Montanism was a heretical movement that originated about 156 and was named after its founder Montanus, and his followers were called Cataphrygians. It spread to other regions in the Roman Empire. This heresy arose at a time before Christianity was generally tolerated or legal in the Roman world.
While claiming a conversion to Christianity, Montanus preached and testified what he purported to be the Word of God as he traveled among the rural settlements of his native Phrygia and Asia Minor. Orthodox Christians, however, regarded his teaching to be heretical. He claimed not only to have received a series of direct revelations from the Holy Spirit, but personally to be the incarnation of the paraclete mentioned in the Gospel of John 14:16.
Montanus was accompanied by two women, Prisca, sometimes called Priscilla, and Maximilla, who likewise claimed to be the embodiments of the Holy Spirit that moved and inspired them. As they traveled, "the Three" as they were called, spoke in ecstatic visions and in the first person as of the Father or the Paraclete.
Prisca claimed that Christ had appeared to her in female form. When she was excommunicated, she exclaimed "I am driven away like the wolf from the sheep. I am no wolf: I am the word and spirit and power."
Although the Orthodox Christian church prevailed against Montanism within a few generations, elements of Montanism persisted. Inscriptions in the Tembris valley of northern Phrygia, dated between 249 and 279, openly proclaim their allegiance to Montanism.
In the sixth century, John of Ephesus, at the orders of the emperor Justinian, led an expedition to Pepuza to destroy the Montanist shrine there, which was formed around the tombs of Montanus, Priscilla, and Maximilla.