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Simon Magus set the precedent for the misuse of money that has plagued the Church for two millennia. His practice of sorcery in Samaria was upstaged by the miracles accompanying the preaching and baptisms of Philip the Evangelist. When Peter and John arrived, they placed their hands on the new converts, and Simon witnessed the power of the Holy Spirit.

“Give me this ability!” Simon pleaded, offering the apostles money.

“To hell with you and your money!” is a literal rendering of Peter’s reply. The biblical account breaks off with Simon’s plea that the curse not be fulfilled; one early Church tradition claims that the unrepentant Simon traveled to Rome and founded Gnosticism. Today we call the purchase of Church offices “simony,” in memory of this greedy magician.

Secular Journalists exposing Christian charlatans: A modern phenomenon? Not really. Lucian wrote satire in the mid-second century, and he loved to pick on Christians—especially when he smelled a fraud. In one of his works, he reports on a huckster named Peregrinus, a murderer and child molester who fled to Palestine and got involved with the Christians.

“In a trice he made them all look like children; for he was prophet, cult leader, head of the synagogue, and everything, all by himself. He interpreted and explained some of their books and even composed many, and they revered him as a god, made use of him as a lawgiver, and set him down as a protector, next after that other, to be sure, whom they still worship, the man who was crucified in Palestine because he introduced this new cult into the world.”

Peregrinus was imprisoned for his involvement with the Christians. This, Lucian says, was an “asset to his future career” as a charlatan. Christians traveled from all around to visit him; some tried to rescue him.

“Much money came to him from them by reason of his imprisonment, and he procured not a little revenue from it.” Lucian comments on the strange beliefs of “these poor wretches,” the Christians, who “despise all things indiscriminately and consider them common property, receiving such doctrines traditionally without any definite evidence. So if any charlatan or trickster, able to profit by occasions, comes among them, he quickly acquires sudden wealth by imposing upon simple folk.”

Released from prison, Peregrinus wandered for a while, “possessing an ample source of funds in the Christians, through whose ministrations he lived in unalloyed prosperity.” But his defrauding of the Christians would not last forever. Lucian says he “transgressed in some way even against them (he was seen, I think, eating some of the food that is forbidden them) they no longer accepted him.”

Lucian’s tale continues, culminating in Peregrinus’s spectacular suicide. Before a crowd of Greeks at the Olympic festival, he jumped into a burning pyre. “So ended that poor wretch [Peregrinus], a man who (to put it briefly) never fixed his gaze on the verities, but always did and said everything with a view to glory and the praise of the multitude.”

Of course Lucian treated this story in his classic satirical fashion; he may have overstated the facts. A fraud like Peregrinus could never dupe Christians so thoroughly… could he?

Marrying for money was a way of life for Marozia, the woman who dominated the papacy during the 10th century. When barely beyond puberty, she was already the mistress of Pope Sergius, bearing him a son. When Sergius died, Marozia embarked upon a series of marriages to successively wealthier husbands, enriching herself with their estates upon their untimely deaths. Using her beauty and promiscuity, she continued to control the papacy, eventually winning that office for the illegitimate son she had born to Sergius.

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