Dositheus, an ancient sect among the Samaritans in the first century of the Christian era.

Mention is made in Origen, Epiphanius, Jerom, and divers other Greek and Latin fathers, of one Dositheus, the chief of a faction among the Samaritans; but the learned are not at all agreed as to the time wherein he lived. St Jerom, in his dialogue against the Lucifarians, places him before our Saviour; wherein he is followed by Druius, who in his answer to Serrarius places him about the time of Sennacherib king of Assyria. But Scaliger will have him posterior to our Saviour's time: And in effect Origen intimates him to have been contemporary with the apostles; where he observes, that he endeavoured to persuade the Samaritans that he was the Messiah foretold by Moses.

He had many followers; and his sect was still subsisting at Alexandria in the time of the patriarch Eulogius, as appears from a decree of that patriarch published by Photius. In that decree, Eulogius accuses Dositheus of injuriously treating the ancient patriarchs and prophets, and attributing to himself the spirit of prophecy. He makes him contemporary with Simon Magus; and accuses him of corrupting the Pentateuch in divers places, and of composing several books directly contrary to the law of God.

Archbishop Usher takes Dositheus to be the author of all the changes made in the Samaritan Pentateuch, which he argues from the authority of Eulogius. But all we can justly gather from the testimony of Eulogius is, that Dositheus corrupted the Samaritan copies since used by that sect; but that corruption did not pass into all the copies of the Samaritan Pentateuch now in use among us, which vary but little from the Jewish Pentateuch: And in this sense we are to understand that passage in a Samaritan chronicle, where it is said that Douis, i.e. Dositheus, altered several things in the law of Moses. The author of that chronicle, who was a Samaritan by religion, adds, that their high-priest sent several Samaritans to seize Douis and his corrupted copy of the Pentateuch.

Epiphanius takes Dositheus to have been a Jew by birth, and to have abandoned the Jewish party for that of the Samaritans. He imagines him likewise to have been the author of the sect of the Sadducees: Which seems inconsistent with his being later than our Saviour; and yet the Jesuit Serrarius agrees to make Dositheus the master of Sadoc, from whom the Sadducees are derived.

Tertullian, making mention of the same Dositheus, observes, that he was the first who dared to reject the authority of the prophets by denying their inspiration. But he charges that as a crime peculiar to this sectary, which in reality is common to the whole sect, who have never allowed any but the five books of Moses for divine.