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Women Office Holders in Montanism

The volume then moves to the evidence of the Montanists in Phrygia. This chapter explores the role of women as invested with religious authority, leaders, prophets, ordained, and objects of reverence in Montanist communities, in the light both of literary sources and epigraphic evidence. It considers key issues, for example whether the designation presbytera on the tombstone of Ammion in ancient Temenothyrai, now Uşak, Turkey, means ‘elderly woman’, ‘the wife of a presbyter (or bishop)’, or a ‘female presbyter’. In the latter case, was this title simply honorific or involve holding of an actual office? It decides ultimately this was an actual office for a woman that functioned in an entirely Catholic community, perhaps in a proto-Catholic house-church at Temenothyrai, influenced by the attested practices of the Montanists. The Montanists, founding their gender theory on Paul’s assertion in Gal. 3:28 (so Epiphanius, Panarion 49.2.5), rejected the dichotomy of public and private spheres for the ministry of men and women, and women were included as office holders serving both.