have been deemed canonical by the church (and only
after long debate: p. 67), but many others existed in
antiquity (see p. 75). These indicate that there was
a strong prophetic tendency in some sections of early
Christianity, as there was among contemporary Jews.
An extreme version of Christian prophecy is associated
with the name of Montanus, a native of Phrygia in
Asia Minor in the late second century. The heresiolo-
gists called his movement Montanism after him, or
Kataphrygian after its place of origin. Montanus’ fol-
lowers themselves, however, seem to have designated
their movement the ‘New Prophecy’. We are told that
Montanus, together with two female associates, claimed
to utter divinely inspired prophecies, often accompanied
by an ecstatic frenzy (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History
5.14–16).Although this catalogue does not exhaust the possible ways in
which Jesus and his message could be interpreted, it is instruc-
tive of some of the tendencies in early Christian thought that
came to be regarded as dangerous by the emerging Christian hier-
archy. Some can be explained by the fusing (and subsequent
metamorphosis) of Christian teachings with other religious and
philosophical traditions. This was how the heresiologists viewed
the Gnostics, for example. The defenders of orthodoxy also noted
that the ecstatic prophecy associated with Montanus was charac-
teristic of pagan cults in his native Phrygia. Such adaptations of
Christian doctrines were not unique to Christianity within the
empire. Beyond the eastern frontier in Mesopotamia, for example,
there emerged in the third century a religion named Manichaeism
(after its founder Mani), which merged Christian ideas and narra-
tives with Near Eastern traditions of a cosmic conflict between
good and evil, and light and darkness.
Church fathers such as Irenaeus and Eusebius characterized
such trends as a conflict between truth and error. In the sketch
offered here I suggest that it was symptomatic of the engagement
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