FOOTNOTE:
[20] It will be noticed that this chapter does not refer to the earliest connections of Jews with Gaza.
CHAPTER VI
THE SAMARITANS
Meyer supplies some valuable information about the Samaritans in Gaza on pages 71-2, from which I gratefully cull a few sentences. He writes of their having settled there early, maintaining themselves as a separate community till the modern period. A complete history is impossible, because of the meagreness of the record. It is remarkable how this little sect spread all over Palestine, and even into Egypt. There are records of the Samaritans at Gaza from the fourth to the seventeenth centuries. According to the Samaritan Chronicle of the High Priest Eleazar, the territory of Palestine, and other parts of Syria and Egypt, were assigned to various Samaritan families at the time of Baba the Great (end of fourth century). That extending from Gaza to the River of Egypt was given to Israel ben Machir, and Shalum was assigned to it as Priest; the territory from Carmel to Gaza to Laib ben Becher, with Joseph as its Priest. All the Samaritans who settled at Gaza were of the tribe of Benjamin, excepting Mouzaf ben Mitpalel of the tribe of Ephraim. The Martyr Paul of Gaza, c. a.d. 300, before his death at Cæsarea, prayed for the Samaritans of his native town.
During the reign of Justinian, c. a.d. 529, the imperial troops once occupied the city on the occasion of an uprising of the Samaritan inhabitants of the district, and the citizens were greatly disturbed. The Bishop Marcianus stepped into the breach, and settled the affair by organising a militia to which the matters in dispute were referred. The imperial troops were withdrawn, and peace was restored.
There were many Samaritans at Gaza in the seventh century. After the Muslim conquest, a.d. 634, the Samaritans of Gaza deposited their property with their high priest, and fled to the east.
The five hundred Samaritans who had been captured at Shechem by Bazawash, governor of Demascus, c. a.d. 1137, were redeemed by a co-religionist of Acre. Many of these settled in Gaza.
In a.d. 1674 the Samaritans living at Gaza addressed a letter to Robert Huntington, who was deeply interested in their religion and literature.
Clermont-Ganneau reports the finding of a Samaritan liturgical inscription at Gaza, but does not produce it either in the original or in translation. Able also reports a fragment of a decalogue in the Samaritan script of the Mohammedan period.
Among the Gleanings from the Minute Books of the Jerusalem Literature Society, November 1849, Mr. E. T. Rogers remarks that the Samaritans are still quite a distinct set of people, as they were in the time of our Saviour. They make no proselytes; never intermarry with people of other sects, and are particularly clean as a people; none others are known than those now in Nablus. Their principal distinction in the oriental crowd is that they wear a crimson turban.
When the Rev. Dr. E. H. Thomson visited Nablus, in May 1898, he asked after the fate of the Samaritan community that was still surviving in Gaza when Baron Sylvestre de Sacy, c. 1829, corresponded with the Samaritans of Nablus. He was informed that the community in Gaza had ceased to exist some sixty years before. Now, at all events, these one hundred and sixty Samaritans resident in Nablus are all that remain of the Samaritan race and creed.
Mr. J. G. Pickard, writing from Gaza in The Quarterly Statement P. E. F., July 1873, reports on the newly discovered Samaritan Stone of which the inscription is a passage in Deuteronomy iv. 29-31. It has been suggested that this stone belonged to a Samaritan synagogue in Gaza. The spot where the stone was discovered is about a mile and a half from the sea shore.
CHAPTER VII
SOME EARLY BISHOPS OF (I) GAZA, (II) MAYOUMAS (THE PORT OF GAZA)
Palestina Prima—Cæsarea, Metropolis.
The Dictionary of Christian Antiquities, p. 1631, mentions "Philemon (1) Bishop of Gaza; commemorated February 14 (Basil Menol)."
The Kalendar of the Byzantine Church, on November 22, commemorates "Philemon, Apostle."
The Jerusalem Archimandrite Meletius Metaxakis, (now Bishop of Kition, Cyprus), in an article on the Madaba Mosaic Map, Nea Sion, May and June 1907, p. 485, states that "according to The Ecclesiastical Treatise about the Seventy Disciples of the Lord, Philemon, the Apostle, to whom the Epistle of Paul is directed, became Bishop of Gaza."
The legendary history of Philemon supplies nothing on which we can rely. The Apostolic Constitutions (vii. 46) relate that Philemon became Bishop of Colosse, and died a martyr under Nero, but this is not sustained by any other early testimony, and is expressly denied by the author of the Commentary on St. Paul's Epistles, attributed to Hillary. This tradition, therefore, which Dr. Meyer (p. 59) mentions, apparently without hesitation, cannot, I think, be accepted.