Acts of Peter and Simon

Introduction

There is a moment, familiar to anyone who has ever stood at the edge of a great archive or peered into the dim corridors of ancient history, when the past suddenly feels less like a foreign country and more like a room you have always lived in but never properly explored. That moment arrives with particular force when you encounter a text like this one — a narrative so vivid, so strange, and so deeply human that it refuses to stay quietly in the category of 'lost antiquity' and insists instead on being read, felt, and argued over as urgently as anything written yesterday.

What you hold in your hands is a reconstruction, a scholarly resurrection, and in many ways an act of literary archaeology. The tradition it draws upon — the ancient cycle of stories concerning the apostle Peter and his legendary adversary Simon Magus — is one of the most fascinating and least discussed bodies of early Christian literature. For centuries, these stories circulated in fragments, in competing manuscripts, in the footnotes of theological treatises and the margins of ecclesiastical histories. They were copied by monks who found them thrilling, condemned by church fathers who found them dangerous, and ultimately pushed to the periphery of the canonical tradition, where they waited, patient as stone, for someone to look at them properly again.

The figure of Simon Magus appears, briefly but unforgettably, in the eighth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles in the New Testament. He is a Samaritan sorcerer of considerable reputation who encounters Philip the Evangelist, witnesses miraculous healings and exorcisms, and converts to Christianity — or appears to. When Peter and John arrive and lay hands on the new believers, conferring the Holy Spirit, Simon is so impressed that he offers them money in exchange for this power. Peter's rebuke is fierce and unambiguous: 'May your silver perish with you, because you thought you could obtain God's gift with money.' The encounter is brief, Simon disappears from the canonical text, and the episode gives us the word 'simony' — the buying and selling of ecclesiastical offices — which has haunted the church ever since.

But Simon does not disappear from history. He explodes into it. In the apocryphal tradition, in the writings of Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Hippolytus, Origen, and Eusebius, in the sprawling and extraordinary texts known as the Pseudo-Clementine literature, Simon Magus becomes something far larger and more terrifying than a greedy opportunist with a weakness for showmanship. He becomes the archetypal opponent of the apostolic mission — the great deceiver, the false prophet, the man who can make statues walk and the dead appear to breathe and himself appear to fly through the air on the power of demonic assistance. He becomes, in short, one of the most compelling villains in all of ancient literature, and his contest with Peter becomes one of the great dramatic engines of early Christian storytelling.

The text you are about to read draws on this rich and largely unfamiliar tradition with both scholarly rigor and narrative ambition. It is rooted in genuine historical sources — the Acts of Peter, one of the five major apocryphal acts of apostles composed in the second and third centuries; the Pseudo-Clementine Recognitions and Homilies, enormous novelistic texts that frame the apostolic mission as an intellectual and spiritual adventure story; the fragments preserved in Epiphanius, in the Philosophumena attributed to Hippolytus, and in dozens of other patristic sources. But it is also, unapologetically, a work of storytelling — an attempt to give these ancient materials the dramatic coherence, the psychological depth, and the narrative momentum that they deserve and that their original audiences clearly craved.

To understand why this tradition matters, and why it has been so persistently undervalued, it helps to understand something about how the Christian canon was formed and what was left outside it. The process of canonization — the gradual, contested, centuries-long process by which certain texts came to be regarded as authoritative scripture and others did not — was not simply a matter of separating the authentic from the inauthentic, the true from the false. It was a process deeply shaped by theological controversy, by the needs of particular communities, by the politics of episcopal authority, and by the practical requirements of liturgical use. Texts that were too local, too exotic, too theologically adventurous, or simply too entertaining for the grave purposes of public worship tended to fall away from the emerging mainstream, even when they were widely read and deeply loved.

