The Real History of the End of the World (9 page)

Eusebius, a Greek scholar and friend of the emperor Constantine, wrote a history of the Christian Church in the early fourth century. He used many documents that have been since lost. One was by a priest, whose name has not survived, who went to Phrygia and debated with Montanus and his followers. He describes Montanus's behavior, saying, “He raved, and began to chatter and talk nonsense, prophesying in a way that conflicted with the practice of the Church handed down generation by generation from the beginning.”
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The response of the crowd in attendance does sound plausible. Some thought he was possessed and was a nuisance; others listened avidly and believed it all. The writer ends by saying that it is now thirteen years since the death of the prophet Maximilla, and none of the disasters she foretold has come to pass.
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Maximilla was supposed to have said that the world would end immediately after her death. “After me there will be no more prophecy, but the end.”
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The movement survived the deaths of the all the founders at the end of the second century. Like many later apocalyptic groups, the Montanists adapted to the realization that the end was not coming when it was first predicted. Their most famous convert was the theologian Tertullian (c. 160-c. 225), who lived in Carthage in North Africa. Tertullian believed that he was living in the end times, although he thought it presumptuous to name a time. “[T]wo comings of Christ having been revealed to us: a first, which has been fulfilled in the lowliness of a human lot; a second, which impends over the world, now near its close, in all the majesty of Deity unveiled.”
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So he, like other faithful Montanists, was willing to let God decide the time.

Tertullian mentions that the followers of the New Prophecy called themselves
pneumatikoi
, “spiritual persons.” This is borne out by the discovery of several gravestones in Turkey that used this term.
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The Montanists seem to have been a sect centered on three charismatic leaders, all of whom spoke, they insisted, only as directed by a divine presence. Montanus was more likely to get into debates and shouting matches in which he may have implied that he was God himself, but that also might simply be the accusations of his enemies. Maximilla was more careful, stating, “The Lord sent me as a partisan of this task, a revealer of this covenant, an interpreter of this promise, forced, whether I will or not, to learn the knowledge of God.”
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The third prophet, Prisca (or Priscilla), caused some controversy when she told everyone that Jesus had appeared to her “as a woman clothed in a shining robe, Christ came to me [in sleep]; he put wisdom into me and revealed to me that this place is sacred and that here Jerusalem will come down from heaven.”
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“Here” were the towns of Pepuza and Tymion in Phrygia, where the followers of the New Prophecy established themselves, renaming the area “Jerusalem,” since it was well known that it was Jerusalem Christ would return to. They fasted, prayed, and abstained, as much as possible, from sexual activity. They seemed to have allowed marriage but not the remarriage of those widowed. In essence, they wanted to be ready and on the spot when Jesus returned.

The trouble for other Christians was that there was nothing in any of those activities that went counter to the beliefs of the majority of Christians. But at the time, the religion was still small and often suppressed forcefully by the government. Montanus's claim to a direct line to God probably irritated the bishops, who were trying to establish an organized church under difficult conditions. They may also have felt that the trances, speaking in tongues, and public displays made the rest of the Christians look silly.

According to Eusebius, one Apollonius wrote a polemic against the group. He accused Montanus and the women of extorting money from their followers to support a luxurious lifestyle. He also points out that Maximilla and Priscilla left their husbands to join the group, insinuating that they did this just for wild sex. He states that two of the Montanists who claimed to have been imprisoned for being Christians were actually small-time crooks, whose crimes “are filed in the record office.”
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He finally attacks their claim to be prophets. “Tell me, does a prophet dye his hair? Does a prophet paint his eyelids? . . . Does a prophet visit the gaming tables and play dice?”
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Montanus apparently did all these things, and so God would never sully himself speaking through such a one. Of course, we don't have a rebuttal from Montanus. Nor can we check the records office for data or go through the New Prophecy's trash looking for empty bottles of dye.

