With the Sadducees, as we know them from the New Testament, Josephus, and rabbinical sources, our sect cannot well be identified. There is, however, a sect sometimes associated with the Sadducees, namely, the Dositheans, in whose teachings and customs Dr. Schechter finds such resemblances as lead him to surmise that the Dositheans were an offshoot of our sect. The [pg 361] accounts of the Dositheans in writers of different ages and religious connections, from Origen and Epiphanius down to the Samaritan Chronicler Abul-Fath and the Moslem heresiographer Shahrastani, are notoriously confused and contradictory,[74] so that many scholars have felt constrained to conclude that there was more than one sect of the name. The Fathers generally agree in describing the Dositheans as a Samaritan heresy, though Epiphanius and Philaster have it that the author of the heresy was by extraction a Jew. They frequently bring him into connection with Simon Magus, in the time of the Apostles. According to Origen, he gave himself out for the Messiah foretold by Moses; his followers had books of his, and legends pretending that he had not died, but was still alive somewhere. Other Fathers give no date for the rise of the heresy, but by coupling it with the Sadducees seem to imply that it was older than Christianity; thus (Pseudo)Tertullian (probably after Hippolytus)[75] says that Dositheus the Samaritan was the first to reject the prophets as not inspired; the Sadducees, springing from this root of error, ventured to deny the resurrection also. From this Philaster probably drew the inference that Zadok, the founder of the Sadducees, was a disciple of Dositheus. The Samaritan and Moslem authors agree with the Fathers in treating the Dositheans as a Samaritan sect. Abul-Fath, a Samaritan writer of the fourteenth century, puts the beginnings of the sect in the first century b.c., at the time when the yoke of the Jews had been broken by the kings of the gentiles, and the Samaritans were able to return and restore their sanctuary, which had been destroyed by Simon and John Hyrcanus.[76] The Moslem writer Shahrastani, in his [pg 362] learned work on Religious Sects and Philosophical Schools (first half of the twelfth century), gives substantially the same date: the founder of the Dositheans, who professed to be the prophet foretold by Moses, the star spoken of in the law, appeared about a century before Christ.
In this state of the evidence it is obvious that no argument can be based on the coincidence in time between the origin of the Dositheans and that of our sect. When the Fathers bring the names of Dositheus and Zadok into conjunction, it means no more than that they attributed certain errors to both Dositheans and Sadducees; just as the Talmudic legend which makes Zadok and Boëthus apostate disciples of Antigonus of Socho is but a mythological way of saying that Sadducees and Boëthusians were addicted to the same heresies concerning retribution, or as the coupling of Dositheus and Simon Magus means that both passed for Samaritan arch-heretics.
The first point of agreement between the Dositheans and our sect which Dr. Schechter notes is in the calendar. Abul-Fath says that the Dositheans did away with the computation of the almanac (tables of lunar conjunctions), making all their months exactly thirty days long, and (thus) annulled the correct festivals and the ordinance of the fasts and the affliction (Day of Atonement).[77] The circle of thirty disciples, who, with a woman called Helena (Moon), formed the train of Dositheus, according to the Clementine Recognitions (ii, 8) symbolized the days of the month. If our sect employed the calendar of the Book of Jubilees, as seems highly probable, they also had thirty-day months; but it would not follow that the system was original with them, nor that the Dositheans must have adopted it from them. There were, in fact, from very remote times, two years in use within the area of the ancient civilizations, a lunar-solar year, consisting of twelve lunar months of twenty-nine or thirty days each, with a thirteenth month added every two or three years to maintain approximate agreement with the solar year and make the months fall in the same seasons, and a solar year of three hundred and sixty-five days, divided into twelve months of thirty [pg 363] days each without regard to the lunations, and five extra days (epagomenae). The former was the system of the Babylonians and the Greeks, as well as the Jews; the latter was in use in Egypt from immemorial times until the Roman reforms. From the Egyptians it was borrowed by the Abyssinians; it was employed also for some centuries before and after the Christian era in the calendars of Gaza and Ashkelon. The Persians had the same system; the Yashts contain a liturgy for the thirty regents of the days of the month, the five extra days being assigned to the divine Gathas. Probably under Persian influences, this calendar was established in Armenia, Cappadocia, and other parts of Asia Minor.[78]
Jews and Samaritans not only lived in many of the lands of their dispersion among peoples who used the thirty-day month, but encountered this calendar in commercial centres on the very borders of Palestine with which they had close relations. The advantages of a system in which the festivals came on fixed dates, instead of shifting within wide limits, as they must in the lunar-solar year with its irregular intercalation, are obvious,[79] and an attempt to reform the Jewish calendar accordingly may have been made more than once and in more than one region. The peculiarity of the system of the Book of Jubilees is not the uniform length of the months, but the admission of only four extra days, thus making an even fifty-two weeks (364 days), which was of more concern to the author than the increased error of a whole day in the solar year.[80] We do not know whether the Dositheans [pg 364] of Abul-Fath and the Sadducees of Kirkisani (of whom later) agreed in this point with Jubilees, or counted five extra days like the rest of the world. The former may be thought probable, but it cannot be assumed as certain. The year of 365 days is also found in the Greek Apocalypse of Baruch, c. 6.
