Panarion
A catalogue and refutation of eighty heresies by the bishop of Salamis in Cyprus, written about AD 375. It is hostile and often careless, but it copies out older documents and sayings that survive nowhere else, among them oracles of the Montanist prophets.
Read the text at archive.org ↗Sections 48–49, on the Phrygians and the Quintillians, begin at p. 219 (Greek text) ↗
Epiphanius called his work the Panarion, the “medicine chest”, because it was meant to supply remedies against the bites of heresy. He dates his own writing in the section on the Montanists: about 290 years, he says, have passed since Maximilla, down to the twelfth year of Valentinian and Valens, which is AD 375–376 (48.2).
He writes as a prosecutor, two centuries after the second-century movements he describes, and his own statements about them need to be checked against earlier writers. His value lies in his sources. For the “Phrygians” (section 48) he is generally thought to draw on a much older refutation, which quotes the prophets’ own words: a saying of Montanus comparing a man to a lyre and the divine speaker to the plectrum (48.4.1), and Maximilla’s saying that after her there will be no prophet, only the end (48.2.4). He also gives a date for the beginning of the movement, about the nineteenth year of Antoninus Pius (48.1.2), and admits that the group accepts the whole of Scripture and the resurrection of the dead (48.1.3). Section 49 reports a prophetess’s vision of Christ at Pepuza.
Cited in
- c. AD 157–172, estimated date