DOSITHEUS. – A Greek dissident patriarch of Jerusalem from 1669 to 1707, born in Arakhovo in the Peloponnese on 31 May 1641. He was ordained a deacon, contrary to canon law, at the age of eleven, and was only twenty-eight when he was appointed patriarch of Jerusalem, succeeding the resigned Nectarius, who had made him metropolitan of Caesarea in 1666.
Dositheus’s long patriarchate was spent in efforts to restore the finances of the Greek confraternity of the Holy Sepulchre; in vigorous polemics against Protestants and especially against Catholics; and in developing the influence of Hellenism in the East, particularly in Russia, where he sought to hinder Latin culture.
In 1680 he founded a Greek printing press in Jassy at the expense of the patriarchate of Jerusalem, with the aim of publishing extensive collections of anti-Italian polemical writings composed by both ancient Byzantines and modern Greeks.
The principal collections bear the following titles: Τόμος καταλλαγῆς ("Tome of Reconciliation"), Jassy 1692; Τόμος ἀγάπης ("Tome of Charity"), 1698; Τόμος χαρᾶς ("Tome of Joy"), Rimini 1705. These were preceded by the publication of an edition of his predecessor Nectarius’s work on the primacy of the pope: Ἱερίτης ἀρχῆς τοῦ πάπα, Jassy 1682. Dositheus also published the De haeresibus of Simon of Thessalonica (1683), Il Manuale contro lo scisma dei papisti by Maximus of the Peloponnese (Bucharest 1690), and the major work by Meletius Syrigos, Contro i capitoli calvinisti di Cirillo Lucaris (1690), to which he added an Ἐγγεγραμμένο ἔλεγχον τῆς καλβινικῆς φρονοβλάβειαν of his own composition, in which the question of the Eucharist is especially addressed.
Besides this pamphlet, he left a great ἱστορία περὶ τῶν ἐν Ἱεροσολύμοις πατριαρχευσάντων, published posthumously in Bucharest in 1715 by his nephew and successor, Chrysanthus Notaras, who divided it into twelve books, whence its title Δωδεκάβιβλος by which it is often cited.
The Acts of the Synod of Jerusalem of 1672 and the Profession of Faith in eighteen articles and four questions that accompany them are what Dositheus left of greatest theological significance. Published under the title Ἀπολλήνιος δημοσιεύσεις, Paris 1676, it was directed against the Calvinist errors contained in the profession of faith of Cyril Lucaris (v.).
Dositheus strove, without success, to prove that the Calvinist Confession of Faith attributed to Lucaris was not authentic. The proofs he adduced merely showed that Lucaris was not always Calvinist, or that at certain moments in his life he concealed his heretical opinions.
As for Dositheus’s own Profession of Faith, it is remarkable for its clarity and conciseness and stands in point-by-point opposition to that of Lucaris. It is almost entirely in conformity with Catholic doctrine, especially regarding the priesthood, the Eucharist, Purgatory, and the biblical canon.
In 1723 this Profession of Faith was sent to the Russian synod, recently created by Peter the Great, by the four Eastern patriarchs as the authentic expression of Orthodoxy. For this reason it is called by the Russians the Letter of the Patriarchs.
Some Greek and Russian theologians have sought to treat this document as a proper symbolical book of the Greek-Russian Church and to place it on a par with the definitions of the ecumenical councils. Today, however, such an opinion is increasingly abandoned, and modern theologians do not hesitate to contradict this confession. Philaret, metropolitan of Moscow, made corrections and deletions in the Russian and Greek editions published in Russia in 1838–40, finding it contaminated by Latinisms.