Simon and the Simonians are pure fiction. Irenaeus, the peddler of our inerrant canon, including Acts, betrays his own principle of inerrancy to make Act's fictional yet repentant Simon Magus into an unrepentant fountainhead of heresy, complete with fictional genealogies linking every non-Catholic group's origin to this fictional man. Simon's doctrine? "There was no Jesus; it was just me in a magical Halloween costume. There was also no crucifixtion, just a couple of my buddies and some Katchup." Yet somehow every sect, including Marcion who believed and taught Jesus was real and fhe crucifixion was real, is supposedly derived from "Simon's teaching." Pure fiction, all of it.outhouse wrote: ↑Wed Aug 16, 2017 5:16 pmdavidbrainerd wrote: ↑Wed Aug 16, 2017 10:44 am
themselves fictional character invented by Irenaeus,.
You have nothing to support such an imaginative claim.
This is unsupported and downright dishonestCelsus may be fictional too,
Start providing sources for such blatant imaginative claims
addendum: Having Simon as the fountainhead of all heresy also betrays Irenaeus' claim that Marcion is the firstborn of Satan (i.e. fountainhead of all heresy)---AND contradicts Irenaeus' and Tertullian's claims of a period of purity for the church followed by heresy arising late (i.e. Simon as a character in Acts would be 1st century)...but Irenaeus is not concerned with consistency, only with creating an offensive label to shove all the disparate groups together under by.
addendum 2: since Irenaeus labels all non-Catholic groups as deriving from Simon, if someone later says "I met a Simonian" it means nothing. They could mean an Elkesite, or Valentinian, or Marcionite, or someone from any number of groups. Its equivalent to saying "heretic" and thus only means non-Catholic.
addendum 3: as to Celsus, in my view, without independent confirmation of his existence by a pagan source not dependent on Origen, there is no reason to see him as any more historical than opponent characters in fictional dialogues like the fictional pagan moderator in the Dialogue of Adamantius.