And yet, Irenaeus said, all these false versions of Christianity, however different they were, stemmed from a single demonic teacher, Simon Magus. Simon appears in the Acts of the Apostles as a magician who offered the apostles money for the power to bestow the Holy Spirit (Acts 8:9-24). Moreover, Irenaeus argued that all these teachers and groups manifested false gnosis or knowledge, which St. Paul had warned against in one of his letters to Timothy (1 Timothy 6:20). The Gospel of Judas, then, indeed turned Christianity on its head, for it was not Christianity at all, rather yet another
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