Chapter 5: The Baptist Movement of the Samaritan Messiah Dusis/Dosithea

Shadow and Light from Samaria

If Samaria constitited an object of scandal for Judea, its neighbor to the south, it was because of Samaria’s ancient cults that entered into the project of religious and national[ist] resistance, which was resolved to impede the invasion-politics of Yahwehism and its terrible God, avenger and warrior.

These same Samaritans still tolerated an archaic form of YHWH, close to El, the Father, and the angelic plurality contained in the form of Elohim. Holding the sanctuary of Sichem on Mount Garizim as the only true temple, Samaritanism did not admit any other sacred scriptures than the Torah or Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible) and the Book of Joshua, which Hellenization, soon implanted in Samaria, propagated under the name Book of Jesus (thus would Origen cite it around 250).

The hatred between Judeans and Samaritans was exacerbated by the destruction of Sichem under the reign of Jean Hyran, Asmonean prince and Great Priest of Jerusalem (135–105 [B.C.E.]).

On the other hand, Hellenization, badly accepted in Judea, encountered a better welcome in Samaria. It is true that the Canaanean and Philistinian substrata, quite long-lived, were not foreign to an Achean implantation, at the time of the migrations of the Second Millennium before the Christian era. The persistance of cultural forms issued from the Magna Mater, allied with the audacious critiques of Greek philosophy, introduced into the closed universe of the gods a quite corrosive mixture, of which the teachings of Simon and Barbelite practices offered singular examples, that is, when one discovered them underneath the silence and the calumnies accumulated by the Church’s work of eradication and by its complacent historians.

This light of Samaria badly accommodated the sparkling and virtuous road chosen by Essenism. Nevertheless, perhaps it clears up the birth of dissident sects, such as the still poorly-known Sethians, whom the Messiah-Son of Man would frequently encounter in the Qumranian manuscripts.

Between Judea and Galilee, Samaria extended to the rivers of the Dead Sea, where the original kernel of Essenism was established. These places were propitious for the implicit constitution of a front hostile to the Temple, to Jerusalem, to Judean beliefs, nay, to the law of Moses.[77]

Did not Essene dualism draw its origin from the Samaritan distinction between YHWH and his angelic constituent, Elohim? In any case, the heresy of the “two celestial powers” — a veritable crime against the unique God in the eyes of Jewish orthodoxy and condemned by the Books of Henoch — was surreptitiously dropped into it, in the confrontation between the Good Angels and the Bad Angels.

Such a doctrine even impregnated the thought of the very Pharisian Philo of Alexandria, when he opposed the beneficial power of Theos, the Good God, to the punitive function with which the Kyrios or Savoir (the translation of Adonia, the equivalent of the Tetragrammaton YHWH) charged himself. Marcion restrained himself from making precise the divergence between the God of the Jews, creator of a bad world, and the Good God that de-Judaized Christianity would substitute for YHWH as the creator of a world in which the Good would realize itself through the intervention of the Messiah-Redeemer.

But the relation between Essenism and Samaritanism, which here includes the diversity of the tendencies that they nourished, discovered in Dusis/Dosithea a Messianic figure, the importance of whom few researchers have emphasized .

The Messiah Dusis/Dunstan/Dosithea

In the Fourteenth Century, the Samaritan chronicler Abu’l Fath spoke of a certain Dusis or Dunstan around whom were united a messianist and baptist group that he called the Dunstanites at the time of the crisis engendered by the destruction of the Temple at Garizim by Hyran II.

Was a second expansion of Dunstanism manifested by a new eschatological prophet named Dosithea, as Isser suggests?[78] He would have had as his successor a prophet named Aulianah.

But the name Dosithea, Dosi-theos, which refers back to Dusis and means “God gave him,” recalls Dusis’s quality as an Angel-Messiah. No doubt he also established a rapprochment with another Messiah, come from Galilee: Hanina Ben Dosa, that is to say, son of Dusis.[79]

Dositheaism seems to have assumed in Hellenized form the ancient Dunstanite movement, which was a baptist and messianic movement that resulted from a schism within Samaritanism.[80]

As in Essene dissidence, Dusis’s schism was accompanied by a re-casting of the calendar: the adepts attributed 30 days to each month. A century later, the Elchasaites — anecdotally translating the scorn they felt for Saul (assimilated by Dosithea and Simon) — reported that Dosithea founded a sect of thirty men and a woman named the Moon [la Lune], who was prostituted in a brothel in Tire and who was the mistress of the prophet before throwing herself in the arms of Simon.

In the Sixth Century, Bishop Euloge encountered in Alexandria Samaritan groups that still reproached Dosithea for having altered a great many sacred texts. Abu’l Fath shares the indignation with the rest.

In truth, if the prophet Dunstanite rewrote the sacred messages — as the Essenes, Nazarenes, Marcionites, Anti-Marcionites and Catholics did — this was because Moses spoke through his voice, he was entitled to revise the law and adapt it to his divine truth.

Did not Dusis’s disciples go further in the critique of Judean and Mosaic doctrine? This is the hypothesis advanced by Fossum.[81] Dosithea — the Hellenized version of Dusis — rejected the prophets accepted by the Jewish canon, called for the reform of Mosaic law and even extolled the abolition of religious duties.

All the milieus that were preoccupied with Judaism debated the observance and the questioning of the rituals claimed to have been prescribed by Moses. The Hellenization of Judeo-Christianity after 140 did not take place on any other terrain. The rejection of the prophets was announced by Marcion.

