The Path of Christianity E-Book

John Anthony McGuckin

• Herausgeber: IVP Academic
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 3032

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

John Anthony McGuckin, one of the world's leading scholars of ancient Christianity, has synthesized a lifetime of work to produce the most comprehensive and accessible history of the Christian movement during its first thousand years. The Path of Christianity takes readers on a journey from the period immediately after the composition of the Gospels, through the building of the earliest Christian structures in polity and doctrine, to the dawning of the medieval Christian establishment. McGuckin explores Eastern and Western developments simultaneously, covering grand intellectual movements and local affairs in both epic scope and fine detail.The Path of Christianity is divided into two parts of twelve chapters each. Part one treats the first millennium of Christianity in linear sequence, from the second to the eleventh centuries. In addition to covering key theologians and conciliar decisions, McGuckin surveys topics like Christian persecution, early monasticism, the global scope of ancient Christianity, and the formation of Christian liturgy. Part two examines key themes and ideas, including biblical interpretation, war and violence, hymnography, the role of women, attitudes to wealth, and early Christian views about slavery and sexuality. McGuckin gives the reader a sense of the real condition of early Christian life, not simply what the literate few had to say.Written for student and scholar alike, The Path of Christianity is a lively, readable, and masterful account of ancient Christian history, destined to be the standard for years to come.

Leseprobe

To my beloved Eileen

CONTENTS

Prelude

Abbreviations

Part One: The Church’s Pilgrim Path

1 The Fertile Second Century

The End of the Apostles and the Beginnings of Apostolicity

A Proliferation of Christian Schools and Teachers

Jewish Christian groups

Encratites

Nazarenes (Nazoraioi)

Ebionites

Elkesaites

Montanism

Asia Minor Quartodeciman communities

Christian gnosis

A context

Valentinus (fl. 120–160)

Bardesanes (c. 154–222)

Basilides (fl. 135–161)

Marcionism

Irenaeus of Lyons (c. 135–200)

The apostolic fathers

Clement of Rome and the pseudo-Clementines

Ignatius of Antioch (c. 35–107)

Hermas (active 90–150)

Polycarp (c. 69–156)

Papias of Hierapolis (active early second century)

The Letter of Barnabas

The Didache

The Letter to Diognetus

The second- to third-century Monarchian movement

The anti-Monarchian early Logos school

Justin Martyr (d. c. 165)

Tertullian (c. 155–220)

Hippolytus (c. 170–235)

Novatian of Rome (c. 200–258)

Early Orthodoxies and Heterodoxies

A Short Reader

Further Reading

2 Blood in the Arena: The Age of Persecutions and Resistance: Second to Third Centuries

Christians in the Roman Imperial Sightline

Nero’s persecution

Domitian’s persecution

Trajan’s persecution

The Severan interlude

The persecution of Maximinus Thrax

The Decian persecution

The persecution of Valerian

The Diocletianic persecution

The memory of a persecuted community

Roman Ideas on Law and Religion

The principate and dominate (27 BC to AD 313)

A Christian response to Roman oppression: Tertullian’s social theology

Hellenistic Attitudes to Christianity: The Case of Celsus

Rival Non-Christian Orders

Mithras

Isis, queen of magic

Cybele

Manichaeism

Early Christian Relations with the Jews

The Christian Apologetical Tradition

Justin Martyr (d. c. 165)

Tatian

Athenagoras of Athens (c. 133–190)

Melito of Sardis (d. c. 180)

Clement of Alexandria (c. 150–215)

Theophilus of Antioch

Tertullian (c. 155–240)

(Marcus) Minucius Felix (later second century)

A Short Reader

Further Reading

3 Coming of Age: Christianity in the Third Century

The Establishment of Christian Polity

Rome and North Africa: Aftermaths of Persecution: Cyprian and Stephen

The Christian Schools at Alexandria and Caesarea

The Alexandrian catechetical school

Origen of Alexandria: Master theologian and philosopher

Origen’s biblical theology of salvation

Origen’s heritage: Dionysius of Alexandria

The school of Caesarea

Christianity and the Philosophers

A Short Reader

Further Reading

4 The Gospel on the Throne: Christians in the Fourth-Century East

Diocletian and the Constantinian Revolution

The Arian Crisis and Its Resolution

Arius and Alexander in conflict

The Council of Nicaea 325

Searching for commonality and consensus

The Synod of Serdica 343

The Synod of Alexandria 362

Athanasius’s opponents

Eusebius of Nicomedia

Aetius and Eunomius of Cyzikos

The Cappadocian Theological Synthesis

Basil of Caesarea (330–379)

Gregory of Nazianzus (329–390)

Gregory of Nyssa (c. 331–395)

The Councils of Constantinople 381 and 382

Christianity’s Fourth-Century Ascendancy and Its Protestors

A Short Reader

Further Reading

5 Reconciling the World: Christian Ascetical and Penitential Imperatives

Repentance and Reconciliation in Early Christian Theory and Action

Eastern penitential canons

The Synod of Ancyra 314

Monastic influences on penance

Western penitentials and the system of confession

Feudal ideas of restitution and expiation

Purgatory as posthumous expiation

Feudal atonement theory in the West: Anselm’s Cur deus homo?

