Ulfilas Translates the Bible into Gothic - First Germanic Literature
Ulfilas invented an alphabet for Gothic around the middle of the fourth century in order to translate the Bible into it. He was born about 311, probably to Cappadocian Christian captives taken in a Gothic raid, and grew up among the Goths north of the Danube speaking both languages. He was consecrated bishop around 341 by Eusebius of Nicomedia and sent back as a missionary. Gothic had no writing beyond runes, which carried associations he did not want and were poorly suited to continuous prose. He built an alphabet of some twenty-seven letters, mostly Greek with borrowings from Latin and the runic futhark, and translated the scriptures from Greek into it. The Codex Argenteus at Uppsala, written in silver and gold ink on purple parchment in Italy two centuries later, is the main surviving witness, and it preserves most of the four gospels. It is by a long margin the earliest substantial text in any Germanic language, and much of what is known about the structure of the Germanic languages before Old English rests on it. He is said to have omitted the Books of Kings on the grounds that the Goths needed no encouragement in the matter of war. The theological consequence was large. Ulfilas was an Arian, holding the Son subordinate to the Father, and the Goths and the peoples they converted became Arian Christians — which set them apart from their Roman subjects for two centuries. When the Goths, Vandals and Lombards ruled Italy, Spain and Africa, they ruled Catholic populations as heretics, and every one of those kingdoms eventually converted or fell. The Franks under Clovis converted directly to Catholicism around 496, which is much of the reason they inherited the west.
- Year: 341 CE
- Category: Cultural
