Part Three — When the Church Had to Say No: False Teaching and the Canon
Chapter 22 — Montanus and a Claim That Needs Correcting (1 of 2)
It would be easy to assume that Montanism represented a direct threat to the closing New Testament canon — the popular version of this story is told that way so often that it passes for settled fact. Direct examination of the primary sources does not support that connection nearly as strongly as the popular version claims, and a book built on the discipline of examining its own claims has to say so plainly rather than quietly smoothing past it.
What Montanism Actually Was
Sometime around the middle of the second century — ancient sources support dates anywhere from the mid-150s to the early 170s, and this book does not pick a false precision between them — in Phrygia in Asia Minor, a man named Montanus began prophesying in an ecstatic manner, joined soon after by two women, Priscilla (also called Prisca) and Maximilla, both recognized as prophets within the movement. They called their movement the New Prophecy, and its central claim was that the Holy Spirit — the Advocate Christ promised in John's Gospel — was speaking fresh revelation through them, to a church they believed had grown too settled and too comfortable. The New Prophecy's practical emphases were rigorous: strict fasting, resistance to remarriage, and an eager, even welcoming posture toward martyrdom, all held together by a conviction that the end of the age was near and the church needed to sharpen rather than relax her discipline in response.
The movement's most notable convert is also its most consequential for how later generations have understood it: Tertullian himself, the same churchman whose refutation of Marcion this book just examined, embraced the New Prophecy later in his life, flourishing especially in Carthage in the early third century under his influence and defense.
The Claim This Book Has to Correct
The popular account holds that Montanism represented a direct threat to the closing New Testament canon: that claiming ongoing, Spirit-given prophecy on a level with apostolic Scripture forced the church to shut the canon's door specifically to keep this kind of fresh revelation out. On this account, the Shepherd of Hermas's own prophetic material — the visions this book already told in Part Two, Chapter 12 — becomes suspect partly by association with the same broader anxiety about ongoing prophecy that Montanism raised.
Careful examination of the primary sources does not support this connection as strongly as the popular version claims, and it is worth showing the actual evidence rather than simply asserting the correction. Tertullian's own writings from his Montanist period — De Ieiunio Adversus Psychicos ("On Fasting, Against the Psychics") chief among them — are where this would have to show up if it were true, since this is Tertullian defending the New Prophecy directly, in his own voice, against his critics within the wider church. What he actually defends is startlingly modest by the standard of the popular claim. In Thelwall's standard English translation, Tertullian states outright what the New Prophecy is and is not claiming: "The New Prophecies are rejected not because Montanus, Priscilla, and Maximilla preach another God, or disjoin Jesus Christ, or overturn any rule of faith or hope, but because they plainly teach more frequent fasting than marrying." No new doctrine at all — only fresh direction on matters of church discipline, stricter fasting, resistance to remarriage, matters that were already, in Tertullian's own account, coming to be settled by bishops rather than by apostolic writing in the first place. A movement whose most articulate defender describes its content as disciplinary guidance, not doctrinal revelation, is not a movement claiming to rival or supplement the closed apostolic deposit — and this is Tertullian arguing in Montanism's favor, in his own opponents' own terms, with every reason to claim more for it if more could honestly be claimed.
The wider body of ancient sources on Montanism gives no stronger grounds for the "rival scripture" reading either. The church's actual response to the movement was, by the clearest ancient testimony available, considerably more mixed and more genuinely uncertain than a simple story of "prophecy versus closed canon" allows — some bishops and communities took the New Prophecy seriously as a real question rather than dismissing it as an obvious threat to Scripture's authority. And the specific, documented reason the Muratorian Fragment gives for excluding the Shepherd of Hermas is chronological rather than a response to Montanist-style prophetic claims, stated in the fragment's own words: Hermas wrote the Shepherd "very recently, in our times," while his brother Pius occupied the bishop's chair in Rome — Pius's dates independently placing the work decades after the apostolic period closed. A straightforward apostolicity test, not a referendum on whether ongoing prophecy itself was dangerous.
What Can Honestly Be Said
None of this means Montanism is irrelevant to this book's larger argument about canon formation — only that its relevance is narrower and more specific than the popular story claims. The New Prophecy does show the church working out, in real time, how to test a claim of ongoing revelation against the deposit of apostolic teaching already received — a live instance of exactly the discernment this whole book has traced through other means. Paul had already given the church a tool for this kind of testing, generations before Montanus was born:
"Do not extinguish the Spirit. Do not treat prophecies with contempt. But examine all things; hold fast to what is good." — 1 Thessalonians 5:19–21 (NET)
That is not a command to reject prophecy outright, and Montanism should not be handled as though it were simply an obvious, self-evident error the church swatted away without a second thought. It is a command to test — and the New Testament does not leave "examine all things" as an empty instruction with no content behind it. Read across Paul and John together, three tests recur for any claim to speak by the Spirit, and they are worth naming plainly rather than leaving implicit.