other · 34 · Samaria
Acts is careful about him in a way its later readers were not. He had amazed Samaria with magic and been called the power of God that is called Great; then Philip preached and he believed and was baptised, and Acts says so plainly — even Simon himself believed. When Peter and John came down and the converts received the Spirit through the laying on of hands, Simon offered money for the ability to do it. Peter's answer is furious: may your silver perish with you, because you thought you could obtain the gift of God with money. Simon asks them to pray for him, and that is the last Acts says. Everything else attached to him — arch-heretic, father of the gnostics, flying over Rome and falling at Peter's word — is second-century and later, and none of it is recorded here. What is real and lasting is the word: buying or selling a church office has been called simony ever since, and it is one of the two or three sins the councils of this dataset legislate against most often.
To buy the power of conferring the Holy Spirit.
A word — simony — and a figure the second century made into the first heretic.