DOSITEANS. - Ancient sect founded by a certain Dositheus the Samaritan. The information available about this figure is very uncertain and contradictory. J. B. Cotelier (in Constitutiones apostolicae, VI, 8; PG 1, 924), Thaller (in Kirchenlexikon, III, coll. 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 figures of this name, both heresiarchs, corrupters of the Bible and opponents of the prophetic books.
The first, a Jew by origin and later a convert among the Samaritans, would have lived before Christ and would have been the teacher of Zadok and the father of the Sadducees. To him those Dositheans seem to trace back who denied the resurrection of the dead and the immortality of the soul, and taught to live according to the flesh. The other Dositheus, on the other hand, would have been almost a contemporary of Jesus Christ. His name is linked to that of Simon Magus, of whom he was first the teacher and then the disciple. He spread his doctrine among the Samaritans, making himself believed to be the Messiah promised by Moses in Deut. 18, 18. To justify his claims in contrast with the books of the Prophets, he rejected the authority of those books, giving instead all his preference to the Pentateuch of Moses. He had in his following 30 disciples, 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 through the work of his enemies, or through his excessive abstinences, or in order to make his disciples believe that he had ascended to heaven.
His followers recognized as sacred only the Pentateuch of Moses, taught the doctrine of the eternity of the world and fought against immoral antinomianism. Their manner of life was particularly rigorous: they practiced circumcision and fasting, exhorted to the observance of continence and virginity, condemned second marriages and the use of meat. Characteristic of them was the rigorous observance of the sabbath rest, so much so that they remained all day long in the position in which they were surprised by the beginning of the sabbath. Toward the end of the 6th century this sect still existed in Egypt, since it was combated by Eulogius, patriarch of Alexandria, d. 608, as appears from a writing of his published by Photius (Bibliotheca, cod. 230).
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Guglielmo Zannoni