Miltiades and the Prophets

In this treatise he also mentions a writer, Miltiades, saying that he too had written a book against the heresy we have described. After quoting some of their words, he goes on: “I found these things in a treatise of theirs opposing the treatise of the brother Alcibiades, in which he proves that a prophet ought not to speak in ecstasy, and I made an abridgment.” [a]

A little further on in the same work he lists those who prophesied under the new covenant, among whom he counts a certain Ammia and Quadratus, saying: “But the false prophet is in ecstasy, which brings with it a lack of restraint and of fear. He begins in willful ignorance and ends, as has been said, in involuntary madness of soul. [b] They will not be able to show that any prophet of the old covenant or of the new was carried away in spirit in this way: not Agabus, nor Judas, nor Silas, nor the daughters of Philip, nor Ammia in Philadelphia, nor Quadratus, nor any others they may boast of, who have nothing to do with them.” [c]

And again, a little later, he says this: “For if, as they say, the women around Montanus succeeded Quadratus and Ammia in Philadelphia in the prophetic gift, let them show which of their people succeeded Montanus and the women. For the apostle holds that the prophetic gift must be in the whole Church until the final coming. But they could not show it; it is already about the fourteenth year since Maximilla’s death.” [d]

That is what he writes. But the Miltiades he mentions has left us other records of his own zeal for the divine oracles, in the discourses he composed against the Greeks and against the Jews, meeting each subject separately in two treatises. He also made a defense, addressed to the secular rulers, of the philosophy he followed. [e]