composed in the third century.
The footnote in Salles refers to the work by Waitz and also lists a small bibliography of Waitz's critics.

Turning to Waitz -- it's online at https://archive.org/details/texteundunt ... ew=theater -- one finds what is apparently the early case for chapters being added to the Clementine novel to attack Marcion through Simon Magus.

It looks like Simone Pétrement's reference to Simon Magus being a cipher for Marcion was a reference to a view from earlier times -- though I don't know how prevalent the view still is that Marcionism is a target of some of the Clementine novel. But the question is not important enough for me to plough through machine translated German of various articles to be totally in the picture.

LC -- it looks like Waitz was arguing for different versions of Clementine literature across centuries -- pre and post Nicene. But you have the links if you want to chase it up.
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Re: Simon Magus = Marcion: Who has suggested this?

Post by schillingklaus »

Any attempt of identifying the Homiletic Simon the Enchanter as one person must be inevitably short. So Jean Magne realized that the Enchanter represents a spectrum of anti-demiurgist doctrines which was opposed at some point by the Judaizers, represented by Peter, who consistently but illogically identifies the Father with the Jewish god.

That this ideology must predate Marcionism, which is already far from original gnostic doctrine, by a long stretch is obviuous because the Enchanter may reasonably quote parts of Matthew in his favour, which shows traces of editorial fatigue pointing to a dependence of Mt on pre-Christian gnostics. But the enchanter does not stay there and stepwise shows awareness of Manicheism, which denies the gnostic ideology of a dependence of Evil on Good.
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Re: Simon Magus = Marcion: Who has suggested this?

Post by Giuseppe »

Assuming Marcion was parodied behind Simon Magus, what does this (1) imply?

If one follows Alfaric about the Magus being sanitized as 'Simon Peter', then the implication from (1) would be an implicit 'confession' that Marcion was the true first disciple of Jesus.

Or that the synoptics postdate Marcion.

But as with the epistles, a case for the epistles being total forgeries is weakened by the identity Paul = Simon Magus (one would like to start the knowledge of a such case by reading Van Manen, not Bob Price), so a case for Marcionite priority would be weakened if it is started by arguing merely that Marcion = Simon Magus.

So the identity Marcion = Simon Magus has to be archived since it is of the category: not useful even if true.
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