See also: F C Baur; A. Hilgenfeld; Hermann Detering, "The Falsified Paul: Early Christianity in the Twilight" - 1995 (translated into English in 2003); and J.R.Porter, The Lost Bible, pg 230.
Knight, Kevin (2012). "Simon Magus". newadvent.org. Catholic Encyclopedia. Retrieved 20 August 2016. it is difficult or rather impossible to extract from them any historical fact the details of which are established with certainty
Cf. Plotinus, Ennead II, 9, 10: "They first maintain that the Soul and a certain 'Wisdom' [Sophia] declined and entered this lower sphere ... Yet in the same breath, that very Soul which was the occasion of descent to the others is declared not to have descended. 'It knew no decline,' but merely illuminated the darkness in such a way that an image of it was formed upon the Matter. Then, they shape an image of that image somewhere below — through the medium of Matter or of Materiality ... and so they bring into being what they call the Creator or Demiurge, then this lower is severed from his Mother [Sophia] and becomes the author of the Cosmos down to the latest of the succession of images constituting it." MacKenna trans., p. 230.
"Geburah, or Dynamis, was an appellative or metonym of "The Divine Glory" among the apocalypticists, and with this very meaning entered the Gospels in the famous passage: 'You shall see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of the Dynamis [Matthew 26:64; Mark 14:62].' Although in rabbinic sources of the first and second centuries the name Dynamis was widely used as a synonym for God Himself, the esoteric use continued in the circles of the Merkabah mystics. ... This term must have had wide usage, since according to the Acts of the Apostles 8:10 even the Samaritan Simon Magus claimed to be the Great Dynamis: ἡ δύναμις τοῦ θεοῦ ἡ καλουμένη μεγάλη." Scholem, p. 67.