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

Mention is made by Origen, Epiphanius, Jerome, and various other Greek and Italian fathers, of one Dositheus, the chief of a faction among the Samaritans; but the learned are not all agreed as to the time when he lived. St Jerome, in his dialogue against the Luciferians, places him before the time of our Saviour; and in this he is followed by Drusius, who, in his answer to Serrarius, places him about the time of Sennacherib, king of Assyria. But Scaliger contends that he was posterior to our Saviour's time; and in effect Origen intimates that he must have been contemporary with the apostles, observing that this man endeavoured to persuade the Samaritans that he was the Messiah foretold by Moses.

Dositheus had many followers; and his sect subsisted at Alexandria in the time of the patriarch Eulogius, as appears from a decree of that patriarch published by Pho In this decree Eulogius accuses Dositheus of abusing the ancient patriarchs and prophets, and of attributing to himself the spirit of prophecy; makes him contemporary with Simon Magus; and accuses him of corrupting the Pentateuch in various places, as well as of composing several books directly contrary to the law of God.

Archbishop Usher conceives Dositheus to have been the author of all the changes made in the Samaritan Pentateuch, which he infers on the authority of Eulogius. But all that we can justly gather from the testimony of Eulogius is, that Dositheus corrupted the Samaritan copies since used by that sect. This corruption, however, did not pass into all the copies of the Samaritan Pentateuch now in use amongst us, which vary but little from the Jewish Pentateuch; and hence we are to understand the passage in a Samaritan chronicle, where it is said that Dousis or Dositheus altered several things in the law of Moses, in the sense here indicated. The author of that chronicle, who was a Samaritan by religion, adds, that the high priest sent several Samaritans to seize Dousis 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 founder of the sect of the Sadducees. But this seems inconsistent with his being later than our Saviour; and yet the Jesuit Serrarius agrees to make Dositheus the master of Sadok, from whom the Sadducees were derived.

Tertullian, in mentioning 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 as a crime peculiar to that sectary, what in reality was common to the whole sect, who never allowed any but the five books of Moses to be of divine inspiration.