Simon le "magicien." Actes 8,5-25 et l'accusation de magie contre les prophetes thaumaturges dans l'antiquite.

• Author: Gager, John G.
• Position: Review

Simon le "magicien." Actes 8,5-25 et l'accusation de magie contre les prophetes thaumaturges dans l'antiquite. By FLORENT HEINTZ. Cahiers de la Revue Biblique, vol. 39. Paris:

J. GABALDA, 1997. Pp. 178.

When a scholar of Etienne Trocme's stature writes in the preface to his book, "II [viz., Heintz] a l'etoffe d'un maitre," our expectations are inevitably excited. Can the book live up to its billing? All the more so in that the text examined here-Acts 8.5-25 (the story of the encounter in Samaria between Simon and the apostles Philipp. Peter, and John)--travels a much-explored landscape.

Heintz lays out his objectives in the opening pages: first, to demonstrate that the passage belongs to the widespread rhetorical genre of Greco-Roman literary polemic or, more precisely, of invective directed against thaumaturgical prophets; and second, to peel away the layers of polemic in an effort to discover authentic details concerning the historical person of Simon.

Heintz opens his quest with two brief surveys. The first traces early Christian readings of Acts 8 (Justin Martyr, Irenaeus of Lyons, Hippolytus, the Acts of Peter, and the Pseudo-Clementine literature) and demonstrates that the portrait of Simon as a magician established itself solidly in this literature. The second survey covers modern treatments, which Heintz categorizes and subjects to critical scrutiny. Against Lucien Cerfaux and others, who hold that the account in Acts is largely accurate, Heintz contends that this view is overly dependent on the manifestly unreliable tradition of later Christian writers and that it ignores the patently polemical use of magical accusations in ancient texts. More interesting is his criticism of the view held by Ernst Haenchen and Gerd Ludemann that Acts 8 represents a deliberate effort to defame and degrade Simon by portraying him as a magician. At least on the surface, this view would appear to come close to Heintz' own position. Indeed, his only criticism here is tha t Ludemann fails to note that the use of accusations of magic was not limited to early Christianity but crossed all boundaries in antiquity.

Heintz reserves his most detailed, as well as his sharpest, criticism for the work of the American scholar Susan Garrett (The Demise of the Devil: Magic and the Demonic in Luke's Writing [19891). In particular, he argues that her view that magic was seen as a Satanic activity, broadly in ancient Judaism and specifically in Acts, lacks persuasive...