Ulfilas, the Gothic Bible and the Codex Argenteus

In the exhibition hall of Carolina Rediviva, the main building of Uppsala University Library, a double opening of a sixth-century book lies under glass beside a chased silver cover made in seventeenth-century Stockholm. The leaves are purple, the letters silver, and the language is Gothic, an East Germanic tongue that has had no native speakers for many centuries. The book is the Codex Argenteus, the “Silver Bible”, and it preserves the largest surviving part of the translation of Scripture made in the fourth century by Ulfilas, bishop of the Goths. Uppsala University Library describes the manuscript as the main source of what is known about the Gothic language and as Sweden’s most precious literary treasure.¹ Its history joins a missionary bishop on the Lower Danube, an Ostrogothic court in Ravenna, a Benedictine abbey in the Ruhr, the collections of an emperor in Prague, the war booty of a Swedish army and the scholarship of four centuries of philologists.

The Bishop of the Goths

A Family of Captives

The fullest account of Ulfilas’s origins comes from the Arian church historian Philostorgius, whose history survives in an epitome made by the Byzantine patriarch Photius. According to Philostorgius, Gothic raiders from north of the Danube crossed into Asia Minor in the reigns of Valerian and Gallienus, in the middle of the third century, and plundered Cappadocia and Galatia. Among the captives they took back across the river were Christians, including clergy, whose presence began the conversion of their captors. The ancestors of Ulfilas were among them: Philostorgius records that they were “of Cappadocian descent, deriving their origin from a village called Sadagolthina, near the city of Parnassus”.² Ulfilas was therefore born into a community of Greek-speaking Christian descendants of prisoners living among the Goths beyond the Danube, a background that helps to explain how a man with a Gothic name, meaning “little wolf”, came to preach and write in Greek, Latin and Gothic.

The second principal witness is a letter by Auxentius, bishop of Durostorum on the Danube, who had been taken from his parents as a boy and brought up by Ulfilas as his pupil. The letter survives in the margins of a Latin manuscript, quoted in a polemical work by the Homoian bishop Maximinus. Auxentius states that his teacher preached “in the Greek, Latin, and Gothic tongues without ceasing” and left behind “in those very three languages several treatises and many interpretations”.³ None of these writings is known to survive under his name, but the statement is consistent with the linguistic range that the Gothic Bible itself displays.

Consecration and Mission

Both sources agree on the outline of Ulfilas’s elevation. Philostorgius says that he was sent by the Gothic ruler on an embassy to the imperial court and was there “ordained bishop of the Christians among the Goths, by Eusebius and the other prelates that were with him”.⁴ The Eusebius in question is Eusebius of Nicomedia, the most powerful churchman in the eastern empire in the 330s, who had become bishop of Constantinople and died around 341. Philostorgius places the embassy under Constantine, but Auxentius’s chronology of a forty-year episcopate ending in Constantinople points to a later date, and the consecration is usually placed around 341, in the reign of Constantius II.⁵ Auxentius adds that Ulfilas was thirty years old at the time and that he was raised to the episcopate from the office of lector, a minor order whose holder read the Scriptures aloud in church.⁶

For seven years Ulfilas worked among the Goths north of the Danube, in the territory of the Tervingi in what is now Romania. Auxentius then describes a persecution of Christians “in the countries of the barbarians”, set in motion by “the godless and blasphemous chief (iudex) of the Goths”, after which Ulfilas, “having completed seven years in the office of bishop, was driven out by the vehemently threatening persecution from the country of the barbarians with a great host of confessors onto Roman soil and here honorably received by the Prince Constantius”.⁷ The refugees were settled south of the river in the province of Moesia, where Ulfilas remained with his people, by Auxentius’s reckoning, for another thirty-three years. A later persecution of Gothic Christians north of the Danube was carried out by the Tervingian leader Athanaric, and the church historian Socrates connects the spread of Christianity among the Goths with the civil conflict between Athanaric and his rival Fritigern, whose followers adopted the religion of their ally the emperor Valens.⁸

A Homoian Bishop

The Christianity that Ulfilas taught was that of the imperial church of his generation, not the Nicene settlement that prevailed after 381. In the controversies that followed the Council of Nicaea in 325, the emperors Constantius II and Valens supported the party later known as Homoian, from the Greek word for “like”, which declared the Son to be like the Father according to the Scriptures and rejected all language of substance. The term “Arian”, used by Nicene writers and by most later historians of the Goths, is a polemical label for a range of positions, and Ulfilas’s own statements show where he stood within it. Auxentius records that he rejected both the Nicene confession of the Son as of one substance with the Father and the compromise formula of “like substance”. The creed that Ulfilas left on his deathbed, as reported by Auxentius, reads in part: “I believe that there is only one God the Father, alone unbegotten and invisible, and in His only-begotten Son, our Lord and God, creator and maker of all things, not having any like unto Him.”⁹ The Holy Spirit is described as “neither God nor Lord, but the faithful minister of Christ”.

