Simon Magus and Helen: The First Gnostic Love Story
Church law has a name for the sin of buying a spiritual office. It’s called simony, and it’s named after a man who gets sixteen verses in the Book of Acts. He’s there, he offers the apostles cash, and he gets told off. That’s how most Christians remember Simon Magus, if they remember him at all. The bishops who hunted heretics in the second century remembered him for something much stranger. They said he traveled around the eastern Mediterranean with a woman named Helen, whom he’d found working in a brothel in Tyre, and that he taught she was the first Thought of God, fallen into the world and waiting to be rescued. ...