Note 37 — Chapter IV · THE EVOLUTION OF THE CULT

I have said that “the Jesus” can have been “the one God” only for non-Jews. Conceivably he may have been so for some Samaritans. There is reason to believe that in the age of the Herods only a minority of the Samaritan people held by Judaism;37 and there is Christian testimony that in the second century a multitude of them worshipped as the One God Sem or Semo, the Semitic Sun-God whose name is embodied in that of Samson. Justin Martyr, himself a Samaritan, expressly alleges that “almost all the Samaritans, and a few even of other nations” worship and acknowledge as “the first God” Simon, whom he describes as a native of Gitta or Gitton, emerging in the reign of Claudius Cæsar.38 Justin’s gross blunder in identifying a Samaritan of the first century with the Sabine deity Semo Sancus, whose statue he had seen in Rome,39 is proof that he could believe in the deification of an alien as Supreme God, in his lifetime, in a nation with ancient cults. The thing being impossible, we are left to the datum that Sem or Semo or Sem-on = Great Sem was widely worshipped in Samaria, as elsewhere in the near East.40