The apocryphal acts of the apostles are a perfect example of this dynamic. Composed between roughly 150 and 400 CE, texts like the Acts of Peter, the Acts of Paul, the Acts of Thomas, the Acts of John, and the Acts of Andrew were enormously popular in the early church. They were read aloud in communities across the Mediterranean world. They shaped the way ordinary Christians imagined the apostles — not as remote, hieratic figures but as flesh-and-blood human beings engaged in dangerous, dramatic, miraculous adventures in real cities with real opponents. They were, in the best sense of the word, popular literature: vivid, emotionally engaging, theologically serious in their own way, and absolutely riveting as stories.

And yet they were also, from the perspective of the emerging orthodox mainstream, deeply problematic. Many of them promoted ascetic ideals — particularly sexual renunciation — in ways that threatened the social fabric of ordinary Christian families. Some of them contained theological emphases that later came to seem heterodox. Others simply competed too successfully with the authority of the episcopal hierarchy, presenting apostolic figures as independent, charismatic wanderers rather than founders of stable institutional churches. By the fourth and fifth centuries, texts that had once been read in churches were being banned from them, and the tradition of apocryphal storytelling was driven underground, into heretical sects, into popular devotion, into the margins of the official tradition.

The World Behind the Story

To read this text with full appreciation, it helps enormously to have some sense of the world in which the original Simon-Peter tradition was born and flourished — a world that was simultaneously more credulous and more sophisticated than our own, a world in which the boundaries between religion, magic, philosophy, and politics were far more porous than anything we are accustomed to.

The Roman Empire of the first and second centuries CE was a world saturated with the supernatural. This is not a condescending observation about the credulity of ancient people; it is a straightforward description of the intellectual and cultural environment in which early Christianity emerged and competed for adherents. The Mediterranean world was home to an extraordinary diversity of religious traditions — the old civic cults of Greece and Rome, the mystery religions of Isis and Mithras and Cybele, the philosophical schools of Stoicism and Platonism and Pythagoreanism, the various Jewish sects and movements, and a proliferating array of newer movements that defied easy categorization. All of these traditions, in their different ways, made claims about divine power, about the nature of the cosmos, about what human beings could achieve through ritual, contemplation, or direct encounter with the divine.

In this environment, the figure of the wonder-worker — the man or woman who could heal the sick, cast out demons, predict the future, control the weather, or communicate with divine beings — was a recognized and important social type. Such figures appeared across the entire spectrum of ancient religious life. Apollonius of Tyana, the Pythagorean philosopher and holy man, was credited with miracles strikingly similar to those attributed to Jesus. The emperor Vespasian was said to have healed a blind man and a lame man in Alexandria. Wandering charismatic healers and exorcists were a familiar presence in the cities and villages of the empire. And alongside these relatively respectable figures existed a vast and thriving world of professional magic — curse tablets, love potions, amulets, ritual handbooks, and practitioners who offered their services for a fee.

The distinction between 'miracle' and 'magic' in this world was not a distinction between the real and the fraudulent, or between the divine and the demonic, though those categories certainly existed and were vigorously debated. It was primarily a social and political distinction. A miracle was a wonder performed by a legitimate religious authority for legitimate purposes; magic was a wonder performed by a marginal or suspect figure for private or antisocial ends. The same act — healing, divination, the apparent raising of the dead — could be classified as either miracle or magic depending entirely on who was performing it, for whom, and under what circumstances. This is the conceptual world in which the contest between Peter and Simon takes on its full meaning. Both men are wonder-workers. Both claim divine authorization. The question the story asks — and asks with genuine urgency — is not whether supernatural power exists, but whose power is real, whose is fraudulent, and how you can tell the difference.

Simon Magus himself, as a historical figure, remains deeply obscure. The scholarly consensus is that there was indeed a Samaritan religious teacher and wonder-worker named Simon who was active in the mid-first century, that he attracted a significant following, and that early Christians remembered him as a significant opponent. Beyond that, almost everything is contested. The elaborate mythology that grew up around him — his claim to be a divine being, his consort Helena whom he presented as a reincarnation of Helen of Troy and the fallen divine Thought of God, his philosophical system that anticipated later Gnostic cosmologies — may reflect the actual teachings of a historical Simon, or may be a composite portrait assembled from various sources and controversies, or may be largely a polemical construction by his Christian opponents. What is certain is that he captured the imagination of early Christians in a way that few opponents of the apostolic mission ever did, and that the stories told about his contest with Peter grew in ambition and drama with each retelling.

