74 See Hilgenfeld, Die Ketzergeschichte des Urchristenthums, 1884, pp. 155 ff.; Montgomery, The Samaritans, 1907, pp. 252 ff. 75 See also Epiphanius; the Sadducees were an offshoot from Dositheus. 76 Not in the time of Alexander the Great, as Dr. Schechter has from Montgomery. Abul-Fath, indeed (and Adler’s Chronicle after him), introduces this whole story before Alexander, and makes Simon a protégé of Darius; but the testimony that Dositheus appeared after the time of Hyrcanus, which, as a matter of Samaritan history, may be conceived to rest on tradition, is not to be set aside because, in fitting his Samaritan traditions into the framework of universal history, Abul-Fath is in error by two or three centuries about the date of Hyrcanus. This used to be understood; see, e.g., De Sacy, Chrestomathie arabe, vol. ii (1806), p. 209. 77 Epiphanius avers, on the contrary, that the Dositheans kept their festivals at the same time with the Jews. 78 See Ideler, Handbuch der mathematischen und technischen Chronologie, vol. i, pp. 437 ff., 517; Ginzel, Handbuch der mathematischen und technischen Chronologie, vol. i, pp. 170 f., 287. On the calendar of Gaza, Schürer, Geschichte des jüdischen Volkes (3 ed.), vol. ii, pp. 88 f. 79 We have experience of the inconvenience of this system in the wandering of Easter and the Christian festivals dependent on it; a reform by which Easter should come on a fixed date in the solar year has repeatedly been proposed, and a movement is now on foot in Europe to bring this about by agreement of governments and churches. 80 The year of 364-days is found also in Enoch 72-82, and (by the side of the true solar year of 365-¼ and the lunar year of 354 days) in the Slavonic Enoch. The intercalary days are introduced one at the beginning of each quarter of the year (Enoch 75 1); this is also the method in Jubilees; see 6 23. In effect this is equivalent to a year in which eight months have thirty days and four—those in which the equinoxes and solstices fall—have thirty-one (Enoch 72 13, 19). It is not impossible that this system is implied in the chronology of the flood in Genesis; see B. W. Bacon, Hebraica, vol. viii (1891-1892), pp. 79-88, 124-139; Charles, Jubilees, p. 56. 81 This is not the place to discuss the value of Epiphanius’s testimony. His description of the Scribes and Pharisees at least admonishes to caution. 82 The text is certain enough, in the sense that all the manuscripts hitherto collated have the same reading. 83 Nicetas, in reproducing Epiphanius’s account of the Dositheans, has τεκνῶσαι, “after having begotten children,” which also agrees very well with the context.