The sect outlasted its founders and took hold in Carthage, Tertullian's home. It was only after the hierarchy of the Church was better established that the Montanists were listed as heretics and accused of more than having expectations of the end and painting their eyelids.

One of the nastier charges against the Montanists, made in later centuries, was the blood libel. This is practically a subtheme in every tract against a non-mainstream religious group. Starting in the twelfth century it was used against the Jews, who were supposed to sacrifice a Christian child every Passover and bake its blood into the matzo. The communal meal and communion of the Christians opened them up for this accusation from the pagans they lived among. Cyril of Jerusalem (c. 315-386) was the first person known to use it against the Montanists. He said that they “slaughter the wretched little children of women and cut them up into unlawful meat for the sake of what among them are called mysteries.”
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This was taken up by other writers looking for good reasons to condemn Montanists. One problem with the sect was that, except for some fuzzy logic in their claims that the Holy Spirit spoke through them, there was really nothing they believed in that was heretical. The gift of prophecy wasn't unacceptable to early Christians. Theologians were upset only when some of the pronouncements countered the fragile agreements made between theologians on matters such as the nature of the Trinity. Most Christians really didn't understand all the fine points of dogma, but killing and eating babies was clearly a Bad Thing to Do. If the Montanists did it, they were against it.

I wonder if this libel might not have been partly caused by Tertullian. In his justification of Christianity written ostensibly for all the Greek and Roman pagans, he takes up the blood libel accusation. Only Tertullian had a warped sense of humor. He writes as if Christians really did this, “Yet there is no great difference between us [Christians and pagans], only you do not kill your infants in the way of a sacred rite, nor (as a service) to God. Instead, you make away with them in a more cruel manner, because you expose them to the cold and hunger, and to wild beasts, or else you get rid of them by the slower death of drowning.”
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He continues to bait his pagan readers about the joy they take in watching people die for their sport, nothing to eating babies.

What was Tertullian thinking? Since later Christians were quite sure that they had never eaten babies, they might well have wondered if he was talking about his experiences as a Montanist, thus confirming the truth of the charge.

One of the clearest later commentaries about the Montanists wasn't written until the fourth century, by Jerome, who first translated the Hebrew Bible into Latin (with the help of several smart women). He wrote to one of them, Marcella, who had been approached by a Montanist missionary. In his letter, Jerome first says that he doesn't believe that Montanus, Maximilla, and Priscilla were prophets because the prophecy of Joel, quoted by Peter at the Pentecost (Acts 2:14-18), that in the last days there would be prophets, was fulfilled in the Pentecost at that time and couldn't happen again.
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While he didn't obsess over it, this indicates that Jerome, too, thought the end was coming fairly soon.

His next quibble with the Montanists has to do with the nature of the Trinity. “We distinguish the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit as three persons, but unite them in one substance. They, on the other hand, . . . force the Trinity into the narrow limits of a single personality.”
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Because he has nothing else major to accuse them of, Jerome then chastises the Montanists for being too strict, fasting too often and not allowing forgiveness of sins. Jerome also doesn't like it that they don't consider bishops important. Finally, he is angry at the audacity of the Montanists to think that God made mistakes using Moses and Jesus and “when, by these two steps He was unable to save the world, He last of all descended by the Holy Spirit upon Montanus and those demented women Prisca and Maximilla, and that thus . . . Montanus possessed a fullness of knowledge such as was never claimed by Paul.”
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The nerve!

Jerome had heard the claims of blood libel but, to his credit, doubted them. “I prefer, I say, not to credit these: accusations of blood-shedding may well be false.”
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So, through all the gossip and fourth-century yellow journalism, I conclude that the Montanists were a charismatic sect who believed that their leaders had received advance warning of the Second Advent of Christ, assumed it would be soon, and set up a community to make themselves ready for him. Their experience of the hope, then disappointment and scorn from outsiders would be shared by others throughout the centuries to the present. Even the accusations against them are familiar.