The city of Rome, where the climactic confrontation between the two men was traditionally located, provides a crucial backdrop for understanding what was at stake in these stories. Rome was the center of the empire, the city where power was concentrated and where reputations were made or destroyed. The tradition that Peter came to Rome, founded the church there, and was eventually martyred under Nero is one of the most important and most contested claims in early Christian history. The apocryphal acts place the Peter-Simon contest specifically in the context of this Roman mission, and the drama of that setting — the apostle of Christ confronting the great deceiver in the very heart of the pagan world, before the eyes of the emperor and the Roman populace — gives the narrative an epic quality that goes far beyond local religious controversy. This is a story about the fate of the world, about which power will ultimately govern human history, and it is told with a sense of cosmic stakes that the best ancient authors understood instinctively.

The magical practices attributed to Simon in the ancient sources are also worth pausing over, because they are not simply fantastic invention. They reflect, with considerable accuracy, the actual repertoire of wonder-workers and ritual specialists in the ancient world. The Greek Magical Papyri, a collection of ritual handbooks preserved in Egyptian manuscripts from the second to fifth centuries CE, give us a vivid picture of what ancient magic actually looked like in practice — the invocations of divine names, the use of material substances and ritual actions, the claims to control over demons and spirits, the techniques for healing, harming, binding, and compelling. When ancient sources describe Simon making statues move, animating the bodies of the dead, flying through the air, or changing his appearance, they are drawing on a recognizable tradition of claims and counter-claims about what ritual specialists could do. The point is not that these things actually happened, but that the ancient audience for these stories inhabited a world in which such claims were taken seriously as claims, and in which the question of their ultimate source — divine or demonic — was a matter of genuine theological importance.

Peter, in this tradition, is equally fascinating as a character. The canonical New Testament presents him as a man of enormous energy and equally enormous human frailty — the disciple who walks on water and then sinks, who confesses Jesus as the Messiah and then denies knowing him three times on the night of the arrest. The apocryphal tradition preserves and amplifies this complexity. The Acts of Peter, our most important source for the Roman phase of the Peter-Simon contest, presents an apostle who is capable of extraordinary miracles but also of doubt, of failure, of the need for renewed vision and divine reassurance. He is not a plaster saint but a fully realized human being engaged in a struggle that costs him everything. This psychological depth is one of the most striking features of the apocryphal tradition, and it is one that this text works hard to honor and develop.

Reading the Text Today

Why should a modern reader care about any of this? It is a fair question, and it deserves a serious answer that goes beyond the obvious appeal of a good story — though that appeal is real and should not be underestimated. The contest between Peter and Simon is a genuinely gripping narrative, full of dramatic reversals, vivid set-pieces, and moments of genuine emotional power. But the tradition also speaks to questions that are anything but antiquarian.

At its deepest level, the Peter-Simon tradition is a story about the nature of power and the problem of discernment. How do you tell the real from the counterfeit when both look equally impressive? How do you distinguish genuine spiritual authority from skilled performance? How do you resist a charismatic figure who offers you exactly what you want — certainty, wonder, the thrill of the miraculous — when the cost of that offer is your freedom and your integrity? These are not questions that belong exclusively to the second century. They are questions that every generation has had to answer for itself, in every domain of human life from religion to politics to the marketplace of ideas.

Simon Magus, in the tradition that this text draws upon, is not simply a villain. He is something more interesting and more disturbing: a figure who represents the permanent temptation of false transcendence, the human hunger for the miraculous that can be exploited as easily as it can be genuinely satisfied. He is brilliant, charismatic, and in his own way sincere — convinced of his own divine status, genuinely capable of impressive feats, and utterly unable to understand why the power he wields is not the same as the power Peter manifests. The tragedy of Simon, in the best versions of this tradition, is not simply that he is evil. It is that he is wrong about himself in a way that he cannot see, and that this wrongness leads him to a catastrophe that has something genuinely pitiable about it.

