Dositheos (Samaritan)

Dositheos (occasionally also known as Nathanael, both meaning "gift of God") was a Samaritan religious leader, founder of a Samaritan sect, often assumed to be a gnostic. He is reputed to have known John the Baptist, and been the teacher of Simon Magus.

He lived probably in the first century of the common era. According to Pseudo-Tertullian, he was the first to deny the Prophets, a heresy that gave rise to the party of the Sadducees.Jerome gives the same account.Hippolytus I begins his enumeration of the 32 heresies by mentioning Dositheos; hence the sect is made to appear older than the Sadducees, and on the heresy is based the system of Philaster.

He was not mentioned by the two early patristic authors Justin Martyr or Irenaeus.

The Samaritan chronicler Abu al-Fatḥ of the fourteenth century, who used reliable native sources, places the origin of the Dosithean sect in the time before Alexander the Great. The rabbinical sources also contain obscure references to Dositheos and Sabbæus as the two founders respectively of the Samaritan sects of the Dositheans and Sabuæans. These have been identified with the Samaritans Sabbæeus and Theodosius, of whom Josephus relates that they defended before the Egyptian king Ptolemæus Philometor, against Andronicus, the advocate of the Jews, the sanctity of Mt. Gerizim.

The Samaritan chronicles (the Book of Joshua and Abu al-Fath's Annales) recount a similar discussion between Zerubbabel and Sanballat. As Josephus says that the Samaritans had two advocates, he doubtless meant the two apostles Dositheus and Sabbæus, whose doctrine, including the sanctity of Mt. Gerizim, rejection of the prophetical books of the Old Testament and denial of the resurrection, was on the whole identical with that of the Samaritans.

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