own imaginative mind, or to the inventions of his fabricating informers, that Simon must of course have received such a decree from the senate and Caesar. This necessarily also implied vast renown, and extensive favor with all the Romans, which he must have acquired, to be sure, by his magical tricks, aided by the demoniac powers; and so all the foolish particulars of the story would be made out as fast as wanted. The paltry fable also appended to this by all the Fathers who give the former story, to the effect, that some woman closely connected with him, was worshiped along with him, variously named Helena, Selena and Larentina, has no doubt a similarly baseless origin; but is harder to trace to its beginnings, because it was not connected with an assertion, capable of direct ocular, as well as historical, refutation, as that about Simon's statue most fortunately was. The second name, Selena, given by Irenaeus, is exactly the Greek word for the moon, which was often worshiped under its appropriate name; and this tale may have been caught up from some connection between such a ceremony and the worship of some of the Semones,—all the elegant details of her life and character being invented to suit the fancies of the reverend fathers. The story, that she had followed Simon to Rome from the Phoenician cities, Tyre and Sidon, suggests to my mind at this moment, that there may have been a connection between this and some old story of the importation of a piece of idolatry from that region, so famed for the worship of the
"mooned Ashtaroth,
Heaven's queen and mother both."
But this trash is not worth the time and paper I am spending upon it, since the main part of the story, concerning Simon Magus as having ever been seen or heard of in Rome, by senate, prince or people, in the days of Claudius, is shown, beyond all reasonable question, to be utterly false, and based on a stupid blunder of Justin Martyr, who did not know Latin enough to tell the difference between sanco and sancto, nor between Semoni and Simoni. And after all, this is but a fair specimen of Justin Martyr's usual blundering way, of which his few pages present other instances for the inquiring reader to stumble over and bewilder himself upon. Take, for example, the gross confusion of names and dates which he makes in a passage which accidentally meets my eye, on a page near that from which the above extract is taken. In attempting to give an account of the way in which the Hebrew Bible was first translated into Greek, he says that Ptolemy, king of Egypt, sent to Herod, king of the Jews, for a copy of the Bible. But when or where does any history, sacred or profane, give any account whatever of any Ptolemy, king of Egypt, who was cotemporary with either of the Herods? The last of the Ptolemies was killed, while a boy, in the Egyptian war with Julius Caesar, before Herod had himself attained to manhood, or had the most distant thought of the throne of Palestine. The Ptolemy who is said to have procured the Greek translation of the Bible, however, lived about three hundred years before the first Herod. It is lamentable to think that such is the character of the earliest Christian father who has left works of any magnitude. Who can wonder that Apologies for the Christian religion, full of such gross blunders, should have failed to secure the belief, or move the attention of either of the Antonines, to whom they were addressed,—the Philosophic, or the Pious? Or that a writer who pretended to tell the wisest of the Caesars, that in his imperial city, had been worshiped, from the days of Claudius, a miserable Samaritan impostor, who, an outcast from his own outcast land, had in Rome, by a solemn senatorial and imperial decree, been exalted to the highest god-ship, and that the evidence of this fact was found in a statue which that emperor well knew to be dedicated to the most ancient deities of Etruscan origin, worshiped there ever since the days of Numa Pompilius, but which this Syrian Christian had blunderingly supposed to commemorate a man who had never been heard of out of Samaria, except among Christians. And as for such martyrs, if there is any truth whatever in the story that his foolish head was cut off by the second Antonine, the only pity is, it was not done a little sooner, so as to have kept the Christian world from the long belief of all this folly about an invention so idle, and saved me the trouble of exposing it.
The fullest account ever given of this fable and all its progress, is found in the Annales Ecclesiastici of Caesar Baronius, (A. C. 44. § 51-59.) who, after furnishing the most ample references to sacred and profane authorities, which palpably demonstrate the falsity of the story, returns with all the solemn bigotry of a papist, to the solemn conviction that the fathers and the saints who tell the story, must have had some very good reason for believing it.
