38, 39, but he constantly, as in the passage before us, distinguishes it from disease itself, and that more frequentl
than the other Evangelists. Hobart draws special attention to Luke vi. 17, Vill. 4, xiii. 32, which have no parallels in the other Gospels, and Acts xix. τ2.
To which we may add Luke iv. 4ο, Acts v. 16 (Wendt); see further on xix. 12.--- βοῶντα, cf. Mark i, 26, Luke iv. 33.— παραλελυμένοι: St. Luke alone of the Evangelists uses the participle of παρα-
212
ἐθεραπεύθησαν.}
8. καὶ ἐγένετο Χαρὰ µεγάλη 2 ἐν τῇ πόλει ἐκείνῃ.
g. ᾽Ανὴρ δέ τις ὀνόματι Σίμων προὐπῆρχεν ὃ ἐν τῇ πόλει µαγεύων καὶ
1 εθεραπευθησαν; D reads εθεραπενοντο, so Hilg., perhaps assim. to εξηρχοντο,
Blass in β rejects.
2 yapa µεγαλη DEHP, Vulgclem., Syr. Harcl., Arm., Chrys.; πολλη χαρα SABC 47, 61, so Tisch., W.H., R.V., Weiss, Wendt; χαρα τε µεγαλη εγενετο, so Gig.,
Par., Syr. Pesh., Blass in B, and Hilg.
N.T.; cf. Luke ii. 10, xxiv. 52, Acts xv. 3.
ὁπρούπηρχεν .. «
εξιστων, D reads προὔπαρχων . . Iren. also read προυπαρχων, 50 Hilg. Σαμαρειας, see on ver. 1.
χαρα often joined with pey. elsewhere in
. εξιστανεν; Par., Vulg., peyav, ‘‘delevi,”
so Blass on the authority of some codices of Iren. see comment. below.
λύειν, instead of παραλντικός, the more popular word; and here again his usage is exactly what we should expect from a medical man acquainted with technical terms (Hobart, Zahn, Salmon), cf. ix. 33 and Luke v. 18, 24 (παραλυτικῷ, W.H. margin). Dr. Plummer, S#. Luke, Introd., Ixv., points out that Aristotle, a physician’s son, has also this use of παραλελυμένος (Eth. Nic., i., 13, 15), but he adds that its use in St. Luke may have come from the LXX, as in Heb. xii. 12, where we have the word in a quotation from Isa, xxxv. 3 (cf. also Ecclesiast. xxv. 23). It may be added that the participle is also found in 3 Macc. ii. 22, καὶ τοῖς µέλεσι παραλελι- µένον, and cf. 1 Macc. ix. 15, where it is said of Alcimus, καὶ παρελύθη. But the most remarkable feature in St. Luke’s em- ployment of the word is surely this, that in parallel passages in which St. Matthew and St. Mark have παραλυτικός he has παραλελυµένος, cf. Luke ν. 18, Matt. ix. 2, Mark Ἡ. 3; in Luke v. 24 this same distinction is also found in the Revisers’ text (but see W.H. above), when this verse is compared with Matt. ix. 6 and Mark ii. το.
Ver. 8. This detail, and indeed the whole narrative, may have been derived by St. Luke from the information of St. Philip himself, cf. xxi. 8, xxiv. 27, or from St. Paul as he travelled through Samaria, xv. 3.
Ver.9. Σίμων: very few of the most advanced critics now dismiss Simon as an unhistorical character, or deny that the account before us contains at least some historical data; see McGiffert’s note, Apostolic Age, p. too. Hilgenfeld and Lipsius may be reckoned amongst those who once refused to admit that Simon Magus was an historical person- age, but who afterwards retracted their opinion. But it still remains almost un- accountable that so many critics should have more or less endorsed, or developed, the theory first advocated by Baur that the
Simon Magus of the Clementine Homilies is none other than the Apostle Paul. It is sufficient to refer for an exposition of the absurdity of this identification to Dr. Salmon “‘ Clementine Literature ” (Dict. of Christ. Biog., iii., pp. 575, 576; see also Ritschl’s note, Die Entstehung der altkatholischen Kirche, p. 228 (second edition)). This ingenuity outdid itself in asking us to see in Simon’s request to buy the power of conferring the Holy Ghost a travesty of the rejection of Paul’s apostolic claims by the older Apostles, in spite of the gift of money which he had collected for the poor Saints in Jeru- salem (Overbeck). No wonder that Spitta should describe such an explana- tion as ‘‘a perfect absurdity ’’ (Apostel- geschichte, p. 149). Before we can be- lieve that the author of the Acts would make any use of the pseudo-Clementine literature in his account of Simon, we must account for the extraordinary fact that an author who so prominently repre- sents his hero as triumphing over the powers of magic, xiii. 6-12, xix. 11-10, should have recourse to a tradition in which this same hero is identified with a magician (see Spitta, uw. s., p. 151; Salmon, “ The Simon of Modern Criti- cism,” Dict. of Christian Biog., iv., p. 687: Zéckler, Apostelgeschichte, p. 212, and Wendt’s note, p. 201). In Acts xxi. 8 we read that St. Luke spent several days in the house of Philip the Evangel- ist, and if we bear in mind that this same Philip is so prominent in chap. viii., there is nothing impossible in the belief that St. Luke should have received his narrative from St. Philip’s lips, and included it in his history as an early and remarkable instance of the triumph of the Gospel—we need not search for any more occult reason on the part of the historian (see Salmon, u. δ., Ῥ. 688). Simon then is an his- torical personage, and it is not too much to say that to all the stories which have gathered round his name the narrative of