DOSITEANI. — An ancient sect founded by a certain Dositheus the Samaritan. The information available concerning this person is very uncertain and contradictory. J. B. Cotelier (in Constitutiones apostolicae, VI, 8; PG 1, 924), Thaller (in Kirchenlexikon, III, cols. 1997–98), F. X. Krauss (Dosithée et les Dosithéens, in
Revue des études juives, 42 [1901], pp. 27–42), and other scholars consider it necessary, in order to reconcile the data of the ancient sources, to distinguish at least two persons of this name, both heresiarchs, corrupters of the Bible and opponents of the prophetic books.
The first, a Jew by origin who later joined the Samaritans, is said to have lived before Christ and to have been the teacher of Sadoc and the father of the Sadducees. Those d. who denied the resurrection of the dead and the immortality of the soul, and taught that one should live according to the flesh, seem to have derived from him. The other Dositheus, on the contrary, is said to have been almost a contemporary of Jesus Christ. His name is linked with that of Simon Magus, of whom he was first the teacher and then the disciple. He spread his doctrine among the Samaritans, having himself believed to be the Messiah promised by Moses in Deut. 18, 18. To justify his claims, which conflicted with the books of the Prophets, he rejected the authority of those books, while giving all his preference to the Pentateuch of Moses. He had thirty disciples in his following, chosen from among his adherents, and a woman whom he called Luna. He died of hunger, shut up in a cave; it is not known whether this occurred through the agency of his enemies, because of his excessive abstinence, or in order to make his disciples believe that he had ascended into heaven.
His followers recognized as sacred only the Pentateuch of Moses, taught the doctrine of the eternity of the world, and opposed immoral antinomianism. Their way of life was particularly rigorous: they practiced circumcision and fasting, urged the observance of continence and virginity, condemned second marriages and the consumption of meat. Their distinctive feature was the strict observance of the Sabbath rest, to such an extent that they remained all day in the position in which they had been caught at the beginning of the Sabbath. Toward the end of the sixth century this sect still existed in Egypt, since it was opposed by Eulogius, patriarch of Alexandria, who died in 608, as appears from a work of his published by Photius (Bibliotheca, cod. 230).