DOSITHEUS

DOSITHEUS, patriarch, scholar (1641–1707). Patriarch of Jerusalem from 1669 to 1707, Dositheus was arguably the most important Orthodox church leader of the seventeenth century. Active in church life at a very young age due to the death of his father and placement in a monastery in 1649, he became Archdeacon of Jerusalem in 1661 and Archbishop of Caesarea five years later. An indefatigable scholar, writer, and polemicist, he spent perhaps the greatest part of his pontificate in Romanian Moldavia (q.v.) where, in the city of Jassy and at some distance from the Turkish authorities in Constantinople, he was free to set up the first printing press in the Ottoman Empire (q.v.). Jassy is where the Synod of 1642 condemned the “Confession” of Cyril Lukaris (q.v.) and published, in slightly edited form, the highly “Latinized” reply, the “Confession” of Peter Mogila (q.v.). Dositheus won general, pan-Orthodox approval for his own “Confession” at the Synod of Bethlehem in 1672, a more balanced and traditionally Orthodox document than Mogila’s, the Kievan metropolitan. He also published much valuable patristic material, including the Tomos of Joy with the minutes of the Council of Constantinople in 879 and writings of Gregory Palamas (q.v.), as well as timely polemical works and a thirteen-volume history of the Patriarchate of Jerusalem (q.v.).