As for the irreligious attitude, it corresponds to the philosophy of Simon of Samaria, whom the heresiologues communally characterized as the disciple of Dosithea and the father of all heresies. But the amalgam of Dosithea and Simon appears to have come from the same polemical vein as the identification of Saul with Simon, which was made by the partisans of the churches of Jacob and Simon-Peter.

The Dositheans participated in the general reform movement that, through Essenism, Ebionism, Nazareanism and Paulinism, would end in the Hellenized Christianity of the Marcionites and Anti-Marcionites of the Second Century.

According to Abu’l Fath, the Dositheans were called “the children of the Apostle,” the apostle being Moses.[82]

At the hinge of this era, officially decreed to be Christian, many were the apostles and their children. It would be necessary to efface the memory, to have a conjuration of ecclesiastical interests impose the symbolic power of Joshua, leading the nations toward the mythical beyond of the Jordan, under the redemptive name “God has saved, saves, will save” — a conjuration much later obliterated in its turn by the fabrication of a historical Jesis.

In Dosithea, Christian historicism wanted to make a disciple of Jesus named Nathaniel — which corresponds to Dositheos, God gave him.[83]

The novels devoted to Jesus abound in traits of this type, in which reality, travestied and put on stage, works to the glory of the principal person. Mythical heroes thus dominate beings and symbols from which, in fact, the legend proceeds.

Dusis preceded, announced and prepared the effervescence — limited until the Zealot movement gave it a growing audience — in which messiahs, apostles, prophets, enlightened ones and charlatans carved out a popular reputation by extolling the reform, rebirth or abolition of Judean conservatism.

Like Essenism, Dositheism or Dunstanism was a baptist, messianic and reformist movement. Baptism occupied a primordial place in it. Prayers were practiced in [bodies of] water, such as bathing pools [piscines] or the Jordan, so fertile symbolically.

The erudite blinders on the researchers exploring (with the Church’s prejudices) an epoch in which the Church founded its assizes have hardly permitted them to disentangle what has reconciled and distinguished the baptist and Samaritan current of Dunstan/Dositheo (born around 135 [B.C.E.]), Essenism (around 100), Nazareanism (around 50) and the Johannism of Jochanaan/John the Baptist, all of whom were attached to a great ascetic rigor and scorn for the body, the world, women and life.

But there is something more troubling: Dusis is also a cricified and resuscitated Messiah.

The Annals of Abu’l Fath cite a group called the saduqay, which affirmed: “Men will know the resurrection because Dusis is dead due to a shameful death and Levy was stoned to death; because if Dusis was really dead, then all of the just men of the earth would be dead.”

Reserved for slaves and common criminals, the “shameful death” meant execution on the cross. The idea that Dusis, raised to heaven, had not been struck [down] by a real death prevails — when applied to Jesus — in all of the Christianities of the first three centuries, nay, beyond, up to what Catholicism condemned under the name of “Docetism.”

Incarnated as the Spirit of God and the reincarnation of Moses in a terrestrial existence marked by redemptive suffering, Dusis did not fail to evoke the syncretic Messiah of the Judeo-Christian Elchasaites, who expressed themselves around 110 in the Homelies of Peter: “There is only one true prophet: he who since Adam has been incarnated in the patriarchs Henoch, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses and who, at the end, finds his rest by incarnating himself as Jesus.”[84]

As the Master of Justice, Dusis — suffering and glorious Messiah — assured his faithful an eternal survival, a resurrection according to the spirit. Dusis, the Master of Justice, Dosithea, Jochanaan, Jacob and Simon-Peter: do they not trace the line of the syncretisms successively hostile to Yahwehist syncretism, and that an ecumenism of diverse tendencies would — after the “apocalypse” of 70 — be unified according to the myth of Joshua the Gatherer?

It would not be without interest to note that Levy, disciple of Dusis, put to death by stoning, found himself in the novels of Jesus under the traits of Levy the Publican, alias Matthew, to whom are attributed a secret Gospel and a Gospel consecrated by the Catholic canon.

Close to the Johanite, Ebionite and Nazarean sects, Dositheism was opposed, on the other hand, to the Naassenes. The saduqay of whom Abu’l Fath spoke actually taught that “the Serprent would govern the life of creatures up to the day of the resurrection.”[85] They identified the Serprent with the Cosmocrat, the Demiurge, the Bad God ruling the world, as opposed to the Naassenes, for whom NHS, the Serprent, revealed the road to salvation. The Naassenes, it is true, were sometimes repelled by asceticism and chastity, which was uniformly preached by Esseno-Christianity.

Would not the hostility to Yahwehism engender in Dostheism the identification of YHWH with the Demiurge that Marcion would preside over? In a midrash from the Third or Fourth Century, the Samaritan Marqua evoked an ancient tradition in which YHWH revealed himself as the supreme destroyer. He also reported a trait of which one finds traces in the evangelical legends: “At midnight, YHWH destroyed all the first-born of Egypt.”[86]

The exegetes of the New Testament betrayed a certain embarrassment when they were faced with the lie that attributed to Herod the massive extermination known as the “massacre of the innocents.” All things considered, to impute to a perfectly bloody Jewish king a heinous crime that Marcionism would count as one of a number of angry manifestations of the God of Israel — this expresses well the will, on the part of the fabricators of the Gospels, to give to symbols and abstractions an anecdotal and historical character.