Montanism (the New Prophecy)

In a Phrygian village in the middle of the second century a man named Montanus began prophesying in ecstatic speech, and two women, Priscilla and Maximilla, prophesied alongside him. They did not call themselves Montanists — that was their opponents' label. They called it simply the New Prophecy, and their claim was that the Paraclete whom Jesus had promised was speaking now, through them. What followed was less exotic than the label suggests: stricter fasting, refusal of second marriages, a readiness to face martyrdom rather than flee it, and the expectation that the New Jerusalem would descend at Pepuza in Phrygia. It spread well beyond Asia Minor — Tertullian of Carthage became its most articulate Latin advocate — and although Asian synods condemned it and later imperial law suppressed it, communities persisted for centuries. Pepuza and its neighbour Tymion, lost for well over a thousand years, were located by archaeologists in inland Turkey only in 2000.