Peter, on the other side of the contest, is compelling precisely because he is not invulnerable. He doubts. He fails. He has to be recalled to his mission by visions and by the voices of those who depend on him. His power is not his own — it is borrowed, given, contingent on a relationship with something larger than himself that he must constantly renew and that he is always in danger of losing. This makes him, paradoxically, more trustworthy than his opponent, because it means that his power cannot be separated from his accountability. He is answerable in a way that Simon is not, and this answerability is precisely what makes his miracles different in kind, not just in degree, from Simon's wonders.

The text also rewards reading as a document of early Christian self-understanding. The communities that produced and consumed these stories were not simply entertained by them; they were formed by them. The Peter-Simon narrative gave early Christians a way of thinking about their own situation — as a minority movement in a world full of competing claims to divine power, as people who had to make difficult judgments about whom to trust and what to believe, as communities that were always in danger of being seduced by impressive performances that substituted spectacle for substance. The story was, in the most literal sense, a guide to spiritual survival in a world that offered an overwhelming abundance of spiritual options.

There is also, for the literary reader, the sheer pleasure of encountering a tradition of storytelling that has been unjustly neglected. The apocryphal acts of the apostles are, by any reasonable standard, among the most entertaining texts produced in late antiquity. They combine the excitement of the ancient novel — travel, adventure, miraculous reversals, exotic settings, romantic subplots — with genuine theological seriousness and a vivid sense of the stakes involved in the apostolic mission. They were popular because they were good, and the fact that they were eventually marginalized by the official tradition does not diminish their literary quality or their historical importance.

This particular text has worked to make that quality accessible to a contemporary reader without sacrificing the strangeness and the depth that make the original tradition so remarkable. The language is modern but not anachronistic; the narrative moves with the pace and urgency of good contemporary fiction while remaining faithful to the texture and concerns of the ancient sources. The miracles are presented neither with credulous literalism nor with condescending rationalism, but with the kind of imaginative seriousness that the tradition itself demands — an approach that asks the reader to inhabit, however temporarily, a world in which the boundaries between the natural and the supernatural are genuinely porous, and in which the outcome of a contest between two wonder-workers is a matter of cosmic significance.

The scholarship behind this text is substantial, but it is worn lightly. Readers who want to pursue the ancient sources in depth will find ample guidance in the notes and bibliography; readers who simply want to experience the story as a story are free to do so without interruption. The goal throughout has been to serve the narrative first, because it is the narrative that has kept this tradition alive across nearly two millennia, and it is the narrative that will carry it forward.

One final observation before you turn the page and enter the story proper. There is something deeply moving about the fact that these texts survived at all. They were copied in scriptoria by monks who were technically forbidden to read them. They were preserved in heretical communities that the mainstream church was actively trying to suppress. They survived in fragments, in translations, in summaries and quotations embedded in the works of authors who cited them only to condemn them. They endured because people loved them — because the story of Peter and Simon, of miracle and counter-miracle, of faith tested to its absolute limit and somehow holding, spoke to something in the human heart that official theology, for all its magnificence, could not quite reach.

That story is now yours. It begins, as all the best stories do, in the middle of things — in a world already charged with conflict and wonder, with characters already formed by experiences we will only gradually come to understand, moving toward a confrontation that neither of them can avoid and that will cost both of them more than either has yet imagined. Read it slowly enough to feel the weight of what is at stake. Read it quickly enough to feel the pull of the narrative. And when you are finished, consider the possibility that the questions it raises — about power and authenticity, about faith and doubt, about the difference between the real and the merely spectacular — are questions you have been living with your entire life, waiting for exactly this story to help you see them clearly.