The Christian Monastic Movements

The emergence of varieties of Christian monasticism

Syrian monasticism

Aphrahat the Sage

Macarius the Great

Mar Isaac of Nineveh

Symeon Stylites

Egyptian monasticism

Tales of Antony

Tales of the desert: The Christian fayyum

Pachomian federated monasticism

Other notable Egyptian monastic centers: Gaza and Sinai

Monasteries in Palestine and beyond

Euthymius

Mar Saba

Early monasticism in the West

Martin of Tours

John Cassian in Marseilles

Irish monasticism

Columba

Columbanus

A Short Reader

Further Reading

6 Remaking Society: The Church in the West in the Fourth to Sixth Centuries

The Church in a Troubled Imperium

The Western Nicene Leaders

Hilary of Poitiers

Ambrose of Milan

The Donatist Controversy

Augustine and His Social Vision

Augustine’s City of God

Augustine and the Donatists

Friends and Opponents of Augustine in the West

Pelagius

Caelestius

John Cassian

Jerome and his agenda

The Early Medieval Papacy and the Acacian Schism

Pope Damasus

Popes Felix and Leo

The Acacian schism

Christianity in the Barbarian Kingdoms

The Vandal kingdom

Boethius among the Ostrogoths

A Short Reader

Further Reading

7 A Church of the Nations: Ancient Global Christianity

The Latin and Greek Foci of Classical Church History

Syria

China

Arabia

India

Armenia

Georgia

Nubia

Ethiopia

Slavia Orthodoxa

A Short Reader

Further Reading

8 The Rise of the Ecumenical Conciliar System in the Fifth to Sixth Centuries

The Christian Patriarchates

John Chrysostom at Constantinople

The Origenistic Crisis

The Christological Controversy of the Fifth Century

The clash of Antioch and Alexandria

The reform campaign of Nestorius at Constantinople

Cyril of Alexandria’s countercharge

The Council of Ephesus 431

Ephesus II 449 and its aftermath

The Council of Chalcedon 451 and Its Aftermath

The Council of Constantinople II 553

Byzantine Platonism at Athens and Palestine

Damascius of Athens and the neo-Platonic school

Dionysius the Areopagite

A Short Reader

Further Reading

9 The Emergence of Christian Byzantium in the Sixth to Ninth Centuries

Justinian the Great

The Digest (or Pandects) of Justinian

The Institutes of Justinian

The Novels of Justinian

Justinian’s Corpus Iuris Civilis

The Emergence of the Monophysite Church

Heraclius and the Exaltation of the Cross

Monoenergism and Monothelitism

The Council of Constantinople III 680–681

Islam and Its Impact on Eastern Christianity

The Byzantine Iconoclastic Crisis

Photius the Great (c. 810–897)

The Byzantine Slavic Missions

A Short Reader

Further Reading

10 The Flourishing of Medieval Rome in the Seventh to Tenth Centuries

Benedict and Benedictinism

Gregory the Great and His Successors

The Carolingians and the Holy Roman Empire

The Medieval Papacy

A Short Reader

Further Reading

11 The Formation of Christian Liturgy

Earliest Origins of Liturgy

The Classical Patristic-Era Formulations of Liturgies

Eucharistic

Baptismal rites

Penitential rites

The Liturgical Cycle of Feasts

Latin Styles of Liturgy

The African rite

The Ambrosian rite

The Mozarabic rite

The Gallican rite

The Celtic rite

The Eastern Rites

The Antiochene liturgical family

The Alexandrian liturgical family

A Short Reader

Further Reading

12 The Great Parting of the Ways: Greek East and Latin West in the Tenth to Eleventh Centuries

Byzantine Monastic Renewal: Symeon the New Theologian and Hesychasm

Byzantine Intellectual Life

John Mauropous

Constantine (Michael) Psellus

John Xiphilinus

Constantine Leichoudes

Apologia and Conflict: Michael Cerularius and the Great Schism

The Rise of the University Schools in the West

A Short Reader

Further Reading

Part Two: A Winding Road: Select Themes and Ideas

13 The Bible and Its Interpretation in the Early Church

Old and New Biblical Interpretation

Relativism and the Ecclesial Mind

The Principle of Consonance

The Principle of Authority

The Principle of Utility

A Short Reader

Further Reading

14 The Church and War

Conflict as Blessing or Bane?

Is Christianity a Peaceful Religion?

Struggling with Conflicting Sources on Religious Violence

Constantine and the “Christ-Loving Armed Forces”

Major Christian Theorists

Pre-third-century writers

Origen

Lactantius

The fourth-century Fathers

Augustine

Byzantine attitudes

A Short Reader

Further Reading

15 The Development of Christian Hymnography

Origins of the Greek Christian Hymns

Religious Hymns Among the Pre-Christian Greeks

Pre-Nicene Christian Hymnody

Hymns of the Heterodox-Orthodox Struggles

Hymnography After the Arian Crisis

Latin hymns

Pre-sixth-century Syro-Byzantine hymns

A Short Reader

Further Reading

16 Ways of Prayer in the Early Church

Gathering for Prayer

The Heart as Sanctuary in the Old Testament

The New Testament Doctrine of the Heart

Prayer in the Early Christian Monastic Movement

Syriac Christian Tradition on the Prayer of the Heart

A Short Reader

Further Reading

17 Women in Ancient Christianity

Greek Silence

Women in the First Centuries of the Church

Women in Ancient Christian Epigraphy

Women in the Age of Persecutions

Christian Women in the Patristic and Byzantine Era

Women in the Later Byzantine Hagiographies

A Short Reader

Further Reading

18 Healing and Philanthropy in Early Christianity

Healing in Ancient Hellenism

Healing in Early Christian Perspectives

Philanthropia in Classical Greek Thought

Philanthropy in the Byzantine Divine Liturgy

The Hospital as Symbol of the Church

A Short Reader

Further Reading

19 The Exercise of Authority in the Church: Orders and Offices

New Testament Polity

Authority in Hellenistic and Christian Usage

Ordination and Offices in Early Christianity

Apostles

Christian prophets

Presbyters

Bishops

Deacons

Widows

Virgins

A Short Reader

Further Reading

20 Christians and Magic

Antique Fears of Black Magic

Magical Amulets

Exorcists and Magi

A Short Reader

Further Reading

21 The Church and Wealth

Classical Greek Inheritances

Christian Attitudes to Wealth

Scriptural evidences

A tradition rooted in eschatology

Wealth in the earliest centuries of the church

The patristic-era teachings

A Short Reader

Further Reading

22 Church and Slavery in an Age of Oppression

Slavery in Ancient Social Structures

Scriptural Approaches to Slavery

A Short Reader

Further Reading

23 Attitudes to Sexuality in the Early Church

Philosophical Renewals of Interest

Greek Love

Some Nonphilosophical Greek Attitudes to Sexuality

Greek Medical Notes on Sexuality and Gender

Hellenistic Jewish Approaches to Sexuality

The New Testament Evidence on Sexual Morality

The Jesus tradition

The Pauline and Pastoral Letters

The patristic era: The triumph of renunciation theory

A Short Reader

Further Reading

24 A Brief Account of Ancient Christian Art

Early Christian Egypt and the Origins of the Icon

Earliest Christian Art Theory

Symbols and Practices in Early Christian Art

Iconoclastic Opposition to Sacred Art

Conflicted Attitudes to Christian Art

A Short Reader

Further Reading

Epilogue

Notes

Appendix 1: The Seven Ecumenical Councils: A Brief Guide

Appendix 2: List of the Roman Popes to 1054 and the Patriarchs of Constantinople to 1453

Appendix 3: List of the Roman Emperors to 1453

Index of Persons and Places

Index of Subjects

Index of Biblical Citations

Praise for Path of Christianity

About the Author

More Titles from InterVarsity Press

Copyright

Prelude

This intellectual and social history of the early church in its first thousand years has been designed from the outset as a textbook. I hope it will be useful to a wide range of readers: clergy, seminarians, a diverse array of students of Christian thought and culture, and also to the general reader who has an empathy for this great culture-building religion and who might wish to know how the church got to be the way it is. Most important things were settled by the fifth century. Much of what we now see as characteristics of the Christian movement are variations on the foundations, reactions to it, reactions to the reactions, and so on. One thing is abundantly true of Christianity: it was born of an eschatological philosophy that looked to the past and from which it took its bearings for the future. It has remained, ever since, a profoundly conservative force even when, as often was the case, it was being socially and religiously radical and proleptic. The church’s history, accordingly, is like a vast antique emporium, where very little has ever been thrown away and some archaic things are, most surprisingly, still being pressed into daily use. An understanding of how the church in the first millennium got to be the way it is will not only offer the reader a fascinating gallery of stories in their own right, but might also explain much about the contemporary church: why some parts of it seem so slow to acknowledge change of any kind, and why other parts seem not to be able to change fast enough; why some aspects of Christian pastoral practice have been, and remain, moving and admirable, and why other aspects seem less than attractive in a modern age that values individual freedoms and responsibility.

