The greatest problem in reconstructing the history of the Samaritans during the first centuries of Roman rule is the dearth of literary sources and the overtly hostile nature of those sources, both Jewish and Christian, which have survived.
Josephus was unwilling even to consider the Samaritans Jews: ‘When the Jews are in difficulties, they deny that they have any kinship with them, thereby indeed admitting the truth, but whenever they see some splendid bit of good fortune come to them, they suddenly grasp at the connection with them, saying that they are related to them and tracing their line back to Ephraim and Manasseh, the descendants of Joseph’ (Ant. xi.341). The polemical tone of this passage is obvious. But even in Josephus' famous description of the Jewish sects (Bell. ii.119–66), where the Samaritans do not appear at all, modern scholarship has detected anti-Samaritan motivation in his handling of his sources. It has been argued that underlying both Bell. ii.119ff and a similar description of the Jewish sects by the Patristic author Hippolytus (Philosophumena, Bk. 9, end) was a common literary source on the sects, which each writer abbreviated and expanded in a way independent of the other. The common source was an account of ‘the three’ Jewish sects, Pharisees, Sadducees and Samaritans. To this, before it came into the hands of Josephus and Hippolytus, an account of the Essenes had been added, and the passages on the Sadducees and the Samaritans had been condensed into one to keep the number of the sects at three.