abstract
| - Of Cappadocian ancestry, Wulfila was entirely one with the Goths (among whom he had been born) in both language and sympathy. Most of his early life was spent in Constantinople. He was ordained a bishop (c. 341) by the Arian Eusebius of Nicomedia (then bishop of Constantinople). He returned soon afterward to his people to work as a missionary, first beyond the Imperial boundaries and then among the Goths who had settled in Moesia II. Wulfila made the first translation of the Bible from Greek into the Gothic language, omitting, according to Philostorgius, the Books of Kings, which might provoke the already war-like Goths to be negatively inspired by the martial actions contained in those texts. For his translation he established a Gothic alphabet writing system. Fragments have survived and are known as the Codex Argenteus, in the University Library of Uppsala. Wulfila converted many among the Visigoths and Ostrogoths, preaching an Arian Christianity, which when they reached the western Mediterranean, set them apart from their overwhelmingly Orthodox neighbors and subjects. Many believe that it was the ongoing Arianism of Gothic Christianity that eventually led to the addition of the Filioque to the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed at the Council of Toledo, Spain in 589, in a creedal attempt to bolster the divinity of the Son of God.
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