Many programs of advanced study of Christian history follow a twelve-week semester plan and often devote two class sessions a week to a major-credit course, ranging from two to three hours. It was for this reason I conceived the book in two parts. The first section follows the historical line of development of the first millennium in a synchronous way. It looks at the different protagonists and crises in the various centuries as they temporally unfold. The opening chapter, devoted to the second century, is one of the most extensive in the book. This is so because the second century was the nurturing womb for the embryonic international Christian movement. If the second-millennium church is deeply dependent on the first, then the first millennium certainly grows organically out of that second century. The first part of the book allows one to follow a predictable linear progression. The second part of the book plays a different note. It suggests that real life rarely follows such a straightforward, linear movement as the recorded formal narrative might suggest. Accordingly, part two takes a diachronic approach to the story. It leaves the account of mainline developments and instead investigates key structural ideas: themes and obsessions of the Christians that might throw a different kind of light on our study: a light that might give different dimensionality and new perspectives.

In the course of my teaching of this material, for more than ten years in England and then twenty years in New York, I offered two classes on first-millennial history each week in the fall semester. In the first of those meetings we made a linear progress through the centuries, with my lead lecture underlining salient episodes and protagonists. In the second class we spent more time collectively reading and discussing key primary texts, and considering “issues” and themes as they cut across the centuries. I have tried to reproduce this in the structure of parts one and two of the present volume. In each part, however, I have had the luxury in the book, which was not always possible given the pressures of the classroom, to offer a wide range of primary texts for each chapter. My advice to the reader is to take chapters in sequential order from part one, and then alternate them with reading of chapters (not necessarily in sequence) from part two. This way the long, thousand-year road will not be too daunting.

If the book is used as a class text, therefore, it lends itself immediately to a linear presentation, followed by a seminar discussion: synchronic and diachronic at the same time.

I hope it proves useful. It has certainly been illuminating putting it all together so as to serve as a clear and honest exposition of an extraordinary and often extremely beautiful set of phenomena, which I have tried to expound with a clear historical eye, yet also with a view to the spiritual and radiant character of the church’s inner life: the soul in the body that gave it vitality, which it always claimed was the spirit of its risen Lord, still inhabiting its concerns despite the very human fallibility it often showed on its long earthly pilgrimage.

Abbreviations

ANFAnte-Nicene FathersANRWAufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt: Geschichte und Kultur Roms im Spiegel der neueren Forschung. Part 2, Principat. Edited by Hildegard Temporini and Wolfgang Haase. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1972–c.circaCSELCorpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorumd.diedfl.flourishedJEHJournal of Ecclesiastical HistoryJTSJournal of Theological StudiesOECTOxford Early Christian TextsPGPatrologia Graeca [= Patrologia Cursus Completus: Series Graeca]. Edited by J.-P. Migne. 162 vols. Paris, 1857–1886PLPatrologia Latina [= PatrologiaCursus Completus: Series Latina]. Edited by J.-P. Migne. 217 vols. Paris: 1844–1864r.reignedSCSources ChrétiennesStPatrStudia PatristicaVCVigiliae ChristianaeZNWZeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft und die Kunde der aälteren Kirche

1

The Fertile Second Century

The End of the Apostles and the Beginnings of Apostolicity

The second century is an extraordinarily fertile time in Christian history. It is a period that often “falls between the gaps” in common knowledge: being too late for those focused intently on the New Testament and too early for those who wish to see the classically formulated shape of post-Nicene ecclesiality. The period was often studied by theological historians chiefly for what it might adumbrate of the shape of things to come, rather than what it had to say for and of itself. But like the study of all embryology, this foundational era in Christian post–New Testamental development can tell us so much, as long as we are willing to listen to the stories, however odd they might strike us at first, and put a rein on our desire to address them primarily in terms of what came before or what was to follow after. Of course, most of what we find in the second century found itself in a similar dilemma of self-classification. Much of the time the writers of this era were making explicit claims among themselves, sometimes in sharp disagreement, to represent the authentic lineage of the apostolic era. So many conflicting claims to be the genuine continuation of the teaching and direction of the first-generation disciples, however, led to an inevitably growing sense that not all such claims could possibly be true, and not all visions of the central thrust of Christian consensus were compatible. This led much of the controversy of this era to be focused around the issue of tradition and traditioning: the paradosis of the church (what was handed on as core and definitive).

Apostolicity and what it meant came to be a crucial issue. It is one that is reflected even today in the power of the notion of the apostolical canon (what can be regarded as fundamental and authoritative New Testament Scriptures) and apostolic succession of authority from the first generations to the successive ones. These twin notions of what is the new scripture of the new community and who speaks for it (in other words, apostolic canon and who the ordained officers of the liturgical assembly are, who speak for that canon in exegesis and preaching, as successors to the apostles) are the dominant masterthemes of this whole century. By the end of this formative period, central things have come into shape that will mark Christianity for millennia to come: the nature of ordained authorities; the central core of what can be regarded as the Christian holy books, and not least how to interpret them; whether or not the church is bound to the Jewish laws if its accepts the Jewish holy books; what is the nature of fundamental Christian hopes; what is the status of the person of Jesus, or the Holy Spirit; whether the Christian God was monist, binitarian, or trinitarian in form; and how disputes might be resolved across the growing Christian world. The church expanded out from Jerusalem very quickly. It followed trade routes by sea and land, first into Asia Minor and then to all the great Roman sea ports. Its international coherence was not a given thing at first. It seems, to me at least, to have developed by the spread of good practice watched and copied by communities who had an eye to one another’s doings and who were also encouraged toward greater commonality across the second century by the church leaders of the larger city communities who could boast of a greater accumulation of skilled and learned leaders in their assemblies. This is much the same way that religious communities develop even to this day: strong locally, but also internationally aware by personal connection and historical respect.

Our story in this chapter will progress by looking at the remarkable range of people, events, controversies, and developments that occurred in this important period. If the New Testament is the true embryology of the Christian church, then this century was its infancy. Learning is imprinted as much as consciously acquired in such formative times. Likewise, patterns laid down here endured for centuries to come as fundamental charter structures. Our story begins by looking at some of the leading movements and individual teachers, claiming attention as the continuators of the Christian story in the larger Roman world after the destruction of the Jerusalem temple.

