The Samaritan conception represented in Marqe and its uncanny resonance with the teachings attributed to Simon Magus cannot be overlooked. Marqe, like the so-called "heretics" cataloged by the early Church Fathers, presents an account where creation, hierarchy, and the nature of man’s redemption are radically re-envisioned. In Pseudo-Tertullian’s Against All Heresies (1.4), we see a doctrine that situates God as a remote, transcendent force. This God, while perfect and removed from the material cosmos, has delegated the work of creation to angels who, lacking the divine fullness, fumble in their attempt to replicate the higher light.
These angels, far removed from the divine essence, attempt to form humanity in the likeness of that unreachable brilliance. Yet, man is left "crawling," incomplete, a shadow of the divine ideal. Here, one finds the salvific spark—the "mercy" that Marqe echoes—that, in this otherwise compromised figure, is the residue of that higher light, a fragment that can be redeemed. The rest of man's constitution is doomed to perish, a concept mirrored in Samaritan texts where the "Rock" serves as both the source and judge of this limited creation.
Simon Magus’s influence on this theology cannot be ignored. His doctrine, recorded and critiqued by early polemicists, suggests that the divine light, obscured and hidden, intermittently breaks into the material realm. The angels, ignorant of its true nature, seek to capture and imitate it. For the Samaritans, as for Simon, the cosmos is a fallen construct—crafted not by God Himself but by intermediaries too distant from the source of true virtue. They were mistaken in their efforts to shape man according to a likeness they could not comprehend fully, an effort which resulted in the flawed and mortal humanity we inhabit.
Tertullian’s polemic against Marcion (Against Marcion 2.4-2.8) reveals an echo of this worldview, albeit in a critical tone. Tertullian acknowledges that the "Word," or the divine reason, spoke life into the creation of man. Yet he protests Marcion’s and, by extension, Simon's cosmic pessimism: how could a good God allow his image—a being so full of potential and divinely inspired reason—to be condemned by the actions of intermediary creators? The angels, for Marcion and Simon alike, act as agents of a secondary, corrupt order.
For Tertullian, the correct interpretation is that the goodness of the divine Word infuses creation with purpose and coherence. The act of forming man in the divine image, as opposed to the vague “likeness” the Samaritan and Simonian systems speak of, is a sign of God’s care. Man’s free will—his liberty to ascend, to know, and to obey—becomes the battleground where divine goodness is proven. The image of God, unlike the ineptitude of the fallen angels’ creation, retains an inherent potential for elevation.
Yet, the Samaritan parallel continues to haunt us. For Marqe, as for the school of Simon, the image of man reflects the higher world, but it does so through a shattered mirror. The salvific task, then, is not merely moral obedience but the recovery of the divine spark—the re-alignment with that original, hidden light. This notion transforms the understanding of Christ from a mere moral teacher into a figure embodying that light, traversing the boundaries of the material and the immaterial.
It is in the Samaritan view of the "Rock" that one finds the kernel of this shared cosmology. The Rock that “begot” the world judges and redeems it—both immanent and transcendent. Tertullian’s argument against the Marcionite rejection of the flesh (2.8) falls short when considered against this broader Samaritan and Simonian backdrop. He fails to understand that the physical, for these groups, is not inherently wicked but incomplete—needing the illumination of the higher light for its perfection.
In this way, the Samaritan theology, influenced by Simon Magus’s speculative cosmology, offers a provocative and sophisticated alternative. It does not reject the flesh as evil but sees it as a provisional vessel for the divine light. Its echoes persist in Christian heresiology and, perhaps more subtly, in those patristic debates that sought to define and confine the "proper" image of God.
