Ulfilas

Gothic Christian bishop

• Born: 311
• Birthplace: The region of modern Rumania
• Died: 383
• Place of death: Constantinople (now in Istanbul, Turkey)

An apostle to the Goths, Ulfilas developed an alphabet for the Gothic language and made the first Gothic translation of the Bible. He was also instrumental in converting the Goths to Arianism, leading to conflicts once these peoples settled inside the predominantly Nicene Roman Empire.

Early Life

Not much is known about the early life of Ulfilas (UHL-fuh-las). Tradition has it that his grandparents were taken as slaves from Cappadocia into the Gothic settlements north of the Danube. This same tradition suggests that his father was a Goth. “Ulfilas” itself is a Gothic term meaning “little wolf.”

Ulfilas was fluent in three languages: Greek, Latin, and Gothic. He must have learned something of all three in his youth, for in 332 he was sent to Constantinople, perhaps as an emissary of the Goths to the Romans, or perhaps as a hostage to the court of the emperor Constantine. While there, Ulfilas either acquired or further developed his mastery of Greek and Latin. By the time he was thirty, he had risen to the position of lector, which required that he be able to read and speak in all three languages to the Gothic Christians inside the Empire.

The adult Ulfilas was an Arian rather than a Nicene Christian. When he embraced this position has been debated since antiquity. Orthodox and Arian historians alike tended to advance dates more important for their partisan positions than for their historical accuracy; modern scholars are convinced that it was around 330, during his time at the court of Constantine, since Arianism was the predominant theological position there. Whatever the accurate date, in 341, during the reign of the Emperor Constantius II, Ulfilas was consecrated a bishop by the Arian bishop Eusebius. He would spend the remaining forty years of his life as an apostle to the Goths.

Life’s Work

The Visigoths were a tribal people who, though nominally under a king, usually vested local control in the hands of “judges.” In the region where Ulfilas began his preaching, the local judge, Athanaric, was a pagan. After Ulfilas had been preaching for seven years, Athanaric began to persecute both Arian and Nicene Christians. The danger became so great that Ulfilas sought refuge inside the Empire on the near side of the Danube. The emperor at the time, Constantius, also an Arian, granted his request for asylum. Ulfilas and his band of followers settled in Moetia, in modern Bulgaria.

A second, more severe persecution followed, lasting from 369 to 373. Many more Arians fled to Ulfilas’s community. Apparently, Athanaric feared that Christianity was undermining the tribal nature of his society and threatening the old religion. If Ulfilas’s community is any example, this would certainly have been the case. They remained steadfastly loyal to Rome and devoutly Arian Christian even in the following century, when they refused to join the whole remaining body of the Visigoths who, fleeing the Huns, entered and subsequently looted the falling Roman Empire. Indeed, the community Ulfilas had founded in Moetia was still there in the middle of the sixth century when Jordanes, a Gothic historian, distinguished them from the other, more warlike Goths.

In the midst of the persecution of 368, a civil war erupted between Athanaric and another chieftain, Fritigern. Fritigern, at first defeated, sought Imperial assistance. The emperor Valens, an Arian, was prepared to assist; Fritigern, in return, was prepared to convert to Arian Christianity along with all of his followers. With Valens’s help, Athanaric was defeated. From his location on the Imperial side of the mountains, Ulfilas seems to have attempted to convert both peoples. In 376, when Fritigern’s Visigoths entered the Empire fleeing the Huns, Ulfilas is said to have accompanied his embassy to the emperor in order to plead their case.

Ulfilas’s specific activities in the remainder of his life are not well documented. That he was preaching and teaching the Goths and Romans in Moetia, and perhaps beyond, seems clear. Additionally, he must have devoted much of his time to developing the Gothic alphabet, which he used for his translation of the Greek Bible. He also must have instructed his followers in the use of the alphabet. Subsequently, his text was copied and disseminated among other Gothic groups. The only remaining copy of Ulfilas’s translation, a fragment of some 118 pages of the New Testament preserved at the University of Uppsala in Sweden, was made in Ostrogothic Italy about a century after Ulfilas’s death. It is known as the Codex Argenteus because its uncial letters are of silver on blue velum. A few additional manuscript fragments exist that bear a striking resemblance to the work of Ulfilas, but it is not possible to determine with certainty that they are his. Finally, there are later references to the text that include quotations from the Psalms as well as passages from Genesis. It was his intention to translate the entire Bible with the possible exception of the Book of Kings, which he said was too much about war for the Goths’ own good. In all likelihood, he completed the major portion of his work.

He was also a tireless participant in the Trinitarian controversy of his day. His disciple Bishop Auxentius records that Ulfilas attended many councils and wrote much on the controversy. Independent sources mention him only at two councils, but Auxentius’s own work speaks at length of Ulfilas’s polemical writings.

Ulfilas occupied something of a moderate position in the controversy. He was Arian because he subordinated Jesus the Son to God the Father. On his deathbed, he repeated his creed in a form that would become synonymous with that of other Arians who subsequently converted to this version of Christianity. He stated that he believed in one eternal God who existed alone from the beginning. It was this God who created the Son, “the only begotten God.” The Son, in turn, was the creator of all things and regarded the Father as superior to himself. Finally, it was the Father through the Son who created the Holy Spirit before anything else was created. His creed was “Homoean” because it refers to Christ as being “like” the Father rather than being in any sense “of the same substance” with the Father, as the “Homousian” formula from the Nicene Council of 325 had decreed.