A Proliferation of Christian Schools and Teachers

Jewish Christian groups. Encratites. Encratites are regarded as a secessionist sect by the later heresiologists, but it is probable that they never existed in this concrete form, that is as a polity or church group as such. Rather, their attitudes were part of a much wider ascetical, world-denying “spirit of the age,” which by the late second century had come to mark them out as secessionist from the mainstream Christian communities, who were less radical in their attitudes to asceticism than these others and who, accordingly, came to regard the ascetical practices as specific identity markers for these different communities. So the attitude to encrateia (undoubtedly a commonality among such factions) was probably elevated in the second century as a catchall to identify groups that might have been much more variegated in terms of the broader charter of identifying doctrines they sustained. The term encrateia means “self-mastery” in the philosophical literature, the ability to control the forces of body and spirit in a disciplined way, to permit the sophistic life.1 A second-century compilation of sophistic aphorisms (that had some currency among Christian readers) was the Sentences of Sextus.2It is a clear example of sophist asceticism seen as first of all a detachment from materialist and bodily desires to allow for contemplation, but also a form or “way of life” (politeia) that could easily turn toward a certain “despising” of common human values.

Among the Christians the term encrateia soon came to mean “continence,” and when allied to dietary observances (common to both Jewish and pagan groups of the time) such ascetical disciplines could easily become group identifiers. The “Encratites” the later heresiologists object to seem to have been radical ascetic groups among the Syrian churches of the first three centuries, some of whom overlapped in unclear ways with Gnostic and, later, Manichaean tendencies. A specific litmus test for distinguishing Encratism from mainline Christian asceticism (especially as this became prevalent in the later monastic movement) was the belief among the radicals that sexual activity was deeply unspiritual and inimical to the liberation of the soul, conceived of as a struggle to escape from fleshly bonds.3 Among Encratite circles marriage was thus frowned on, even forbidden to the élite of the communities. The movement was also recorded as being strictly vegetarian and non-wine-drinking. Pythagorean ascetics had long inculcated vegetarianism, since vegan foodstuffs had less “animate matter” in them to keep the souls of the consumers who so “trapped them,” themselves tied in to this sublunar region.

The movement was often allied with a strongly dichotomous worldview of the “two ways” (ever-warring poles of light and darkness, good and evil) that held the cosmos to be profoundly corrupted by material forms; and it understood the church, in a defining and circumscribing way,as the body of pure elect withdrawn from that wicked cosmos.4 Some have seen connections between the epistle to Titus (especially the admonitions of chapter 2) and the Encratite movement: but there is a world of difference, the ascetical advice in Titus being reflective of the very common and widespread sense of ascetical morality (the “Roman household code”), which was a kind of democratized form of Hellenistic sophism for the masses.5 That kind of ascetical advice does not begin to approach the radical dualism of flesh and spirit we find characteristic of Encratism properly understood. It was among Encratite circles that the large body of apocryphal writings of the first three centuries seem to have originated, most of which are marked by these ideological tendencies, even if they are not yet hardened into a common doctrinal ideology.

Syrian Christian theologianTatianis usually elevated as a concrete example of such an Encratite. Irenaeus was the first to see him as the “patriarch” of the Encratites, though he was probably just a more severe form of the ascetical tendencies prevalent throughout much of Syrian Christianity of the first three centuries, a church that struck Greek and Latin external observers as increasingly out of step with the mainline communities of the Mediterranean.6 Among the Syrians, for example, it has been thought that baptism, until well into the fourth century, was thought also to be a solemn invitation to profess lifelong chastity, which meant from earliest times the clergy of the Syrians were celibate, baptism being a requirement for clerical orders. The larger majority of the worshiping faithful would be catechumens who never received the sacraments until late in life, when they were either on their deathbeds or chose baptism and a life of celibate old age thereafter. According to Irenaeus the Encratite movement saw procreative sex as responsible for transmitting the stigma and stain of damnation from Adam through to the whole human race. It is highly reminiscent of ideas that later influenced Augustine from his time among the Manichaeans. Irenaeus traces this idea to influences from Valentinian Gnosticism. Indeed, it has “hung around” Christian attitudes toward sexuality from time immemorial, appearing regularly from the Messalians of the fourth century to the Bogomils of the eleventh and after.

A string of Christian theologians in the early patristic mainstream regularly denounce the Encratite movement.7 In many cases it is a cultural tendency they strike against. One notices, nevertheless, that the overall deeply reverential bow Christianity of the second century makes toward sophistic asceticism prevents the same writers from ever penning a celebratory encomium of the sacramental holiness of sexual union blessed by Christ, or from noting just how extensively the desire for a wholly celibate leadership, and the setting of virginity as the highest ideal of Christian virtue, are established as unremarkable tropes by the very fourth-century writers who find the Encratite “school” disturbing. Perhaps the closest we can come to finding a typical text of Christian Encratites themselves (apart from the apocryphal acts of the apostles)8 is the cited fragment of the dialogue of Jesus and Salome in the Gospel of the Egyptians.9 Fourth-century historian Eusebius, describing the situation of the third century, says that one Severus, whom he classes as a Gnostic, was a leader of such a Christian radical ascetic sect.10 The latter accepted the Old Testament but rejected the writings and authority of Paul (making him redolent of the Ebionites as described by Irenaeus). Epiphanius argues that this radical ascetic movement was still alive in Christian Phrygia and Pisidia in the fourth century.11

Encratism would eventually be swamped, overtaken by larger Christian orthodoxy in the very act of its merging with mainstream forms of Christian life, when the fourth century brought the monastic movement into its heartland: insisting then, as it made it mainstream, only that such ascetical trends did not despise the sacramentality of marriage, or the holiness of procreation, and the virtue possible in the ordinary lay life. The overwhelming character of fourth-century ascetical Christianity, however, meant that while these niceties were observed, the theology of marriage, or reflections on the positive spiritual value of human physical experience, were massively neglected by Christian writers even into the modern age.

