iii. from book ii.

Wherefore, since they stigmatized us as slayers of the prophets ¹ because we did not receive their loquacious ² prophets,--for they say that these are they whom the Lord promised to send to the people,--let them answer us in the name of God, and tell us, O friends, whether there is any one among those who began to speak from Montanus and the women onward that was persecuted by the Jews or put to death by the wicked? There is not one. Not even one of them is there who was seized and crucified for the name ³ of Christ. No; certainly not. Neither assuredly was there one of these women who was ever scourged in the synagogues of the Jews, or stoned. No; never anywhere. It is indeed by another kind of death that Montanus and Maximilla are said to have met their end. For the report is, that by the instigation of that maddening spirit both of them hung themselves; not together indeed, but at the particular time of the death of each ⁴ as the common story goes. And thus they died, and finished their life like the traitor Judas. Thus, also, the general report gives it that Theodotus--that astonishing person who was, so to speak, the first procurator ⁵ of their so-called prophecy, and who, as if he were sometime taken up and received into the heavens, fell into spurious ecstasies, ⁶ and gave himself wholly over to the spirit of delusion--was at last tossed by him ⁷ into the air, and met his end miserably. People say then that this took place in the way we have stated. But as we did not see ⁸ them ourselves, we do not presume to think that we know any of these things with certainty. And it may therefore have been in this way perhaps, and perhaps in some other way, that Montanus and Theodotus and the woman mentioned above perished.