Auxentius says that after forty years as bishop Ulfilas travelled at the emperor’s command to Constantinople for a disputation, fell ill on arriving and died there.¹⁰ The emperor was by then Theodosius I, who had made Nicene Christianity the faith of the empire, and the gathering was probably the conference of bishops held in the capital in 383. The Homoian confession that Ulfilas had preached nevertheless remained the faith of the Gothic peoples, and later of the Vandals, Burgundians and Lombards, for generations after it had lost imperial favour, and the Gothic Bible became one of its most enduring monuments.

An Alphabet and a Translation

Letters for a New Written Language

Gothic had no written literature before Ulfilas. The Goths knew runes, which survive on a small number of objects, but the runic script was used for short inscriptions rather than books. Socrates states that “Ulfilas, their bishop at that time, invented the Gothic letters, and translating the Sacred Scriptures into their own language, undertook to instruct these barbarians in the Divine oracles”; Philostorgius says that he “reduced their language to a written form”.¹¹ The Gothic alphabet he created has twenty-seven characters, each of which also has a numerical value, as in Greek; two of them serve only as numerals.¹² Most of the letter forms are taken from the Greek uncial script of the fourth century, and the order of the alphabet follows the Greek. Some letters, however, are not Greek. The Italian philologist Carla Falluomini, in the most recent full study of the Gothic version, describes an alphabet “devised on the basis of Greek and Latin letters and runes”, reflecting the mixed culture of the Lower Danube in which Ulfilas grew up.¹³ The precise share of each source is still debated: Magnús Snædal notes that there remains disagreement over whether Ulfilas based the alphabet entirely on Greek or also drew letters from the runes or the Roman alphabet.¹⁴

The script was designed for books and for reading aloud in church. Its letters are regular and upright, and in the Codex Argenteus they are confined strictly between two horizontal lines. Words are not separated, in accordance with the late antique convention of scriptio continua, though the text is divided into phrases and sentences.¹⁵ The orthography is careful and largely consistent, and it allowed later scholars to reconstruct Gothic pronunciation with some confidence, even though, as Snædal observes, the details can only ever be deduced from written sources.¹⁶

The Translation and Its Greek Model

The Gothic Bible was translated from Greek, not from Hebrew or Latin. For the New Testament the translators followed a Greek text close to the form that later became standard in the Byzantine church, and for the Old Testament they used the Greek Septuagint. The translation is extremely literal. It follows the word order of the Greek wherever Gothic grammar permits and uses consistent equivalents for Greek words, so that the underlying Greek text can usually be recovered. Falluomini concludes that the Gothic version is “very literal, following a Greek (lost) Vorlage”, while noting that Ulfilas also sought to be intelligible to his hearers and coined many new words for Christian concepts.¹⁷ The surviving corpus contains a large number of such coinages, alongside loanwords from Greek and Latin.

Philostorgius makes a famous claim about the extent of the work. Ulfilas, he writes, “translated into their vulgar tongue all the books of holy Scripture, with the exception of the Books of Kings, which he omitted, because they are a mere narrative of military exploits, and the Gothic tribes were especially fond of war, and were in more need of restraints to check their military passions than of spurs to urge them on to deeds of war”.¹⁸ The report cannot be tested, because almost nothing of the Gothic Old Testament survives. The only Old Testament fragments are three palimpsest leaves with parts of chapters 5 to 7 of Nehemiah.¹⁹ Philostorgius was writing two generations after Ulfilas’s death, and the explanation he gives may tell us more about how fifth-century Romans regarded the Goths than about the translator’s intentions. It remains the only ancient testimony on the question.

It is also unclear how much of the translation was the work of Ulfilas himself. The sources attribute it to him alone, but the differences of style between books, for example between the Gospels and the Pauline Epistles, have led many scholars to think that a group of collaborators worked under his direction. What survives is in any case a revised and copied text, preserved in manuscripts written in Italy about a century and a half after his death.

The Gothic Bible in Ostrogothic Italy

Theodoric's Kingdom

The Goths who settled in the Balkans in the fourth century were not the last to use Ulfilas’s Bible. Snædal points out that although Ulfilas was a Visigoth, his translation was also used by the Ostrogoths, and that everything that survives is of Ostrogothic origin.²⁰ In 489 the Ostrogothic king Theodoric the Great invaded Italy with the approval of the eastern emperor, and from 493 until his death in 526 he ruled the peninsula from Ravenna. His government preserved the Roman administration and the Roman senate, and his Gothic followers kept their own Homoian church alongside the Catholic church of the Italian population. Ravenna acquired a Gothic cathedral and baptistery, and Gothic clergy needed books for their liturgy. The Ostrogothic Kingdom lasted until the Gothic War of 535 to 554, in which Justinian’s armies reconquered Italy.

