If it is argued that Simon was the first inventor of this aeonology, it is astonishing that his name and that of Helen should not have had some recognition in the succeeding systems.  If, on the contrary, it is maintained that he used existing materials for his system, and explained away his improper connection with Helen by an adaptation of the Sophia-mythos, it is difficult to understand how such a palpable absurdity could have gained any credence among such cultured adherents as the Simonians evidently were.  In either case the Gnostic tradition is shown to be pre-Christian.  Every initiated Gnostic, however, must have known that the mythos referred to the World-Soul in the Cosmos and the Soul in man.

The accounts of the Acts and of Justin and Irenaeus are so confusing that it has been supposed that two Simons are referred to.[79] For if he claimed to be a reincarnation of Jesus, appearing in Jerusalem as the Son, he could not have been contemporary with the apostles.  It follows, therefore, that either he made no such claim; or if he made the claim, Justin and Irenaeus had such vague information that they confused him with the Simon of the Acts; or that the supposition is not well-founded, and Simon was simply inculcating the esoteric doctrine of the various manifestations or descents of one and the same Christ principle.

The Simon of Tertullian again is clearly taken from Irenaeus, as the critics are agreed.  “Tertullian evidently knows no more than he read in Irenaeus,” says Dr. Salmon.[80]

It is only when we come to the Simon of the Philosophumena that we feel on any safe ground.  The prior part of it is especially precious on account of the quotations from The Great Revelation ([Greek:  hae megalae apophasis]) which we hear of from no other source.  The author of Philosophumena, whoever he was, evidently had access to some of the writings of the Simonians, and here at last we have arrived at any thing of real value in our rubbish heap.

It was not until the year 1842 that Minoides Mynas brought to Paris from Mount Athos, on his return from a commission given him by the French Government, a fourteenth-century MS. in a mutilated condition.  This was the MS. of our Philosophumena which is supposed to have been the work of Hippolytus.  The authorship, however, is still uncertain, as will appear by what will be said about the Simon of Epiphanius and Philaster.

The latter part of the section on Simon in the Philosophumena is not so important, and is undoubtedly taken from Irenaeus or from the anti-heretical treatise of Justin, or from the source from which both these fathers drew.  The account of the death of Simon, however, shows that the author was not Hippolytus from whose lost work Epiphanius and Philaster are proved by Lipsius to have taken their accounts.

The Simon of Origen gives us no new information, except as to the small number of the Simonians.  But like other data in his controversial writings against the Gnostic philosopher Celsus we can place little reliance on his statement, for Eusebius Pamphyli writing in A.D. 324-5, a century afterwards, speaks of the Simonians as still considerable in numbers.[81]