o more than that they attributed certain errors to
both Dositheans and Sadducees; just as the Talmudic legend which makes
Zadok and Boethus apostate disciples of Antigonus of Socho is but a
mythological way of saying that Sadducees and Boethusians were addicted to
the same heresies concerning retribution, or as the coupling of Dositheus
and Simon Magus means that both passed for Samaritan arch-heretics.

The first point of agreement between the Dositheans and our sect which Dr.
Schechter notes is in the calendar. Abul-Fath says that the Dositheans did
away with the computation of the almanac (tables of lunar conjunctions),
making all their months exactly thirty days long, and (thus) annulled the
correct festivals and the ordinance of the fasts and the affliction (Day
of Atonement).(77) The circle of thirty disciples, who, with a woman
called Helena (Moon), formed the train of Dositheus, according to the
Clementine Recognitions (ii, 8) symbolized the days of the month. If our
sect employed the calendar of the Book of Jubilees, as seems highly
probable, they also had thirty-day months; but it would not follow that
the system was original with them, nor that the Dositheans must have
adopted it from them. There were, in fact, from very remote times, two
years in use within the area of the ancient civilizations, a lunar-solar
year, consisting of twelve lunar months of twenty-nine or thirty days
each, with a thirteenth month added every two or three years to maintain
approximate agreement with the solar year and make the months fall in the
same seasons, and a solar year of three hundred and sixty-five days,
divided into twelve months of thirty days each without regard to the
lunations, and five extra days (_epagomenae_). The former was the system
of the Babylonians and the Greeks, as well as the Jews; the latter was in
use in Egypt from immemorial times until the Roman reforms. From the
Egyptians it was borrowed by the Abyssinians; it was employed also for
some centuries before and after the Christian era in the calendars of Gaza
and Ashkelon. The Persians had the same system; the Yashts contain a
liturgy for the thirty regents of the days of the month, the five extra
days being assigned to the divine Gathas. Probably under Persian
influences, this calendar was established in Armenia, Cappadocia, and
other parts of Asia Minor.(78)

Jews and Samaritans not only lived in many of the lands of their
dispersion among peoples who u