Sounds a bit like Simon the Magician? He shows up in Acts of the Apostles, chapter 8, in the canonical texts, but in Acts of Peter (apocryphal) he has a contest with Peter the Apostle who accuses him of using wicked sorcery to deceitfully convert people instead of actual divine miracles or something, & when Simon takes flight Peter uses divine power to smite him down.
i recently remembered a bizzare story:
We had many Bibles in our old home, and some of those Bibles were given to us for free by different preachers. There were a lot of preachers in the 90s and 00s who had those free bibles and they were just giving them up to everyone, as the sign of good will or invitation to their church. I was a student back then and i had some free time, so i got one of those Bibles from the bookshelf and was reading it. It had some chapter like "To some tribe name" as if its like a letter or something, and it had a story from apostle, who was talking about himself or Jesus traveling the road, when he met a wizard who was very powerfull. It got my attention when i was reading it, because what do wizards do in the bible? And apostle(or Jesus, i don't remember) begin to argue, Wizard claims that his power is more strong than apostle/jesus. To prove it, the Wizard begins to sing and then he starts to fly up and up higher and higher without anything supporting him. Seeing it, apostle/jesus begins to pray to God to smite this unbeliever and suddenly as if in response to the prayer, he falls down to the ground and crashes to death.
I thought - "boy, that was weird. Why would bible even contain miracles like that, if they come not from the god, but from wizardry?"
But i didn't pay much attention to the story, thinking its just one of the fairy tales. And now when i wanted to find more about this story, i can't find any mention of this anywhere, not in Google, not in other search engines, and we moved several houses since then, and those bibles probably lost. Does anyone know what version of Bible was that? Was this even real, i have some fake memory shit and it was a dream or somehting?
Yes, thats it! Why i haven't been able to find it in the internet using simple words in Russian and English is strange though
and how the fuck this apocrypha text even ended up on my bookshelf, translated into Russian, also a question. Were preachers not even versed in bible study and just thinking that if its connected to apostle, then its a bible and legit?
And why in the Bible some guy just "takes flight" like a superman, without explanation is also a good question. I get it that he falls, due to divine intervention but the fact that Bible contains shit like that is strange as it is. I wonder if there are fireballs somewhere in the bible too.
>Yes, thats it! Why i haven't been able to find it in the internet using simple words in Russian and English is strange though
I don't know. What I know for sure is search on the internet has been becoming progressively worse over last couple years.
>and how the fuck this apocrypha text even ended up on my bookshelf, translated into Russian, also a question. Were preachers not even versed in bible study and just thinking that if its connected to apostle, then its a bible and legit?
Hard to say, depends on the kind of preacher. If it's a "freethinking" kind (it was the 90s after all) he's gonna actually give more focus to apocrypha because of some story about how authorities tried to suppress those stories or something. Spiritually American. We had that kind of preachers here as well...
>Spiritually American. We had that kind of preachers here as well...
Yeah, we also had mormon and jehovah witnesses Bibles on the bookshelf. Parents just picked them up and were holding them on the shelf, cause "its the Bible, its a sin to reject or throw away the Bible". But they weren't reading them either, pages were new and sticking to each other, because no one touched them. So they had no idea what was in those books.
Later after 2010 Russian government started to crack down on those American sects, when it started using the Orthodox church as one of the regime crutches, so it started to hunt down and close down the competitors of Orthodox corporation to return the favor for support of Putin's regime. When Wagner coup happened, the head of Russian Orthodox Church was one of the first to publicly support Putin and call for peace.