The sad thing for them is that one hundred years earlier, at the end of the first century, they would have been in the mainstream. But, by the end of the 190s, Christians were beginning to think that the Apocalypse wasn't showing up any time soon so, rather than being prophets, Montanus and his followers were simply an embarrassment.

The evangelist John has spoken of these two resurrections in
the book which is called the Apocalypse but in such a way that
some Christians do not understand the first of the two, and so
construe the passage into ridiculous fancies.

—Augustine of Hippo “Of the Last Judgment,”
City of God,
chapter 7

 

 

 

 

B
y the end of the fourth century C.E., the debate on the time of the Apocalypse had become extremely heated and varied. There were those who clung to the idea that it would start at any minute and those who were happy to accept the calculations of theologians who put the date safely into the end of the next century. The Eastern Church fathers were still not convinced that John's Revelation was a canonical book, considering it as apocrypha written by an unknown person with no apostolic authority. Some thought, with Origen, that the book should be read as allegory. Many others sided with Lactantius, who thought one should assume a literal meaning.
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Then something happened that made all Christians suspect that, this time, the end really had come. In 410, the Ostragoth Alaric conquered and sacked Rome.

By this time, Rome was largely Christian. The emperor was Christian. Therefore the persecutor had been converted, and the Evil Empire had mutated into a city in the service of God. Furthermore, many Christians believed that Rome was the fourth monarchy described in the Book of Daniel. Everyone knew that the fall of that monarchy signaled the coming of the end times.

Reading the reactions of the time, from both Christian and pagan authors, it's clear that the shock was devastating, shaking the foundations of world order. The pagan concept of “eternal Rome” had been taken over by many Christians who now prepared for the Parousia and the appearance of the Antichrist.

One man was determined to stem the millennial tide. His name was Aurelius Augustinus, later known as Augustine, bishop of Hippo.

Augustine was born in 354 C.E. in the town of Thagaste in North Africa in what is now in Algeria, near the border of Tunisia.
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His father was a minor Roman official and a pagan, his mother, Monica, was a Christian. Augustine's upbringing was not devoutly Christian. He was educated in Latin rhetoric, with the intention of entering government service. When he was about eighteen, he went to Carthage to continue his education. There he converted to Manichaeism, a religion, which began in Persia, that posited a god of darkness and a god of light in constant struggle and was a descendent of Zoroastrianism. He also met a woman, never named in his memoirs, with whom he lived for fifteen years. They had a son named Adeodatus, or “gift from God.”

In 383, Augustine went to Rome to teach rhetoric. The following year, he was appointed public rhetor of Milan with the assistance of the pagan senator Symmachus. The senator probably hoped that Augustine would help in the struggle with Milan's bishop, Ambrose. Despite the increasing Christianization of the empire, Symmachus wasn't going down without a fight. The Altar of Victories at which offerings were made for the welfare of the empire had been taken from the Senate House. Ambrose, who was a councilor of the emperor Valentinian II, was doing his best to block the return of the altar.
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Symmachus was doomed to disappointment, however, for Augustine soon fell under the spell of Ambrose, who was a powerful personality and, according to his contemporaries, an inspiring preacher. By this time Augustine was beginning his spiritual quest once more. In the meantime, his mother had sent his concubine back to Africa, over his objections, and was trying to arrange a marriage for Augustine with someone of his own class.

In his early thirties, Augustine was having an emotional crisis. In one of the more dramatic scenes of religious narrative, one evening he was sitting in a garden with his friend Alypius. From Augustine's description of it, he was close to a breakdown. He had been studying Christianity and, intellectually, was drawn to it, but part of him didn't want to give up sex and other pleasures. As he was thrashing about in spiritual agony, Augustine heard the voice of a child chanting, “Take up and read; take up and read!” He rushed back to the letters of the Apostle Paul, left open on the table, and read, “Not in reveling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy; instead, put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.”
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