fourth century[92]), quotes the following passage from their legendary
pages.

"Such were the doings of these people with names of ill-omen slandering
the creation and marriage, providence, child-bearing, the Law and the
Prophets; setting down foreign names of Angels, as indeed they
themselves say, but in reality, of Daemons, who answer back to them from
below."

It is only when Grabe refers to the Simonian _Antirrhêtikoi Logoi_,
mentioned by the Pseudo-Dionysius, which he calls "vesani Simonis
Refutatorii Sermones," that we get any new information.

A certain Syrian bishop, Moses Barcephas, writing in the tenth
century,[93] professes to preserve some of these controversial retorts
of Simon, which the pious Grabe--to keep this venom, as he calls it,
apart from the orthodox refutation--has printed in italics. The
following is the translation of these italicized passages:

"God willed that Adam should not eat of that tree; but he did eat; he,
therefore, did not remain as God willed him to remain: it results,
therefore, that the maker of Adam was impotent."

"God willed that Adam should remain in Paradise; but he of his own
disgraceful act fell from thence: therefore the God that made Adam was
impotent, inasmuch as he was unable of his own will to keep him in
Paradise."

"(For) he interdicted (he said) Adam from the tree of the knowledge of
good and evil, by tasting which he would have had power to judge between