A holy city found

Christian Century, Nov 21, 2001 by John Dart

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.

In a telephone interview with the CENTURY, Tabbernee said several clues were pieced together to narrow the team's hunt to a remote area south of the city of Usak in central western Turkey. A still-unpublished inscription refers, surprisingly, to Tymion, the other settlement which Montanus had, together with Pepouza, designated as the New Jerusalem, Tabbernee said. "We didn't yet know where Pepouza was, but we were able to locate Tymion. Hence we knew Pepouza must be nearby."

Another clue was the fact that both a Byzantine bishop and an abbot from Pepouza attended the second Council of Nicaea held in 787, suggesting to Tabbernee that a monastery then used by orthodox Christians was used earlier by the Montanists, or the Cataphrygians, as the church fathers called them. "In the paper I had presented earlier, I had argued that the monastery, which the Montanist movement had probably also used to house pilgrims, was not in the middle of the city but just outside," he said.

In fact, the director of the Usak Archaeological Museum, Kazim Akbiyikoglu, alluded to cliff-side ruins south of the site of ancient Tymion that might have been a monastery. With an old Byzantine traveler's guide and the permission of the Turkish government, the team of nine persons from the U.S., Germany and Turkey made its way into a broad canyon. One of them was American Robert Jewett, formerly of Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary and now a visiting professor at the University of Heidelberg.

There they found architectural blocks of stone as well as pieces of jugs and other ceramics, and tombstones shaped like small doors. "We found numerous tombs and other evidence of a sizable city," said Tabbernee. After walking through river flats, they hiked up a steep slope strewn with rock rubble toward a structure hewn out of the side of the canyon.

Lampe and Tabbernee were ecstatic. Standing near the monastery, they said they could identify other landmarks that fit perfectly with ancient descriptions of Pepouza. The apparent site of that city lay a little over one mile east of the monastery with the site of Tymion due north of that, said Tabbernee.

There is a "very high" probability that Pepouza has been found at last, said Susanna Elm, professor of history at the University of California at Berkeley. She described Lampe and Tabbernee as "very highly regarded, experienced and scrupulous" researchers. She added that the Montanist movement was important historically because it posed questions about "real, live" prophecy as one of the foundations for leadership.