Montanus

Montanus (flourished 2nd century) was the founder of Montanism, a schismatic movement of Christianity in Asia Minor (modern Turkey) and North Africa from the 2nd to the 9th century. The prophetic movement at first expected an imminent transformation of the world but later evolved into sectarianism claiming a new revelation.

Little is known about Montanus. Before his conversion to Christianity, he apparently was a priest of the Oriental ecstatic cult of Cybele, a mother goddess of fertility. According to the 4th-century church historian Eusebius of Caesarea, about the year 172 or 173 Montanus entered into an ecstatic state and began prophesying in the region of Phrygia (now in central Turkey).

Montanus became the leader of a group of illuminati (“the enlightened”), including the prophetesses Priscilla (or Prisca) and Maximilla. The members exhibited the frenzied nature of their religious experience by enraptured seizures and utterances of strange languages that the disciples regarded as oracles of the Holy Spirit (see also glossolalia).

Convinced that the end of the world was at hand and that the New Jerusalem mentioned in the New Testament (Revelation to John) was about to descend near the Phrygian village of Pepuza, Montanus laid down a rigoristic morality to purify his followers and detach them from their material desires. Official church criticism of Montanus and his movement consequently emphasized the new prophecy’s unorthodox ecstatic expression and his neglect of the bishops’ divinely appointed rule.

Despite the church’s official disapproval of Montanism as a heretical sect, the excommunication of Montanist leaders, and the failure of the world to come to an end, Montanism survived in the rural areas of Asia Minor. The earliest explicitly Christian inscriptions outside the catacombs of Rome have been discovered in the valley of the Tembris River in Phrygia, dated by scholars to the middle of the 3rd century. A Montanist church with a full hierarchy survived until the 8th century. Its most significant figure, however, lived in North Africa. Tertullian, who converted to Montanism about 207, was a brilliant writer and the first important Christian to compose in Latin.

Fragments of Montanist prophecies are preserved by Eusebius of Caesarea in his Ecclesiastical History.