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 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)