Other influences tending to diversity were the rise of later prophets and visionaries, the personality of prominent members of the sect (like Tertullian himself, who gave to Montanism much more than he received from it), and the power of local environment.
He was also famous for his prophecies and the support he gave to visionaries.
In 1849 came the first of several examples that have appeared in Palestine from time to time of that curious product of American religious life - a community of dupes or visionaries led by a prophet or prophetess with claims to divine guidance.
Christian visionaries fixed the year 1666 for the millennium, and in his appeal to Cromwell on behalf of the return of the Jews to England Menasseh ben Israel made strong appeal to this belief.
At all events it enlisted the co-operation of men whose subsequent careers show them to have been something more than visionaries.