This debate was very important for subsequent Gothic history. Ulfilas, the apostle to the Goths, and his disciples doubtless worked tirelessly among them teaching an Arian gospel. Further, his Gothic Bible was influential in providing them with a written language and also with access to other writings, many of which would have been Arian in outlook. The Nicene community worked only in Latin and Greek. Some scholars, indeed, have suggested that Ulfilas would have served the Goths better if he had taught his priests Greek or Latin instead of the language of the Goths. Others point out that, given the hostility between Roman and Goth in this period, Latin is not a language the Goths would have readily learned to read; their own language, though, was another matter.

It has been noted that Ulfilas’s version of the Trinity was more compatible with the culture of the Goths than was the Nicene version. It was a society in which hierarchy of social rank was not only very significant but also very much threatened by the influence of Rome. A creed that made a clear subordination of Son to Father and Holy Spirit to both would have been more acceptable than the highly abstract notions of equality and co-eternity of the Nicene Creed. Finally, the centralizing tendencies of the Nicene tradition would have further weakened the traditional structures of Gothic society, making Christianity into a more threatening, less inviting religious creed.

There is a certain amount of conjecture in all these arguments. However, it is certain that in 376, when the remaining Goths crossed the Danube seeking the safety of the Empire, they embraced Arian Christianity, which they retained until their disappearance as independent successor states during the Gothic Wars of the Emperor Justinian in the sixth century.

Near the end of Ulfilas’s life, the Nicene faction regained control of the Imperial court, and the Arians found their position under attack. In 380, the emperor Theodosius the Great convened a synod at Constantinople, ostensibly to deal with the matter. Ulfilas was among those summoned; that he was personally summoned by the emperor attests to his continuing importance among the Arian bishops of the era. In any event, he went and even testified; before the council completed its work, however, he died, in 383.

Significance

Ulfilas’s position was ultimately rejected at the Synod of Constantinople, which, following the Second Ecumenical Council, condemned Arianism. Yet the Goths did gain the recognition that, in their churches at least, the people would be governed in accordance with the manner of their forebears. In effect, Goths would be free to pursue their own beliefs. In this way, an opportunity was created for Arianism to spread. In the decades following 395, when large numbers of Huns crossed the Danube into the Empire, Ulfilas’s Arian Gauls with their Gothic Bibles were prepared to convert the Gothic newcomers, who now included not only the few remaining Visigoths but the Ostrogoths, Vandals, and Gepids as well. Arianism would be a force to be reckoned with for centuries to come.

Finally, Ulfilas’s translation of the Bible has been of inestimable value to scholars interested in the languages and practices of the Gothic peoples of the late Empire. By comparing the Gothic words Ulfilas used to translate the biblical text to the original Greek, it is possible to gain insights into the social, political, and theological ideas of the Goths. Scholars frequently refer to Gothic words gleaned from the Codex Argenteus when describing the cultural and social structure of the early Goths. Without Ulfilas’s work, scholars would know far less about them.

Ulfilas was on the losing side of the Trinitarian argument, and almost all that he himself wrote was destroyed. Yet he helped to make possible the first step in the absorption of the Gothic peoples into the West; moreover, through his translation of the Bible, he provided modern scholars with invaluable insights into the lives of peoples who, though long vanished as political and ethnic communities, continue to survive in their descendants among the populations of southern France, Spain, and Italy.

Bibliography

Böhmer, H. “Ulfilas.” In The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, edited by Macauley Jackson. Vol. 12. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 1949-1950. A lengthy article on Ulfilas as well as a helpful bibliography. A source useful in organizing the major events of Ulfilas’s life.

Bradley, Henry. The Story of the Goths: From the Earliest Times to the End of the Gothic Dominion in Spain. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1888. Although dated in some respects, still useful for its discussion of Ulfilas’s Gothic alphabet and his biblical translation.

Schaff, Philip, ed. A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church. 1890-1907. Reprint. 14 vols. Grand Rapids, Mich.: W. R. Eerdmans, 1983. An English source for the works of Greek Church historians of Ulfilas and the Trinitarian controversy; however, they are all partisans of the Nicene position. Available in most college libraries.

Scott, Charles A. Anderson. Ulfilas, Apostle of the Goths: Together with an Account of the Gothic Churches and Their Decline. Cambridge: Macmillan and Bowers, 1885. An older work that seeks to do justice to the Arian Goths at the hands of earlier partisan Nicene Christian writers. The author presents Ulfilas as a “monument to the Goths.” Checked against more recent sources, it is still quite valuable.

Sumruld, William A. Augustine and the Arians: The Bishop of Hippo’s Encounters with Ulfilan Arianism. Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1994. Although the focus is on Saint Augustine and his debates with Maximinus, there is much attention paid to the influence of Ulfilas. See in particular chapter 2, “The Rise of Ulfilan Arianism.”

Thompson, E. A. Romans and Barbarians: The Decline of the Western Empire. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982. Presents the story of the end of the Western Roman Empire from the vantage point of the Goths. While the work contains little information on Ulfilas, it provides valuable insights into the culture of his people.

Thompson, E. A. The Visigoths in the Time of Ulfila. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1966. As much about the Visigoths as Ulfilas, this work provides valuable insights into the working of Visigothic society. Helps explain Ulfilas’s work and significance among the Visigoths.

Wolfram, Herwig. History of the Goths. Translated by Thomas J. Dunlap. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. A comparatively recent source on Ulfilas and his place in Gothic history; also the most complete work on the Goths as a whole. Covers all the Gothic peoples from their shadowy beginnings to their catastrophic end in the sixth century Gothic Wars.