This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Montanus called his own movement the New Prophecy, a name that states its claim plainly: the Spirit had not finished speaking when the apostles died. Around the middle of the second century in Phrygia, in Asia Minor, he and two women, Prisca and Maximilla, began prophesying in a manner contemporaries described as ecstatic, speaking as though the Spirit itself, in the first person, had taken over their voice.
That manner of speaking was itself the flashpoint. Regional bishops did not object chiefly to the content of the oracles, which mostly urged fasting, celibacy and readiness for a coming end, but to the form: a true prophet, the objection ran, keeps ordinary self possession while speaking, and a prophet who loses it is exhibiting a different, less trustworthy kind of inspiration. The movement expected the New Jerusalem to descend imminently near the Phrygian town of Pepuza, and organized around that expectation with a severity that outpaced the wider church own discipline.
Bishops in Asia Minor withheld communion from Montanist congregations through the later second century, a refusal that hardened over time into formal exclusion. The First Council of Constantinople, meeting in 381, named the group, there called Phrygians, among those requiring a full second reception into the church rather than a lighter form of readmission, treating their baptism as insufficient. The movement nonetheless persisted for generations, drawing at least one major theologian, Tertullian of Carthage, into its ranks for the latter part of his life.