other · 170 · Ardabau
Eusebius quotes an anonymous writer who puts the beginning at Ardabau, a village of Mysia on the Phrygian border, when Gratus was proconsul of Asia: a recent convert named Montanus began to prophesy in ecstasy, and two women, Maximilla and Priscilla, left their husbands and did the same. What made it a crisis was not the content, which was rigorist rather than heretical — more fasting, no remarriage, no flight from persecution, and the New Jerusalem shortly to descend on a Phrygian town — but the form. They spoke in the first person as the Paraclete. Prophecy as such was not new; a voice saying I, the Lord, am speaking now, alongside scripture and against the bishop, was a question about authority that had to be answered. The answer, worked out in synods across Asia through the 170s, was that the prophetic voice belonged to the past and to the book. The cost is recorded here without softening: the movement was rigorist, not licentious; its opponents were reduced to inventing scandals; and Tertullian, the finest Latin mind of his generation, joined it and never came back. This dataset keeps the two women on this event rather than giving each her own, because it was one movement and one source names all three.
Has prophecy stopped?
The church decided it had, and it took a generation and cost it Tertullian.