Nazarenes (Nazoraioi). Fourth-century heresiologist Epiphanius of Salamis (never wholly reliable in his historical judgment, unfortunately) gives us the information that the Jewish-Christian community of Jerusalem that survived the Roman war of AD 70 fled to Pella in the Decapolis.12 This was the region of the “Ten Cities” across the Jordan. This much is undoubtedly true. Epiphanius then derives the “Nazarene” (Nazoraioi; thus also Nazorean or Nazorene) Jewish-Christian sect from that original remnant community of the Jerusalem church and chronologically lists them as flourishing near the time of Cerinthus the Gnostic: hence mid-second century. Epiphanius lists them in his chronicle of secessionists and so obviously has issues with them. What emerges from his treatment is first and foremost that they did not call themselves Christians like everyone else (as by his day had become the universal practice as established at Antioch) but rather Nazarenes (which was also an antique Semitic way of referring to Christians in the Roman Orient—as he also admits). He says they also referred to themselves as Jesse-ans (after the biblical ancestor Jesse, father of king David) and goes on to give a scriptural discourse on the nature of Jesus’ claim to the kingly and priestly status of the house of Jesse. Epi­phanius makes the point here that with Herod the ruling house of Israel lost all claim to priestly kingship in the line of Jesse (since Herod was a Gentile) so that after Jesus it clearly passed on as a common heritage to the church.13 This can be read, between the lines as it were, as manifesting Epiphanius’s chief bone of contention with the Nazoraioi: how important were bloodline and belonging to the church? A Jewish-Christian heritage might well have different views on that (as well as attitudes to the law’s continuing relevance or not) from Gentile communities. The Nazoraioi seem to have laid some abiding stress on the importance of the physical heritage of Jesus, and when we recall that the very first structuring of the Jerusalem church was based on the first-generational leaders related most closely to Jesus (James the brother of the Lord, and Mary his mother) we might see the point of this.

Epiphanius notes that their Gospel was Matthew in Hebrew. Since this, we remember, begins solemnly with the genealogy through Jesse, and since Epiphanius later complains that the group has excised the genealogy in the Hebrew version they read, it is now generally thought that Epiphanius has come across a Hebrew text of “a Gospel” that they used that was actually not the same as Matthew, and concerning which he simply makes confused identifications. It is now called the Gospel of the Ebionites, from fragments reassembled in Epiphanius’s work.14 It is thought to have been a Gospel synopsis (similar to Tatian’s Diatessaron—a pastiche of texts used in their worship, a Gospel “harmony”). Irenaeus attested the existence of this work, but if he discussed it, these sections of his work are now lost. Apart from cutting the genealogy, the text portrays Jesus and John the Baptist as vegetarians (probably a cultic mark of adherents), emphasizes hostility to the sacrificial cult, and includes the summation of the law in the writer’s own teachings. The text is generally thought by commentators to have been composed in the mid-second century as a harmony of Matthew and Luke, to reflect the school’s particular doctrines.15

The wider issues with the Nazarenes as Epiphanius understands them might also be placed in the context of the spreading influence of Pauline Christianity as a norm in the Gentile communities of the second century, a norm that had been taken for granted since its establishment (by the third century) but that was certainly not a fait accompli, in Palestine at least, in the second. The wider issue, of authority and identity, is akin to the problem that Paul himself had with the dominance of the Jerusalem leaders, especially James, and with what happened when the Gentile Christian communities outside Palestine no longer cared to follow the cultic or dietary prescripts of the law. Bishop Epiphanius, possibly a former Jew himself, writing from a very established fourth-century perspective that looks back on these Jewish Christians as retro minority relics of another age, wants to undermine this Nazarene theology decisively. He insists that Jesus has the priestly kingship of Melchizidek, while James of Jerusalem had the high priesthood after Aaron. James was also Joseph’s son, he notes, not Mary’s. It was Mary’s son who held the Jessean lineage, and the Melchizidekian priesthood and passed this on to the ekklesia, not to members of his immediate family.16

At Panarion 29.5.1, however, Epiphanius seems to tell his readers that he is basing his knowledge of the Nazarenes on Philo’s account in his book The Jesseans and his admiration of their ascetical lifestyle at Mareotis in Egypt.17 This part of his narrative, then, seems to be conflated with Philo’s account of the Therapeutae, whom Epiphanius evidently thinks (following Eusebius) were Christian monks, and it ispartly lifted from a reading of Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History 2.17.16-18; 2.17.21-22. One wonders, therefore, how much of Epiphanius’s treatment at this juncture is grounded at all.18 Some scholars have jaundiced views of his worth, but Ray Pritz has recently argued that he cannot be dismissed wholesale.19 At Panarion 29.7.2, however, Epiphanius’s focus seems to become sharp once more. He speaks of a sect calling themselves Nazarenes who definitely identify as Christian while maintaining all the Jewish customs (to Epiphanius’s annoyance), who use the New Testament alongside the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings, in the rabbinic manner of interpretation; except that they are messianists, who proclaim the resurrection of Christ, upholding the unity of God and that Jesus is his Son.20 They observe, he says, the practice of circumcision and the maintenance of the sabbath. Epiphanius admits that he does not know the details of their Christology: whether they affirm the godly status of the Christ born of the virgin by the Holy Spirit.21 He implies that they were still present in his own day and resident in the town of Berea of Coelesyria, and the town of Bashanitis or Khokhabe, both near Pella in the Decapolis region.22 Jerome, later in the fourth century, lived as a hermit near Berea and also seems to suggest the movement still had adherents in Palestine in his own time. Jerome’s treatment of the Nazarenes depends to some extent on his teacher Apollinaris, who had a close knowledge of the movement from his own home base in Laodicea and Antioch, near Berea.23

Epiphanius seems to launch his attack against them chiefly for having the audacity to maintain a Jewish desire to maintain an observance of the law as Christians, when Paul and the apostolic council of Jerusalem (recorded in Acts) had removed the burden of the law for the church and when God himself had made the law after Jesus’ ascension impossible physically (given the end of the temple) since it had been spiritually fulfilled in the Christ. Nazarenes, then, largely seem to be a straw man for Epiphanius’s supersessionist theology. But the way he treats them, despite being dubiously sourced, does seem to indicate that notable Jewish Christian communities still existed in his own time in the Decapolis region, which means communities still observing large elements of the Torah, not just Aramaic-speaking communities. After the fourth century there seems to be no further mention of them. Epiphanius separates them out from the Jewish-Christian Ebionites (whom he deals with in his next section of the book), though he claims the latter sect was founded by a man called Ebion who had formerly been a Nazarene.24 R. A. Pritz thinks that the term Christian might well have been used to designate Gentile followers of Jesus, with the title Nazarene being preferred to designate the remaining Jewish disciples resident in Palestine.25 Justin, in his mid-second-century Dialogue with Trypho had, long before Epiphanius, indicated that there were two groups of Jewish Christians in Palestine, one of which tried to make Gentile converts keep the law, the other which did not; one of which did not accept a divine status of Jesus, and one of which did, and which Justin claims were just like himself (as a Christian) except for their continued observance of matters of the Jewish law.26 His term of division, we can notice, is again a christological one; and the sense of the nondivine Christology operative among some of the Jewish Christians of his time seems to align this group with what is referred to by several other Christian writers as characteristic of the Ebionites. Jerome also implies that the Nazarenes “Believe in Christ, the Son of God, born of Mary the Virgin, and they confess about him that he suffered under Pontius Pilate and rose again.”27

Some, such as Origen in Contra Celsum, who speaks of “both types of Ebionites,” are possibly confusing Nazarenes (whose only “distinctiveness” from more standard Christian communities of the Diaspora was their desire to honor the law as continuing Jews) with Ebionites, who were a more radically divergent movement in terms of Christology.28 If we take the evidence of Epiphanius and Jerome as including personal knowledge of Palestine in the fourth century, then the Nazarene movement can be seen to have endured until the fourth century (when it gives way to the expansion of imperial Byzantine Palestinian church foundations, which push it out). If we are more skeptical of the latter testimony, the rest of the patristic witnesses accumulate to show that they were still in existence up to the end of the third century: a body of Jewish Christians who observed the law, kept the Old Testament equally authoritative alongside the New, and were not regarded as being theologically dissident in any other way. This was not the case with the patristic descriptions of the Ebionites, however.

