METHURGEMAN ("Interpreter"): The title given to the Palestinian official who in the synagogue service translated into the vernacular (Aramaic) the lesson read in Hebrew from the law verse by verse, and the lesson read from the prophets three verses at a time. See SYNAGOGUE, I.; and TALMUD.

METROPHANES, me"tref'a-niz, CRITOPULUS, crai'tep-u-lus: Patriarch of Alexandria; b. at Berrhoea, Macedonia, probably in 1589; d. at Alexandria, probably in 1639. After entering a monastery at an early age and becoming the protosyncellus of the patriarch of Constantinople, he was sent to England by Cyril Lucar (q.v.) and studied at Oxford until 1623. He then went to Helmstedt, and, after visiting other German cities, was an associate of the Reformed at Geneva in 1627. In 1631 he signed himself at Alexandria as

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tics but also as an anti-Montanist at the outset of that controversy. The unknown anti-Montanist writer of Asia Minor from whose work, written in 192 or 193, Eusebius gives extracts (Hist. eccl., V., xvi. sqq.) cites a Montanist work written in answer to one by "brother Miltiades." The thesis of the latter was apparently that a prophet should not speak in an ecstasy. In the so-called "Little Labyrinth" the Roman author (Hippolytus?) names Miltiades among the early witnesses for the divinity of Christ; and at the beginning of the third century Tertullian ("Against the Valentinians," chap. v., ANF, iii. 506) mentions him, under the title of "Militiades, the sophist of the churches," between Justin and Irenaeus as one of his own predecessors in the opposition to the Valentinians. The thesis quoted above as to prophecy is the first instance of this view in the Gentile Church. Miltiades must have been one of the new theologians who determined the great change in theological views marked by the outbreak of the Montanist controversy (see MONTANISM). His Christological position was also considered noteworthy by the later generation in opposition to the dynamistic view of the indwelling of God in Jesus. The name of "sophist," not necessarily a term of reproach, has nevertheless in Tertullian's mouth an unflattering ring. His book De ecstasi apparently continued the polemic against Miltiades begun in Asia Minor. Eusebius, who had himself handled books of Miltiades, is the last to mention him, attributing to him exhaustive treatises against both Jews and pagans, and an apology for his faith addressed "to the rulers of the world," by which phrase is to be understood the emperors-- either Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius, or the latter and Lucius Verus, or less probably Marcus Aurelius and Commodus. There are reasons for thinking that he wrote a special treatise against the Valentinians which was unknown to Eusebius; there is an illegible name in the Muratorian Fragment which might easily be Miltiades, and Richardson has advanced the theory that four works of his are drawn upon in the pseudo-Clementine literature.

(ADOLF HARNACH.)

BzHLIoaBAPBT: A. Harmaclc, in TU, i (1882), 278-282; We.., uaeracwr, x.143, 239-240, 255-256, ii. 1, pp. 381382, 2, pp. 228, 283; idem, Dopnw, ii. 190, 237, 243; O. Otto, in Corpus apotopetarum CArist~norum, ix. 384373, Jens, 1872; T. Zahn, Forerhunpen sur Geeahiehte des . . Kamm, v. 237-240, Leipeio, 1892; lis'fer, Hiaforv, pp.121-122.