The ancient world is speaking. It has been waiting a long time to be heard.

The Acts of Peter and Simon

Chapter 1

It came to pass that after Paul left the island of Gaudomeleta he came to Italy. The Jews living in Rome, the greatest of cities, heard that Paul was demanding to appear before Caesar. Falling into deep grief and great despondency, they said among themselves: It is not enough for him that he alone has afflicted all our brothers and parents in Judea and Samaria and throughout Palestine; he was not satisfied with that, and now, behold, he comes here as well, having through cunning petition asked Caesar to destroy us.

They therefore assembled against Paul, and after considering many proposals, they decided to go to the emperor Nero and ask him not to allow Paul to come to Rome. They prepared a considerable number of gifts and brought them along, then came before him with their petition, saying: We beseech you, O good emperor, send orders throughout all the provinces under your authority, to the effect that Paul is not to come near these regions; for this Paul, having afflicted the whole nation of our fathers, is now seeking to come here and destroy us as well. The affliction we already suffer from Peter, O most worshipful emperor, is burden enough for us.

The Emperor Nero, having heard these things, answered them: It shall be as you wish. We will write to all our provinces that he is not under any circumstances to make landfall in the regions of Italy. They also sent for Simon the magician and informed him, as has been said, that he too should not come into the regions of Italy.

While all this was going on, some of those from the nations who had repented and been baptized through Peter's preaching sent elders to Paul carrying a letter that read as follows: Paul, dear servant of our Lord Jesus Christ and brother of Peter, the first of the apostles, we have heard from the Jewish rabbis here in Rome, the greatest of cities, that they have asked Caesar to send word throughout all his provinces that wherever you are found you are to be put to death. But we have believed, and do believe, that just as God does not separate the two great lights he has made, so he will not part you from one another — neither Peter from Paul nor Paul from Peter. We firmly believe in our Lord Jesus Christ, into whom we have been baptized, that we have been made worthy of your teaching as well.

Paul received the two men who had been sent with the letter on the twentieth day of May, and was eager to set out. He gave thanks to the Lord and Master Jesus Christ, and sailed from Gaudomeleta. This time he did not travel through Africa to reach Italy, but made straight for Sicily, sailing until he arrived at the city of Syracuse with the two men who had been sent to him from Rome. Sailing on from there, he came to Rhegium in Calabria, and from Rhegium he crossed to Messina, where he ordained a bishop by the name of Bacchylus. When he left Messina he sailed to Didymus and remained there one night. Sailing on from there, he arrived at Puteoli on the second day.

Dioscorus the ship's captain, who had brought him to Syracuse, felt deep sympathy for Paul because Paul had delivered his son from death. He left his own ship at Syracuse and accompanied Paul to Puteoli. Some of Peter's disciples were found there, and they received Paul and urged him to stay with them. He stayed a week, in hiding, because of Caesar's command, for all the local governors were watching to seize and kill him. But Dioscorus the ship's captain, who was himself also bald and was wearing his captain's garb, went out boldly into the city of Puteoli on the first day. Taking him for Paul, they seized him, beheaded him, and sent his head to Caesar.

Caesar therefore summoned the leading men of the Jews and announced to them: Rejoice with great joy, for Paul your enemy is dead. And he showed them the head. They celebrated greatly that day, which was the fourteenth of June, and every one of the Jews was fully convinced it was so.

Paul was in Puteoli when he heard that Dioscorus had been beheaded. Stricken with deep grief, he gazed up into the height of heaven and said: O Lord Almighty in heaven, who have appeared to me in every place I have gone for the sake of your only-begotten Word, our Lord Jesus Christ, punish this city, and bring out all who have believed in God and followed his word. He then said to those with him: Follow me. And going forth from Puteoli with those who had believed in the word of God, they came to a place called Baiae. Looking up, they all saw that the city of Puteoli had sunk into the seabed to a depth of about one fathom, and there it remains to this day, submerged beneath the sea, as a memorial of what was done.