Ebionites. The name derives from the Greek transliteration of the Aramaic word for the “poor ones.” It is also used in patristic literature to refer to a distinct group within the surviving remnants of Judeo-Christianity, again in an apparently geographically restricted area of Palestine before the virtual refounding of the church there in the Constantinian age. Irenaeus is one of the first to mention them, and Origen explains the significance of the Semitic name correctly but cannot resist the pun that the poverty concerned refers now to their “intellectual penury.”29 It might well have been originally a self-designation of the Palestinian church as the anawim of God, the “poor saints” (see Mt 5:3; Jas 2:5). Later antiheretical writers such as Hippolytus and Tertullian, and Epiphanius in the fourth century, all falsely imagined they were a sect founded by a person called Ebion (by then a heresy had to have a heresiarch inventing it).30 According to Irenaeus their movement was distinguished by their rejection of the writings of St. Paul, whom they regarded as an apostate Jew who illegitimately separated the gospel from the Torah. In relation to the universally emerging canon of Scripture, they seemed to have accepted only the Gospel of Matthew, retained all the observances of the law, and denied the virginal birth of Christ, generally regarding him as Messiah, but prophetic and human, not divine.31 Origen adds that they observed Passover as the ultimate liturgical festival and that at least one group among them did accept the traditions of the virginal birth (though implying that many among them did not).32 This suggests that they were known to him, in Alexandria and perhaps Caesarea, as a real body of Christians.

Eusebius’s information about them is also confident, sometimes excessively so. Some of it seems to derive from Irenaeus via Hippolytus and Origen. It is Eusebius who makes the connection between them and the church of Jerusalem, which fled to Pella, thus connecting them with the Nazarenes in some way and implying that their christological dissidence was a falling away from the more antique group that retained the fuller Christian traditions (that is, both Testaments).33 He also notes that there were “two types” of Ebionites, whom he distinguishes christologically. One group, he says,

understood Christ to be a plain and ordinary man who had achieved righteousness by the advancement of his character; and who had been born in the natural manner from Mary and her husband. They insist on the complete observance of the law and do not consider that they would be saved by faith in Christ alone, and by a life in accordance with faith. . . . But there were others besides these, who bear the same name, and have escaped the absurd folly of the first group, and who did not deny that the Lord was born of a virgin and the Holy Spirit, but even so agreed with them in not confessing his preexistence as God, insofar as he was Logos and Wisdom. And so they shared in the impiety of the former group, not least insofar as they were zealous in insisting on the literal observance of the law.34

Epiphanius of Salamis provides further information, including excerpts from their writings that include what has since, and recently, been identified as the Gospel of the Ebionites.35 Generally speaking, it is difficult to know whether they were a continuation of the earliest circles of the Jerusalem church, dating back to James the brother of Jesus, who were cast into obscurity by the aftereffects of the Roman-Jewish war and were later seen as an isolated (and by then apparently “odd”) group once the wider church caught up with them again (as Bauer imagines); or whether they were simply one of the more “unusual” groups among a wider body of Jewish Christians in Palestine, who by the third century had already become “curious” in the eyes of the vastly Gentile church and who caught the eye of church commentators first for their Jewish customs (which by now were regarded as archaic among Christians) and then more acutely (in the context of the larger Gnostic struggles) because of their secessionist Christology, which seemed akin to “psilanthropism” (Christ was a “mere man”).36 The Clementine Homilies and Recognitionsare aware of two of the books belonging to this sect: the Periodoi of Peterand the Anabathmoiof James. Epiphanius has come across these references in the Clementines.37

Elkesaites. Another Jewish group, called the Elkesaites, is also recorded as impinging on the life of the Christian church in the early second century: but they were more a late Jewish revelatory movement that had many elements of pluralist religious fusion in it. They are mentioned by Origen as having tried to evangelize Christians at Caesarea in the third century, preaching universal forgiveness; and by Hippolytus, who records that their teacher Alcibiades of Apamaea came to Rome in the time of Pope Callixtus (pope 218–223) and preached, on the basis of their secret revelation, the need for a second baptism.38 He tells us they stressed the utility of Jewish observance, practiced exorcisms, and valued astrology. Jesus was taken by them as one of a series of holy sages sent into the world to preach repentance. A. F. J. Klijn regards them as originating in Jewish-Christian communities of eastern Jordan who were gathered together around a special revelatory book, the core holy text of their prophet, which demanded conversion of lifestyle in the face of an impending apocalyptic judgment.39 There is no real reason, however, to think they were Christian Jews as such, but more a kind of apocalyptic Jewish fusion movement of the post–Bar Kokhba period, which when it arrived in Rome found the Christian community there a natural target for its preaching (along presumably with the Roman synagogues and the general populace). Christian commentators later presumed their prophet-founder was a man named Elxai, but scholars have recently argued that this is projection (a heresy needing a heretic to go with it) and that the name derives from a Greek mishearing of the Hebrew name for their actual book of revelations itself, ksh hyl or “Book of Hidden Power.” They will be mentioned in the following chapter for the influence they had on the Manichaean movement.

Montanism. Montanism is the name opponents gave to the movement that its own protagonists called “New Prophecy.”40 Montanus seems to have been an early Christian prophet who began a charismatic revival movement in Phrygia (Asia Minor) between 155 and 160. We know about the movement now through a few fragmentary remains of their teachers cited in early synods of bishops who quickly gathered to contest their claims to be teaching the core gospel, and their (imputed) claims to supreme authority—that prophets speaking in the name of Christ acted in the church in persona Christi. This was one of the first times that the early Christian communities really had to face up to their authority structure: what were the rankings of offices and orders within the communities; what were sedentary and what were nomadic? The earliest Christian prophets seem to have been transitory missionaries rather than sedentary community leaders, and this nomadic character seems to attach to the Montanist prophets. The issue raises the question of what manner of authority can ever be held by a single Christian leader (bishop, prophet, presbyter, wonderworker, whatever) in any given community: whether such claimed authority can ever “stand in for Christ,” whether it is ever additional to the record of Scripture, or independent of (and standing over) the consensus of the Christian community. After the Montanists, Christian communities in the main resisted ecstatic prophetic leaders who claimed the authority of Christ, and they tended to move in the direction of synodical, conciliar, group consensus, obedient to prior traditions, texts, and practices, as a way of regulating authority claims in the postapostolic generations. Whenever this has given way, in later history, to claims for any inspired leader or supreme authority in the Christian polity, it has usually been a prelude to a dramatic reaction and rejection.

