The New Prophecy erupts, AD 156

**The movement the archive holds by its own name for itself — the New Prophecy — rather than by the name its opponents gave it.**

Montanus began to prophesy in Phrygia, and with him **Priscilla and Maximilla**, who spoke in ecstasy and in the first person as the voice of the Spirit. The archive holds all three. They expected the heavenly Jerusalem at **Pepuza**, taught rigorous fasting, forbade remarriage, and welcomed martyrdom.

## The evidential problem, stated plainly

**Almost nothing survives from their side.** What the archive has is a handful of oracles quoted by hostile writers and preserved by Eusebius — including Maximilla’s **“I am driven away like a wolf from the sheep; I am not a wolf: I am word, and spirit, and power”**, and Montanus’s **“behold, man is as a lyre, and I fly to him as a plectrum”**.

**Those are quotations selected to condemn**, and the archive says so. It also notes what the opponents concede by accident: an anonymous writer in Eusebius admits he was asked to write and hesitated **for fear of seeming to add to the gospel**, and that the movement had to be met by councils of “the faithful” assembling repeatedly — **which is the first evidence in the archive of synods convened to settle a dispute.**

## Two things worth having

**Two of the three founders were women prophesying with authority**, and the objection recorded against them was not that they were women but that their ecstasy was involuntary and their predictions failed. The archive records the objection as made.

**And it captured Tertullian.** The most formidable Latin writer of the period joined them, and the archive holds his works — which means the movement is represented in the library by a sympathiser of great ability, even though its own founders are not.