Wulfila's Gothic Bible: Christianity Among the Goths (c. 350)

Wulfila’s Gothic Bible was the translation of the Christian scriptures into the Gothic language made by Bishop Wulfila in the mid-4th century. To write it he invented a new alphabet, giving the Goths their first written literature. His work spread a Homoian, so-called “Arian”, form of Christianity among the Goths, and its surviving copies, above all the splendid Codex Argenteus, are the oldest substantial texts in any Germanic language.

Background

In the 3rd century the Goths, a Germanic people, lived north of the lower Danube and the Black Sea. They raided deep into the Roman Empire, and on one raid into Asia Minor around the 250s they carried off Christian captives from Cappadocia. According to the church historian Philostorgius, Wulfila’s grandparents were among them, from a village near Parnassus.

Wulfila was born around 311 among the Goths, with a Gothic name meaning “little wolf”. He grew up bilingual and probably trilingual, using Gothic, Greek and Latin. The Christian community descended from the captives gave him a place in both the Gothic and Roman worlds.

Bishop of the Goths

Around 341 Wulfila was consecrated bishop by Eusebius of Nicomedia, then the most powerful bishop in the eastern empire, to serve the Christians in Gothic territory. He worked north of the Danube for about seven years.

Around 348 a Gothic ruler began persecuting Christians. Wulfila led a large group of believers across the river into the Roman province of Moesia, where the Emperor Constantius II allowed them to settle near Nicopolis ad Istrum, in what is now northern Bulgaria. Constantius is said to have called him the Moses of his time.

Christianity among the Goths still north of the Danube faced further persecution under the leader Athanaric in 369-372, when the Gothic martyr Saba was drowned. Wulfila took part in church councils, including the Council of Constantinople in 360, and died in Constantinople around 383.

The alphabet and the translation

Gothic had no written form apart from a few runic inscriptions. Wulfila created an alphabet of 27 letters, based mainly on Greek uncial letters with some forms from Latin and possibly from runes. He then translated the Bible from Greek, staying close to the Greek word order while creating new Gothic words for Christian ideas.

The surviving parts include most of the four Gospels and large parts of the letters of Paul, with fragments of the Old Testament book of Nehemiah. Scholars debate how much of the work was Wulfila’s own and how much was done by his circle or later revisers. The story that he left out the Books of Kings to avoid encouraging Gothic warfare comes from Philostorgius and cannot be checked.

A Homoian faith

Wulfila’s Christianity followed the Homoian creed favoured by Constantius II, which said that the Son is “like” the Father without defining their shared substance. It differed from the creed of the First Council of Nicaea, and Nicene writers grouped it under the label “Arian”. His creed survives in a letter by his pupil Auxentius of Durostorum.

When large numbers of Goths entered the empire in 376, after the arrival of the Huns, they accepted Christianity in this form, at a time when it was supported by the Emperor Valens. Shortly afterwards the empire turned firmly Nicene. Homoian Christianity therefore became a mark of identity for Goths, Vandals, Burgundians and Lombards, separating them from the Roman Catholic population they later ruled. The Visigoths of Spain abandoned it only at the Third Council of Toledo in 589.

The Codex Argenteus

The most famous copy of Wulfila’s work is the Codex Argenteus, the “Silver Book”. It was made in the early 6th century, probably in Ravenna for the court of the Ostrogothic king Theodoric the Great. The Gospels are written in silver ink on purple-dyed parchment, with the opening lines of sections in gold.

The codex originally had about 336 leaves, of which 188 survive. It was rediscovered in the 16th century at Werden Abbey in Germany, passed to the collections of Emperor Rudolf II in Prague, and was taken by Swedish troops in 1648. The Swedish chancellor Magnus Gabriel De la Gardie gave it to Uppsala University in 1669, where it is kept in the Carolina Rediviva library. A missing leaf turned up in Speyer Cathedral in 1970.

Timeline

• c. 250s: Goths take Christian captives from Cappadocia, including Wulfila’s ancestors.
• c. 311: Wulfila is born among the Goths.
• c. 341: Eusebius of Nicomedia consecrates Wulfila as bishop.
• c. 348: Wulfila leads persecuted Gothic Christians into Roman Moesia.
• 360: Wulfila attends the Council of Constantinople.
• 369-372: Athanaric persecutes Christians north of the Danube.
• c. 383: Wulfila dies in Constantinople.
• Early 6th century: The Codex Argenteus is produced in Ostrogothic Italy.

Why it matters

Wulfila turned an unwritten language into a language of scripture. His Bible is the earliest major witness to the Germanic languages that include English, German and the Scandinavian languages, and his Homoian faith shaped the religious identity of the Gothic kingdoms that succeeded Rome in the West.