ucees, namely, the Dositheans, in
whose teachings and customs Dr. Schechter finds such resemblances as lead
him to surmise that the Dositheans were an offshoot of our sect. The
accounts of the Dositheans in writers of different ages and religious
connections, from Origen and Epiphanius down to the Samaritan Chronicler
Abul-Fath and the Moslem heresiographer Shahrastani, are notoriously
confused and contradictory,(74) so that many scholars have felt
constrained to conclude that there was more than one sect of the name. The
Fathers generally agree in describing the Dositheans as a Samaritan
heresy, though Epiphanius and Philaster have it that the author of the
heresy was by extraction a Jew. They frequently bring him into connection
with Simon Magus, in the time of the Apostles. According to Origen, he
gave himself out for the Messiah foretold by Moses; his followers had
books of his, and legends pretending that he had not died, but was still
alive somewhere. Other Fathers give no date for the rise of the heresy,
but by coupling it with the Sadducees seem to imply that it was older than
Christianity; thus (Pseudo)Tertullian (probably after Hippolytus)(75) says
that Dositheus the Samaritan was the first to reject the prophets as not
inspired; the Sadducees, springing from this root of error, ventured to
deny the resurrection also. From this Philaster probably drew the
inference that Zadok, the founder of the Sadducees, was a disciple of
Dositheus. The Samaritan and Moslem authors agree with the Fathers in
treating the Dositheans as a Samaritan sect. Abul-Fath, a Samaritan writer
of the fourteenth century, puts the beginnings of the sect in the first
century B.C., at the time when the yoke of the Jews had been broken by the
kings of the gentiles, and the Samaritans were able to return and restore
their sanctuary, which had been destroyed by Simon and John Hyrcanus.(76)
The Moslem writer Shahrastani, in his learned work on Religious Sects and
Philosophical Schools (first half of the twelfth century), gives
substantially the same date: the founder of the Dositheans, who professed
to be the prophet foretold by Moses, the star spoken of in the law,
appeared about a century before Christ.

In this state of the evidence it is obvious that no argument can be based
on the coincidence in time between the origin of the Dositheans and that
of our sect. When the Fathers bring the names of Dositheus and Zadok into
conjunction, it means n