This designation is the anti-Montanist tract Ad Avircium Marcellum contra Cataphrygas, a Greek memorandum addressed to Avircius (Abercius) Marcellus against the Phrygian New Prophecy. Eusebius excerpted it in Ecclesiastical History 5.16–17. Martin Joseph Routh printed the Greek in Reliquiae sacrae, volume 2 (Oxford, 1846; reprint Olms, 1974), pages 183–193.
The writer, urged by Avircius and writing after a stay at Ancyra, reports the rise of Montanus, Priscilla, and Maximilla, attacks ecstatic prophecy, and refuses to add to the Gospel’s rule. Lightfoot and Harnack date the work around 192–193 CE; other calculations, using the thirteen years of peace after Maximilla’s death, place it early in the third century.
The text is a primary Greek witness to the earliest Catholic polemic against Montanism in Phrygia and to the circle of Avircius of Hieropolis. Read it for that controversy and for Routh’s fragments, not as the life of an unnamed correspondent.
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