Dr. Schechter quotes Epiphanius[81] on the Dositheans as saying, “some of them abstain from a second marriage, but others never marry”; and, although “the text is not quite certain on this point,”[82] is inclined to perceive in the statement “at least an echo of the law of our sect prohibiting a second marriage as long as the first wife is alive.” The passage in Epiphanius is more than obscure, and the text is for that reason suspected. The passage runs: Ἐμψύχων ἀπέχονται, ἀλλὰ καί τινες αὐτῶν ἐγκρατεύονται ἀπὸ γάμων μετὰ τοῦ βιῶσαι, ἄλλοι δὲ καὶ παρθενεύουσιν. Whatever this may mean, it certainly is not, “some of them abstain from marriage after the death of their first wives,” nor does anything in the context justify the large changes in the text which would be required to force this sense upon it. Casaubon's conjecture υἱῶσαι has nothing to commend it. The simplest solution of the difficulty would be to write συμβιῶσαι,[83] “some of them refrain from marital relations after having lived together, others preserve their virginity.” Whether this emendation is right or not, it is clear that Epiphanius describes his Dositheans as a kind of Encratite ascetics, while the prohibition of polygamy—whether contemporaneous or consecutive—by our sect has a totally different ground; of asceticism there is, indeed, no symptom in its ordinances.
Dr. Schechter thinks that the statement of Epiphanius quoted [pg 365] above that the Dositheans “abstain from eating living creatures” “may have some connection with the law in our text on p. 12, l. 11, which may perhaps be understood to imply that the sect forbade honey, regarding it as 'eber min haḥai (a limb cut off from a living animal), which would agree with the testimony of Abul-Fath that they forbade the eating of eggs, except those which were found in a slaughtered fowl.” Ἐμψύχων ἀπέχονται does not mean “abstain from eating living creatures,” but “abstain from animal food,”[84] while our sect certainly did not include vegetarianism among its eccentricities, any more than the depreciation of marriage.
Several authors describe the Dositheans as extravagant sabbatarians. Origen reports that their rule was, that in whatever place and in whatever posture the Sabbath found a man, there and thus he was to remain till its end. Abul-Fath gives a longer account of their Sabbath laws, which are much stricter than those of our texts. It was forbidden, for example, to feed domestic animals or give them drink on the Sabbath, they were to be provided on Friday with enough provender and water to last them through the Sabbath. Extreme sabbatarianism is, however, a sectarian propensity which does not have to be borrowed.
Dr. Schechter quotes Epiphanius further as saying that the Dositheans “have no intercourse with all people because they detest all mankind,” in which he thinks “we may readily recognize here the law of our Sect requiring the washing of the clothes when they were brought by a Gentile (because of the contamination), and the prohibition of staying over the Sabbath in the vicinity of Gentiles” (Introduction, pp. xxiii f.). What Epiphanius says is that the Dositheans agree with the rest of the Samaritans in the observance of circumcision and the Sabbath, and in avoiding contact with any one because they feel that all men (that is, all gentiles) are unclean. He had already described the customs of all the Samaritans: They wash themselves and their clothes in water when they come in contact with a foreigner; for they regard it as a defilement to come in contact with any one or even to touch [pg 366] a man of another religion.[85] It is, therefore, not a Dosithean peculiarity, but the general Samaritan usage which Epiphanius describes, and it is useless to search for remoter affinities.
The marked hostility to the patriarch Judah with which Eulogius, the Patriarch of Alexandria (died 607 a.d.), charges Dositheus[86] is natural enough in a Samaritan heresiarch; in the same sentence Eulogius accuses him of scorning the prophets of God, which, again, is not peculiar to the Dositheans, but is the general Samaritan position. It has been remarked above (p. 353) that our sect gives especial honor to the books of the prophets “whose words Israel has despised”; and, however unfriendly the attitude of these seceders to the degenerate Judah of their time, there is no indication of animosity to the patriarch, as there is none in the Jubilees.
From a much later time Dr. Schechter has gleaned some notices of a sect of “Zadokites” in whose tenets also he recognizes resemblances to those of our sect. Kirkisani, a Karaite author of the tenth century,[87] says: “Zadok was the first who exposed the Rabbanites and contradicted them publicly. He revealed a part of the truth, and composed books [88]