He was the founder of a Samaritan sect often assumed to be Gnostic in nature, and is reputed to have known John the Baptist, and been either a teacher or a rival of Simon Magus.
[citation needed] Jerome gives the same account, saying, "I say nothing of the Jewish heretics who before the coming of Christ destroyed the law delivered to them: of Dositheus, the leader of the Samaritans who rejected the prophets".
[8] 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.
[11] These have been identified with the Samaritans Sabbæeus and Theodosius, of whom Josephus relates,[12] that they defended before the Egyptian king Ptolemæus Philometor against Andronicus, the advocate of the Jews, the sanctity of Mount Gerizim.
[13] The Samaritan chronicles (the Book of Joshua and Abu al-Fath's Annales) recount a similar discussion between Zerubbabel and Sanballat.
Yet the fact that the patriarch Eulogius of Alexandria (who probably lived 582–603) disputed successfully against the Samaritan followers of Dostan (Δοσθήν) or Dositheus, and wrote a work expressly against them (Photius, "Bibliotheca," cod.
The Pseudo-Clementine Recognitions and Homilies tells how Dositheos, by spreading a false report of Simon Magus' death, succeeded in installing himself as head of his sect.
Abu al-Fatḥ[27] says of the Dostan, the Samaritan Dositheans, that they abolished the festivals instituted by the Mosaic law, as well as the astronomical tables, counting thirty days in every month, without variation.
[citation needed] The determination of the months by means of the testimony of witnesses may also have been a Karaite custom although that practise may go back to a time before the opposite view of the Pharisees existed.
When the prominent Samaritan Yosef Iban Adhasi died, the Dositheans caused disturbance, possibly even expressing joy at the news.