I Didn't Know About The Discovery of the Montanist City of Pepouza

From an original article in the Christian Century (November 21, 2001):

A holy city found. (news).(Pepouza, Roman era city)

The search may be finally over for the long-lost base of an early Christian movement, thanks to the diligence of a U.S. seminary president whose team assembled clues leading to a place where the sectarians claimed a heaven-sent New Jerusalem would descend in end times.

Around 165 C.E. in Asia Minor, a charismatic Christian named Montanus began a movement guided by his ecstatic prophecies and those of two women prophets, Priscilla and Maximilla. The ascetic movement spread from the province of Phrygia (neighboring that of the Galatians) throughout the Roman Empire. It even won the admiration, if not the allegiance, of church father Tertullian of Carthage.

Destroyed by Roman troops at its base nearly 400 years later, the Montanists have been credited or blamed--along with speculative Gnostic groups and the idiosyncratic Marcion, who rejected the Hebrew scriptures--with pushing churches to close the biblical canon and stamp out "heresy." The Montanists are remembered also by today's scholars for being one of the last holdouts on leadership roles for women and on charismatic gifts.

Yet the precise location of the sect's headquarters city of Pepouza has defied attempts at discovery for more than a century. Pepouza was where Montanus said the "New Jerusalem," described in Revelation, chapter 21, would arrive from heaven at the end of human history.

After some 30 years of trying to solve the puzzle, William Tabbernee, president of Phillips Theological Seminary in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in October led a team with Peter Lampe of the University of Heidelberg over the long-obscured site of a large Romanera city they believe is Pepouza. The clincher came when they climbed up a steep cliff to the remains of a 40-room monastery carved into the side of a canyon overlooking the area.

"There is no doubt in my mind that this is the place since the literature reveals the existence of exactly such a monastery at Pepouza," said Tabbernee, who was born in the Netherlands but grew up in Australia. "It was an incredible experience to stand there," he said, "to see the final piece of the puzzle fall into place. There is no other monastery in the whole region. I leapt for joy, acting like Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music." Lampe compared the discovery of Pepouza to "finding a new Shakespeare play."

Only a year ago at an international symposium in Turkey, Tabbernee had proposed another site as the most likely possibility for Pepouza within a 20-to-30-kilometer radius of ancient Phrygia. Frustrated scholars have put forth as many as eight other sites as candidates for archaeological searches.