Although the Montanists’ own voice has been diffracted, later historians did assemble their archive, especially church historian Eusebius of Caesarea in the fourth century, whose record includes accounts from the contemporary synods gathered to discuss them, which actually quote the Montanist leaders (albeit partially).41 Eusebius lifts up the “Phrygian heresy” as an example of how the discipline of church history itself develops as a constant attempt to mark off true faith from secessionism.42 Attempts have been made recently to restore their archive as it survives without the context of condemnation prevalent in these synodical accounts.43 It might well be the case that the clerical resistance to Montanist ecstatic and charismatic approaches to Christian teaching led to the creation of that process of bishops gathering in larger-than-local councils, something that in the next century would be an established church protocol of episcopal provincial synods as a key aspect of international polity.

Appearing suddenly as a traveling Christian preacher (some versions of the story say that he had only been recently converted from paganism), Montanus moved around the towns and villages of central Asia Minor with two female prophets, Maximilla and Prisca (Priscilla), associated in his mission. Eventually he would organize collections of money so that his disciples could receive a salary for their preaching travels.44 It has usually been assumed that he was the leader. But this is by no means certain: it is what later hostile critics presume from the vantage point of two centuries later.45 The existence of the female prophets is significant (though little actually is known about them), as they are striking representations of female leaders of the early Christian movement. We can of course discern female leadership in the earliest levels of the New Testament texts, but it come to be increasingly rare in text evidence at the end of the first century as Christian communities become established, settled, and more and more subject to what is known as the Roman household code, in which women are expected to have a domestic role and be seen but not necessarily heard.46 The change in tone, elevating this domestic code (prevalent in secular Greco-Roman society of the age), can be seen in the Pastoral Letters of the New Testament. It is also witnessed in writings from the earliest episcopal leaders of settled communities, such as the Clementine lettersfrom the Roman church, or the letters of Ignatius of Antioch. By the beginning of the second century the concept of traveling female evangelists, or missionary prophets, seems “scandalous” to the settled church.

Because of the centrality of the female prophets to any understanding of the Montanist movement, recent works discussing them have sometimes elevated them as symbols for a renewed call for ordained female leadership in the church and isolated their antique rejection as a symbol of patriarchal oppression. Others have seen that connection as more to do with feminist theology and more recent church polity than historically grounded analyses. Much of the argument about them as symbols of relevance rises, on both sides, as argumenta e silentio.47 Even so, the aspect of female leadership, which remained prevalent in the later Montanist communities (where there were even female presbyters) but not in the catholiccommunities, has been scrutinized by some recent commentators as a revealing window onto a once-wider pattern of authorities and offices in earliest Christianity that was increasingly narrowed down in Asia Minor and elsewhere after, and partly because of, the Montanist controversy.

Montanus claimed that he was the mouthpiece of the Holy Spirit and that the Paraclete who had been promised in John 14:26; 16:7 was now incarnate in him. Some of the characteristics of the church of Philadelphia as described in the Johannine Revelation can perhaps be seen in the Montanist movement, and it might well trace its origins to aspects of early Asia Minor ecclesial traditions (powerful revival movements, visionary claims, eschatological expectations). The precise context of what Montanus thought his mission was about might well be connected with such foundational apocalyptic elements of the book of Revelation. He probably represents a protest against the declining apocalyptic expectation among the early Christian communities and a corresponding adjustment of organized church life to a sedentary urban environment, where authority was more and more passing away from nomadic prophets and missionary exorcists, to (perhaps less charismatic) local councils of presbyters and bishops.

His critics who accused him of being too recent a convert to be a real missionary were implying that his sense of ecstatic enthusiasm (enthousiasmos) was less a genuine vocation of the divine Spirit, and more a carryover from his pre-Christian adherence to pagan oracular cults, and that this was the context in which they needed to see his reliance on female prophetesses, needing them as a channel to deliver oracles, as with pagan magoi and soothsayers.48 Apollinaris of Hierapolis, one of Montanus’s contemporary episcopal opponents, recounts that his frenzied style of prophecy led some in the churches to fear he was demonically possessed and says he was forbidden from speaking in the assembly.49 Montanus himself claimed that the imminent presence of the end time (eschaton) had impelled the need to preach an urgent sense of repentance, so the church could renew itself under the impetus of the Spirit. He encouraged speaking in tongues (glossolalia) and other manifestations of enthousiasmos.

The three inner-circle prophets claimed no less than the direct authority of God. They habitually spoke in voce dei, as if they were the mouthpiece of God, who talked unmediatedly through them. Hostile witnesses claimed to be shocked by this, as if the prophets were claiming for themselves divine status: but it was probably no more than a customary form of Christian prophetic witness in the earliest assemblies, where prophets spoke “in the name of Jesus.” Anyone questioning their utterance, therefore, was questioning God himself. This was why they allowed bishops the authority to organize communities (worship, finances, and so on) but as having no dominion if they withstood the message of the prophet: and the bishops generally regarded this as unacceptable arrogation of rights to the prophet as having supreme governance over the churches. Montanus claimed that his utterances had superior authority over “older” Scriptures.

Part of their teaching that the end times were imminent was the call to moral reform. To ready themselves for the final cataclysm, Christians had to adopt a rigorously ascetic lifestyle. Marriage was banned among their adherents. Only later was this relaxed to become a ban on any remarriage, including that after the death of a spouse. Regular and severe periods of fasting were encouraged, and so too was substantial almsgiving. Martyrdom, as another eschatological virtue, was also encouraged. Any flight from persecution was forbidden as tantamount to apostasy, and this was perhaps another reason urban bishops disliked Montanists so, their eagerness to advance themselves for martyrdom being an endangerment to many other Christians in local communities under stress. When the end came, the early Montanist teachers claimed, the New Jerusalem promised in the Scripture (Rev 21:1-10) would physically descend from heaven to the little Phrygian village of Pepuza (or sometimes Timione). Pepuza was Montanus’s hometown and later center of operations. To this holy place true believers were called to gather together before the Lord’s coming. The failure of Pepuza to develop as the great eschatological locus was one of the chief reasons the steam went out of the movement in Phrygia, but not before the little town had been greatly expanded by Montanist investment.

