This study has been researched for and written between the years 1989 and 1994, sandwiched precariously between my university teaching and administrative duties. A lot of it was done during two terms of study leave in 1992–3. In those years too I took the opportunity to make a third visit to western Turkey, to visit the area where the beginnings of Montanism are usually located and to pass through Cappadocia. In the summer of 1993 I gave a series of lectures on ‘Approaching the New Testament from the Second Century’ for the ninetieth year of the Vacation Term for Biblical Study series, held at St Anne's College, Oxford, and the process of preparation helped me to clarify some of my thinking about second-century Christianities.

I had some interest in Montanism already but would not have ventured into wholehearted study of it at this stage without the invitation from Alex Wright, of Cambridge University Press. I am glad the invitation came, for Montanism has proved to be a fascinating topic – hard to unravel but never dull. I have valued particularly the brief to write about Montanism ‘from a woman's perspective’ and as a result women figure large in this work.

Montanism cannot be a comprehensive study, however. More than one volume is needed for that and only one is allowed me. We know less about Montanism, even about its beginnings, than many writers have liked to assume and what evidence we possess sometimes points (in my opinion) in directions quite other than those scholars have taken.

THE PROPHECY IN ASIA MINOR AND BEYOND

Chapter two of this study will look at the early stages of Montanism in the three centres of which we know most: Asia Minor, Rome and Carthage. This will take us up to at least the second decade of the third century – to the time of Apollonius in Asia Minor, to Hippolytus in Rome and to Tertullian in Carthage.

The Prophecy had also reached other places. In the period in question we hear of it from writers associated with Egypt, viz. Clement of Alexandria and Origen (Clement Strom, iv.13.93.1; cf. vii.17.108.1 (Phrygian heresy); Origen De princ. ii.7.3). The former (the elder of the two) lived in Caesarea of Cappadocia from 202 ce, though formerly in Alexandria where he had been head of the Catechetical School. Origen had replaced him in that rôle. Their testimony confirms: (a) that prophecy itself was important in the debate with the catholics (Clement proposed to argue with them and others in a work Concerning Prophecy); and (b) that Prophets used the term ‘psychics’ as one of denigration of the catholics (Clement). It confirms too (Origen) that they had distinctive teaching about the Paraclete (cf. In Matthaeum xv, 30) and were zealous in religious obligations (‘per ostentationem acrioris observantiae’) including abstinence from foods and forbidding of marriage. But both writers were probably dependent on sources from elsewhere. Origen had been in Rome a few years prior to writing De principiis (c. 225 ce), though his reference to Agabus and the daughters of Philip in his commentary on Matthew (xxviii) suggests knowledge of a debate about prophecy such as we know from Asia (Eusebius HE v.17,3 [Anonymous]).

THE FIRST WOMEN PROPHETS

‘If Montanus had triumped …’

The quotation from Salmon's study of Montanus in the late nineteenth-century Dictionary of Christian Biography speaks volumes. It presupposes the primacy of Montanus; a particular susceptibility of women to wild excitement together with their incapacity for insight on matters of doctrine and also the triumphalism of women in any religious group unwise enough to give them space. It is a good example of its kind.

Our sources provide many references to women as well as utterances and records from the women themselves. Montanism is unusually rich in that respect, though still there are difficulties in recovering the women's history. For, as Virginia Burrus has observed about ancient heretical movements, the heresiological sources are written ‘from the point of view of self-identified orthodoxy’ and they are written by men, ‘who utilize the figure of the heretical female as a vehicle for the negative expression of their own orthodox male self-identity’.

Women of the earliest Prophecy were not heretical (Burrus' analysis concerned fourth-century women) but sources for much of later Montanism confirm the picture she paints – namely we have the reverse, negative image of the good orthodox woman which the catholics were helping to create and to contain. The female heretic was ‘the threatening image of a community with uncontrolled boundaries’ – allegedly sexually adventurous, verbally and theo- logically untrammelled, divorced from her rightful (private) sphere. There are hints of this even in the earliest sources on the New Prophecy.

LATER MONTANISM: EGGLESIOLOGY AND EPIGRAPHY

The Three died. Themiso (of the ‘catholic epistle’) and Miltiades were then among the leading figures. Perhaps it was the latter's writings which were rejected in 11. 81–2 of the Roman Muratorian Fragment (cf. Eusebius HE v. 16, 3), for the Prophecy was known to its creator (see 3.9.3 above). We know little about the Prophets' churches, however, and there is near silence from Montanists themselves (though we learn a lot about catholic action against them, see 5.2 and 5.3 below). There is the account of the supposed Montanist of the Dialexis and some evidence from epigraphy, but mostly we are reliant on writers such as Epiphanius, Augustine and Jerome, none of whom had cause to present a balanced picture or desire to understand the finer points of Montanist teaching. As for ‘the simple faithful’ in the churches, they probably knew little about their more exotic neighbours and cared less. To the world ‘the Montanist in the street’ must have seemed like any other Christian, except of course that we know some of them lived exciting lives of the Spirit and communed with angels (Nanas).

Toleration (if it had ever existed) did not last. The age of Constantine and his successors brought emphasis on uniformity of worship and so Montanist peculiarities would have become obvious. Their celebration of Easter according to an alien calendar, for example, would have marked them out and might even have had them prosecuted. Loyal citizens of the state would be properly assembled (after catholic fashion) on the (proper) Easter Day (so the measure of Gratian, Valentinian II and Theodosius I, 382 ce).

MONTANUS: THE MAN AND THE ORACLES

Montanus the man

Montanus has a native Phrygian name and first appears, enigmatically, in the village called Ardabau, coming on the stage of history like Melchizedek (Gen. 14: 18f.), without details of ancestry or birth (Heb. 7:3). He was dead by the time the Anonymous wrote and that author did not believe the rumour that Montanus, like Judas Iscariot, had hanged himself (HE v. 16, 15). The Anonymous had no first-hand knowledge of events. It was reported that Montanus was a recent convert to Christianity (HE v. 16, 7), but that may have been said to discredit him. All we really know of Montanus from the early sources is that (i) the mode of his prophesying was noteworthy, with possession and ecstasy and strange manner of speech (HE v. 16, 7; and cf. Miltiades (not Alcibiades) in v. 17, 2f., see 3.2.2–3 below); that (ii) he allowed marriages to be annulled and instituted new fasts (HE v. 18, 2; cf. Hippolytus Refut. omn. haer. viii.19; x.25, and see 3.4–3.5 below), and that (iii) the small Phrygian towns of Pepuza and Tymion were, at his instigation, known by the name ‘Jerusalem’ (v. 18, 3, see 3.3.3 and 3.3.5 below). Then (iv) he won followers and began to organise them: encouraging gatherings in the ‘Jerusalem’ towns of Pepuza and Tymion, soliciting and collecting offerings from the convinced and (perhaps for the first time in Christian history) formally paying salaries to appointed teachers (HE v.18,2).

Points (ii), (iii) and (iv) are considered elsewhere in this study (3.4–3.8), as also is the manner of prophesying which Montanus employed. Nevertheless, the accusations against his mode of prophesying need discussing.