HERESY SERIES: PART 5
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QUESTION: After Christ’s death, resurrection, and ascension, He appeared to Paul. Paul writes in Gal 1:11-12: “[T]he gospel which was preached by me is not of human invention. For I neither received it from man, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ.” If Christ gave revelatory insight to Paul, is it possible that He also did so to others from the days of Paul to today, and/or sometime to others in the future?
MONTANISM: Montanism was a New Prophesy movement founded in Phrygia (modern-day Turkey) by a man named Montanus and his two female followers, Prisca and Maximilla. They believed that their prophesies could both add to Scripture and correct scripture. When prophesizing, they would enter an ecstatic and frenzied state, which was a new thing and something not characteristic of prior prophets. Montanism also believed that Christ would soon return, the New Jerusalem would come down from heaven and be located in Phrygia, and that Christ would physically reign from the New Jerusalem for 1000 years. For this reason, the Montanists practiced a highly ethical and aesthetic lifestyle so as to cleanse the earth in preparation for Christ’s return.
Our reading is from the early Church historian Eusebius Pamphilus, who extensively cites the writings of Apollinaris of Hierapolis. This is important because Apollinaris was the bishop of Phrygia at the time when the Montanist movement was occurring in Phrygia.
READING: [Apollinaris of Hierapolis writes,] “… Lately, however, having been at Ancyra, a city of Galatia, and having understood that the church in Pontus was very much agitated by this new prophecy, as they call it, but which, as shall be shown, with divine assistance, deserves rather the name of false prophesy … Such, and other matters, he states in the beginning of his work, premising the cause of the mentioned heresy, as follows: “Their combination, therefore, and the recent heretical severance of theirs from the church, had for its origin the following cause:—There is said to be a certain village of Mysia in Phrygia, called Ardaba. There, they say, one of those who was but a recent convert, Montanus by name, when Cratus was proconsul in Asia, in the excessive desire of his soul to take the lead, gave the adversary occasion against himself So that he was carried away in spirit, and wrought up into a certain kind of frenzy and irregular ecstasy, raving, and speaking, and uttering strange things, and proclaiming what was contrary to the institutions that had prevailed in the church, as handed down and preserved in succession from the earliest times … For he excited two others, females, and filled them with the spirit of delusion, so that they also spake like the former, in a kind of ecstatic frenzy, out of all season, and in a manner strange and novel … Those few that were deceived were Phrygians; but the same inflated spirit taught them to revile the whole church under heaven, because it gave neither access nor honor to this false spirit of prophecy. For when the faithful held frequent conversations in many places throughout Asia for this very purpose, and examined their novel doctrines, and pronounced them vain, and rejected them as heresy, then indeed they were expelled and prohibited from communion with the church.” … Montanus and Maximilla indeed, are said to have died another death than this, for at the instigation of that mischievous spirit, the report is, that both of them hung themselves, not indeed at the same time, but at the particular time of each one’s death, as the general report is; and thus they died and terminated their life like the traitor Judas. [, Ecclesiastical History, Book 5, Ch. XVI]
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