The Man from Phrygia

I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s day, and I heard behind me a loud voice like the sound of a trumpet,  Revelation 1:10  NASB

In the Spirit – In 156 C. E., Montanus appeared in the village of Phrygia.  He caused a ripple in the Church that became a tsunami centuries later.  In fact, you might owe your understanding of inspiration to Montanus rather than Paul.  Do you want to know why?  The story is all about the Greek idea of ecstasy.  If you thought that the prophets received God’s revelation the way John describes his vision, then you might find the history of this experience, “in the Spirit,” interesting and disturbing.[1]

We often associate John’s vision with our idea of spiritual ecstasy.  But ecstasy is not a biblical idea.  “The Greeks, who coined the word ‘ecstasy’ (ekstasis), understood by it quite literally a state of trance in which the soul was no longer in its place, but had departed from the body, or a state in which the soul, escaping from the body, had entered into a relationship with invisible beings or became united with a deity.”[2]

“Among the Greeks, such a condition is described as a divine seizure, as the state of being filled with the god, enthusiasm in the original sense of the word entheos: having god in oneself.”[3]

This idea was present in the Greek mystery religions which spread throughout the Mediterranean world from the fifth century B.C.E.  Ecstasy was an experience of union with the gods.  The result was “hieromania, a sacred madness in which the soul, leaving the body, winged its way to union with the god.”[4]

This popular religious experience made its way into the thinking about how the prophets received communication from God, compliments of Plato, Pythagoras, and Philo.

“Philo of Alexandria was, it seems, the first thinker to use the term ekstasis in its technical sense.  Accepting the Pythagorean assumption that the body is the prison-house of the soul and a hindrance to the perception of pure truth, and convinced that the human mind (nous) stands in sharp contrast to the divine Spirit, Philo maintains that the highest degree of knowledge can be attained only in an act of ecstasy.  In the normal state, man can achieve only rational knowledge.”[5]

Heschel’s analysis shows us that Philo had a significant influence on later Christian ideas about inspiration:

“Philo of Alexandria is the first thinker known to us who developed a comprehensive approach to the understanding of biblical prophecy.  In his endeavor to fuse Greek and Jewish doctrines he does not shrink from applying the ideas and nomenclature of the Greek mystery religion to his description of biblical prophets.  His syncretistic prophetology became the cornerstone of an interpretation of prophecy which has prevailed ever since.  Philo took over from Greek oracle-religion the idea of ecstasy and declared it to be the decisive mark of the prophet.  For him the prophet is a hierophant, a term for the highest officer of the heathen mysteries.  The prophetic state is described as ‘the divine possession (entheos) and frenzy (mania) to which the prophets as a class are subject;’ or as ‘the experience of the God-inspired and God-possessed . . . which proves him to be a prophet.’ . . . ‘No prophecy without ecstasy.’”[6]

How does God communicate His message to the prophets?  Do you imagine some sort of ecstatic experience, like the one John seems to describe, where the “Spirit” overwhelms the human scribe who dutifully writes what God reveals?  How much of this description comes from the Greek idea rather than the Bible?  If, “There is no word in the Bible for ecstasy,” then where did the idea of the divine, inerrant, inspiration of the text come from?

Along came Montanus.

“The essential principle of Montanism was that the Paraclete, the Spirit of truth, whom Jesus had promised in the Gospel according to John, was manifesting himself to the world through Montanus and the prophets and prophetesses associated with him. This did not seem at first to deny the doctrines of the church or to attack the authority of the bishops. Prophecy from the earliest days had been held in honour, and the church acknowledged the charismatic gift of some prophets.”[7]

“Ecstasy was the accepted form of prophecy in the Church of the second century.  The emergence of the Montanist movement soon after the middle of the second century C. E. brought ecstasy into the foreground.”[8]

“Tertullian, the chief advocate of the Montanists, who devoted one of his writings to this problem, identified prophetic revelations with raving and delirium, and regarded ecstasy as the hallmark of the supreme prophetic state. . . In the language of Augustine, ecstasy as alienation a mente was denied, but alienatio mentis a sensibus corporis, namely, ‘the derivation of the spiritual activity of man from some life outside his senses and its guidance towards the object of revelation,’ was admitted.  This theory prevailed throughout the Middle Ages.  Lutheran dogmaticians of the seventeenth century developed this doctrine of verbal inspiration to the extreme: every word in Scripture was inspired and dictated by God; the prophets were merely the hand and penmen of the Holy Spirit, God’s amanuenses.  Yet this monergistic doctrine of inspiration did not imply that God dehumanized His amanuenses and reduced them to mere mechanisms.  They were not ‘unconscious, as the enthusiasts say of themselves and as the Gentiles imagine the ecstasy in their prophets.  Neither is it to be taken as if the prophets did not understand their prophecies of things which they were to write, which was the aberration once taught by the Montanists, Phrygians, or Cataphrygians, and Priscilianists.’  While the doctrine of verbal inspiration was gradually given up in the eighteenth century, the mechanical conception of prophetic inspiration was revived in a modified form.”[9]

Next time someone tells you that the Bible is the inspired word of God, you might want to ask them how those words were communicated.  If they describe a process of spiritual ecstasy, being “filled with the Spirit,” refer them to Montanus, not Moses.  See what happens.

Topical Index:  inspired, ecstasy, Montanus, Philo, Revelation 1:10

[1] By the way, there is no definite article with “day” in the Greek text, so it could be translated “on a day belonging to the Lord,” rather than to a specific day.

[2] Abraham Heschel, The Prophets: Two Volumes in One (Hendrickson Publishers, 1962), Vol. 2, p. 104.

[3] Ibid., p. 106.

[4] Ibid., p. 108.

[5] Ibid., p. 112.

[6] Ibid., p. 115.

[7] https://www.britannica.com/topic/Montanism

[8] Ibid., p. 122.

[9] Ibid., pp. 123-124.