MONTANUS

MONTANUS , second-century Christian schismatic. For information on the life of

Montanus we are dependent on statements made by the Christian controversialists of the
time, as transmitted by the fathers of the church. Only a few utterances of Montanus himself
have come down to us: "I am the Father and I am the Son and I am the Paraclete," as in the
Dialogue between a Montanist and an Orthodox Christian (J. Ficker, 1905, pp. 447ff.) and
according to Didymus of Alexandria (De Trinitate 3.41) and Epiphanius (Panarion 48.11.1).
"The Paraclete" is sometimes replaced by "the Spirit" or "the Holy Spirit" or some expanded
form of this. Man is like a lyre, and Montanus is described as the plectrum that sweeps
across the strings. Extraordinary promises are made to the faithful, but no concrete
indications are given of Montanus's teaching or ethical demands in any of the extant sources
concerning him.

Montanus reportedly first attracted notice in the time of the proconsulate of Gratus
(Quadratus?), in Ardabau (on the Phrygian border of Mysia), as promulgator of the "new
prophecy." When combined with data provided by Eusebius and Epiphanius of Salamis, this
information suggests the date 156/157 as the approximate beginning of this movement.
Montanus is also reported to have been a recent convert to Christianity (in Eusebius's
Church History 5.16.17) and to have previously been a priest of Apollo (this designation
appears in the Dialogue ) or, more generally, a priest of idols (in the Dialogue and in
Didymus's De Trinitate 3.41). Jerome speaks of him (Letters 41, to Marcella) as abscisum et
semivirum (castrated and half a man), that is, a priest of Cybele. Montanus is reported to
have hanged himself (Church History 5.16.13). Since the same story is told of Maximilla, the
prophetess and close associate of Montanus, the report is evidently a piece of antiheretical
polemic, passed on by an anonymous writer simply as a rumor (cited in Church History
5.16.15). We cannot say for certain whether the report is true that Montanus was originally a
pagan priest, but the contradictory claims suggest that early Christian polemics played a
role in the report, especially since there is no reference to this pagan background of
Montanus among the writings of the anti-Montanists of the second century.

Augustine (De haeresibus liber 26) reports that Montanus celebrated the Lord's Supper
with bread that had been prepared using the blood of a one-year-old infant. The blood had
been extracted by means of countless tiny punctures. The same story is told by numerous
church fathers (Epiphanius, Filastrius, Cyril of Jerusalem, Jerome), but it represents
nothing more than the acceptance into antiheretical Christian polemics of the pagan legend
of the orthodox Christian Lord's Supper as involving the ritualistic sacrifice of an infant.
This story was told at the end of the second century (cf. Minucius Felix, Octavius 9.5).
Because they did not recognize this, some scholars saw the story as reflecting the influence
of an orgiastic culture in Asia Minor and considered it as justification for looking into the
matter further. Montanus's contemporary adversaries knew nothing about the story, or they
gladly would have used it in arguments against him. Also, Eusebius, who summarizes
virtually everything of the anti-Montanist writings, would undoubtedly have passed the
story on.

There was nothing about Montanism that could not have been found, at least in the form
of tendencies, in the early Christian church. Montanism was a movement of renewal that
sought to revive, in the second half of the second century, certain elements of worship,
doctrine, and ethics that had gradually died out in the church at large during the first half of
the century. Montanism itself eventually underwent the same kind of development that
official Christianity had experienced (cessation of glossolalia, withering of the prophetic
element, nonfulfillment of the expectation of the second coming of Christ, decline in ethical
standards), so that in the third century Montanism's internal energies were gradually
exhausted and nothing was left but a sect that, from the fourth century on, was exposed to
ecclesiastical and civil persecution and was doomed to extinction.

Bibliography

Barnes, Timothy D. "The Chronology of Montanism." Journal of Theological Studies, n.s.

20 (1970): 403–408.

Ford, J. Massingberd. "Was Montanism a Jewish-Christian Heresy?" Journal of

Ecclesiastical History 17 (1966): 145–158.

Gero, Stephen. "Montanus and Montanism according to a Medieval Syriac Source."

Journal of Theological Studies, n.s. 28 (1977): 520–524.

Kurt Aland (1987)

Translated from German by Matthew J. O'Connell