Montanism, however, seems to have been a movement largely uninterested in “doctrine” as such. It is, to this extent, somewhat unique among early Christian secessionist movements. Montanism did fully accept the idea of the resurrection of the flesh (a notion that was usually in contention among more Gnostic-flavored secessionist Christian groups of this era), and it interpreted many points of Scripture with a very simple directness (one supposes this was a style not too far removed from the majority among the contemporary Christian communities). This too, of course, made their leaders very open to criticism from current and later theologians that they were simplistic. One of the chief things that emerged in later Christian pneumatology, after the fading of Montanism, was that the possession of the Spirit of God in the church is not witnessed first and foremost by ecstatic possession and nonsensical utterances but rather by a progressive clarity of the mind, a refinement and focus of the intellectual and spiritual gifts for teaching.50 Ecstasy gave way, in a profound way in subsequent Christian experience, to the elevation of human gifts and awareness as part of the spiritual task of “discerning the Spirit.” Montanists’ increasingly hostile reception in Asia led them to denounce the communities there as “slayers of the Spirit.” The charge rankled.

The Montanists also seem to have gloried in their heroic resistance to persecution, claiming the crown as a martyr community. The mainline communities also found this a little hard to stomach. Bishop Apollinaris of Hierapolis, for one, made a count of who among them had actually suffered execution and claimed it was a zero sum total.51 But he contradicts himself after this (Eusebius, as a later archivist, consistently wishes to underestimate the martyr lists of the heretics), because in another passage from his treatise (which Eusebius also records) Apollinaris makes a point of saying that whenever the catholic martyrs were imprisoned, they did not make common fellowship with the Montanist or Marcionite confessors present in the same prisons.52 Other first-generation opponents of Montanism were named by Eusebius as Alcibiades, who wrote a treatise on how the Spirit of God would never disrupt a person’s senses, and Miltiades, who argued that the ecstatic manner of prophesying was contrary to the custom of the church and not represented in the original apostolic generation, such as the family of Philip or Agabus in the New Testament period.53

The writer Apollonius also left notes on the movement, forty years after Montanus first started preaching.54 He claimed that Prisca and Maximilla were induced by Montanus to leave their husbands after they received the spirit of prophesying. He mentions this disapprovingly and also wants it placed on record that their disciples’ claims that Prisca and Maximilla were “virgins” is a false one.55 The anti-Montanist critics also were quick to point out that the custom of earlier prophets had been not to receive gifts of money and not to stay resident in one place.56 This embracing of poverty is one of the few “signs of a real prophet,” such as were commonly accepted and survived in the Didache, for example.57 The anti-Montanist charge is that they have proved themselves false by accepting money, but the real issue is probably that their collecting of money from the preaching tours had allowed them to try to establish a hierarchy of prophets in a nonnomadic environment for the first time.

Not everyone in the church found them objectionable. Some of the Asian bishops supported them as a revivalistic and sincere body of believers and did not think they had made themselves into a breakaway sect. One of the leading minds of the era, Irenaeus, who was himself a native of Asia Minor but now leading the community in Lyon in Gaul, found them to be an admirable spiritual group, and he defended their cause at Rome. His own form of chiliastic millenarianism might reflect the Asia Minor tendency toward apocalyptic prophecy.58 In the end, by the late second and third centuries, when the Montanist movement had moderated its eschatological message (after their prophesied end time failed to happen), they were eventually folded back into North African church traditions. But the Asia Minor bishops remained ever suspicious of them. This might be the reason the book of Revelation was never popular in the Eastern church. Not until it was passed back to the Greeks in the fourth century as a part of the “Western” canon of Scripture, which they were expected to acknowledge (the Greeks insisted the West should accept in return the letter of James), did Revelation enter the canon of accepted Scriptures. Even then it is noticeable that to this very day it is given the silent treatment in the liturgies, prayers, and offices of Eastern Christianity: the book is still never cited in church.59

The lack of big-picture objectionable doctrinal elements caused church authorities considerable difficulties in deciding what, if anything, was wrong with Montanism. The movement spread to the West, where for a time in 177 and 178 important Roman church communities were thinking of recognizing it as an admirable movement but eventually did not. From Rome it moved to North Africa, where it enjoyed a longer and more sedentary second life (we might call it stage-two Montanism) and, as mentioned above, was eventually absorbed into the wider community traditions. Indeed, in this later form of North African Montanism, in the late second and early third centuries, many of the original highly charged apocalyptic elements were smoothed out. The function of ecstatic prophecy was then given a lighter stress, and the urgency of the imminent parousiaseemed to have receded. The rigorist African theologian Tertullian passed from being a stern critic to an enthusiastic adherent late in his life. It is thought by some that leading Monarchian theologian Theodotus the Tanner was also closely associated with the Montanist movement, although Tertullian tells us that Monarchian church leader Praxeas (perhaps a code name for Pope Callixtus) wasinstrumental in having Montanist ideas and assemblies banned at Rome.60 Pope Aniketos earlier had also been hostile to them there (pope c. 157–168).

Many have thought that the Montanist movement was clearly involved in the production of the Passion of Perpetua and Felicity, that classic martyr narrative in which dream-vision and prophetic apocalyptic themes play dominant roles. The strong advocacy of martyrdom as the supreme Christian glory remained characteristic of Montanism to the end and flavored the Christianity of North Africa. But the movement’s most hallowed text was undoubtedly the book of Revelation itself, which also emanated from Asia Minor and probably represents the archaic traditions of the church of that area, which took a particularly sharp form in the rise of Montanism, perhaps serving to bridge the Semitic patterns of visionary martyr resistance in Revelation with Gentile patterns of ecstatic worship.

The movement dwindled away almost everywhere by the fourth century, except in the village of Pepuza, which endured now as Montanist sectarian headquarters. Its long-term effects on Christianity were mainly in the form of the reactions it caused. It probably served to push apocalyptic ways of thinking to the side after the fourth century, allowing Christian thought to become more spaciously metaphysical. It turned Christian pneumatology away from the inspiration of ecstasies and visions, toward scriptural exegesis, reflective intellect, and moral endeavor. It had a long-term effect in sharpening the attribution of episcopal authority, especially as this was witnessed in bishops of many churches gathering together in synods whenever large problems affected the peace of the churches.61 The synodical reaction to Montanism is probably the first time that episcopal councils (which would soon become a standard way of organizing all the mainline churches) is witnessed in Christian history. One record of such a synod gathered to discuss Montanism survives in the writings of the Asia Minor bishop Apollinaris of Hierapolis (d. c. 175). Excerpts from his notebooks survived to be Eusebius’s main source in Ecclesiastical History 5.16. As a worked-out example of “good practice” in governance, this pattern of crisis leadership through synods established itself internationally in Christian communities by the end of the next century. Very quickly the synodal “mind of the bishops” would claim the prophetic authority that had been wrested from the Montanists and define prophetic insight as being necessarily vindicated by more than a single prophet’s claim for authenticity: resting, in other words, in the communal acclamation of that prophetic voice by a discernment that was lodged in the collective.62