(printed p. 141 — Book II)
Saint Epiphanius notes in the cited passage that there was once a certain priest named Sadoc; and indeed he is very famous in the history of David and afterward, 2 Kings 8, 15, 17, 18, 19, and 20; 3 Kings 1; and elsewhere. But it is clear that he is not the one under discussion here.
This Sadoc was a disciple of that great and ancient Pharisee Antigonus, whom I indicated above as the disciple of Simeon the Just. Sadoc also had, under the same teacher, a fellow disciple named Baithos or Baithus, by some called Baietos, and by Drusius, folio 38, called Boethus. How rightly, I stop asking. Yet I certainly do not assent to Genebrard when he writes in book 2 of the Chronology, “I think Dositheus is the Baiethos of the Hebrews.” For what likeness is there, either in meaning or in sound, besides a slight one in the last syllable? Besides, all the cited authorities teach that these two were fellow disciples, not that one was the other’s teacher.
[margin: Sadoc’s teacher was Antigonus, chapter 12. Dositheus was his fellow disciple. Folio 103.]
(printed p. 142)
Therefore it should rather be asked whether some Dositheus was the teacher of these men, and who he was. Philastrius certainly affirms this, and before him Saint Epiphanius in the same heresy 14, when he says that the Sadducees were “a fragment broken off from Dositheus.”
As to the name, Dositheus seems to be the same as the man who in chapter 3 of Pirke Aboth is called דוסתא, Dosetha. But in reality he seems different from the man now in question, because that Dosetha is the son of Janai, who by another name, according to Fagius’s interpretation, is called Meir, and seems to be younger than the other and a Pharisee.
Saint Epiphanius, in heresy 13, paints Dositheus in the colors of foul ambition, hypocrisy, and miserable death in this way:
This Dositheus mingled with the Samaritans, departing from the Jews to their customs. And when he had advanced in the doctrine of the law and had hunted for first place in those deuteroses that exist among them, that is, among the Jews, but had fallen from his hope and attempt and was not considered worthy of any esteem among the Jews, he declined to the Samaritan race and presided over this very heresy, that of the Dositheans. Living in a cave, however, an anchoritic life, because of an excessive pursuit of the wisdom which he had fashioned for himself, continuing in varied and hypocritical fasting, as the report goes, he died in lack of bread and water by his own spontaneous decree or sentence. After some days, they say, certain men came to visit him and found his body exhaling a foul smell,
[margin: Dositheus is also said to have been their teacher.]
(printed p. 143)
with worms bursting from it, and a great cloud of flies standing over it, as if in a swarm.
Tertullian, in Prescription 45, says: “Dositheus first dared to repudiate the prophets, as though they had not spoken by the Holy Spirit.” Origen, in tractate 27 on Matthew, says: “As the history makes clear to one who reads, there were not many men in the time of the Apostles who said that they were Christs, except perhaps Dositheus the Samaritan, from whom the Dositheans are named, and Simon.” And in book 2 Against Celsus: “After the times of Jesus, Dositheus the Samaritan tried to persuade his fellow citizens that he was the Christ foretold by Moses, and he seems to have found disciples.”
So much concerning Sadoc’s teacher Dositheus. Yet it seems that Sadoc is for this reason called by Philastrius a disciple of this man: he went over to him when Dositheus had already separated from the Jews and joined the Samaritans, although up to that point he had been a disciple of Antigonus.
There was also another Samaritan, almost of the same name as Dositheus, Theodosius, who tried to plead the cause of the Samaritans before Ptolemy Philometor, to the great harm of himself and of his associate Sabbaeus. Perhaps from Sabbaeus came the name of the Seboueni Samaritans in Epiphanius, heresy 11, unless their name comes from the seventh month, to which they transferred unleavened bread and Passover, or more generally from their transfer of Sabbaths, as Josephus narrates in book 13, chapter 6.
(printed p. 144)