The surviving Gothic manuscripts are products of this short period. Falluomini argues that the Codex Argenteus, the Codex Carolinus and the Ambrosian palimpsests share palaeographical innovations, and she considers Ravenna the most probable place of their production. Her codicological analysis shows that the books were used in the liturgy, and it identifies a close relationship between Gothic and Latin scribes, suggesting scriptoria “where Goths and Romans worked side by side”.²¹

A Book of Purple and Silver

The Codex Argenteus was written in the early sixth century in northern Italy, probably in Ravenna and probably for Theodoric himself. Those are the words of the nomination by which Sweden proposed the manuscript for UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register, and they reflect the consensus of modern scholarship.²² The dating rests on palaeographical study by Otto von Friesen and Anders Grape and on the art-historical comparison of its canon tables by Carl Nordenfalk; a radiocarbon analysis of part of the codex in 1998 showed that the parchment was made from early sixth-century skin.²³ The book was a deluxe Gospel codex, an evangeliarium, made to be displayed and read in a central place in a Gothic church, probably the Arian cathedral of Ravenna.²⁴

The leaves are of very thin parchment, between 0.11 and 0.12 millimetres on average, dyed purple. The text is written mainly in silver ink, with gold used for a smaller number of lines, and it is the silver that gave the book its name. Over the centuries the silver has darkened, and no scientific analysis of the writing materials has ever been made.²⁵ The proportions of the written area are said to follow the golden section, and the script is not the everyday hand of the Goths but an artistic uncial, designed to give an ornamental impression.²⁶ Uppsala University Library suggests that the book probably once had a splendid binding decorated with pearls and gems.²⁷

The four Gospels stand in the order Matthew, John, Luke, Mark, an order also found in early Latin manuscripts.²⁸ At the foot of each page runs a row of small arches, drawn in silver, which frame the references of the Eusebian canons, the system devised in the fourth century by Eusebius of Caesarea for finding parallel passages in the Gospels. In most Gospel books the canon tables stood together at the beginning, but in the Codex Argenteus the parallel numbers are set under the text of each page.²⁹ The arcades echo the architecture of late antique Ravenna, and the Swedish nomination notes that “the purple, the shape of the canon tables in the manuscript and the shape of Theoderic’s palace” have often been cited as evidence of the link with the king.³⁰

The codex originally consisted of at least 336 leaves, of which 187 survive in Uppsala. Snædal calculates that the extant leaves, including the leaf found in Speyer, contain 35,338 words, about 52 per cent of the entire surviving Gothic corpus; the largest losses are in the Gospel of Matthew.³¹ The other Gothic Gospel manuscripts are small fragments, so for most of the Gospel text the Codex Argenteus is the only witness.

From Werden to Uppsala

Werden and Prague

After the fall of the Ostrogothic kingdom the codex disappears from view for about a thousand years. The Swedish nomination states plainly that “the way from Werden to Prague is hidden in darkness as is the way from Ravenna to Werden”.³² By the middle of the sixteenth century the manuscript was at the Benedictine abbey of Werden in the Ruhr, now part of Essen. A tradition that the book had been brought north from Italy by Liudger, the founder of Werden in 799, who had stayed in Italy and visited Monte Cassino, seems to have arisen only in the nineteenth century, though Uppsala University Library allows that it might be older.³³ Humanist scholars took an interest in the strange script in the second half of the sixteenth century, and the first printed specimens of the text were published by Goropius Becanus in 1569, Vulcanius in 1597 and Gruter in 1602 to 1603.³⁴

By 1600 the manuscript had passed into the possession of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, whose collections at Prague were among the richest in Europe.³⁵ How it travelled from Werden to Prague is not known. It remained there until the last months of the Thirty Years’ War, when Swedish troops stormed the city in 1648 and the codex was taken, with much else from the imperial collections, as war booty to Stockholm.³⁶

Christina, Vossius and De la Gardie

In Stockholm the codex entered the library of Queen Christina. When she abdicated in 1654 and left Sweden for Rome, she settled her debts with her librarian, the Dutch scholar Isaac Vossius, and the Codex Argenteus and some other manuscripts passed to him as compensation for unpaid salary and for books she had borrowed from him.³⁷ Vossius took the manuscript to the Netherlands, where his uncle Franciscus Junius, a pioneer of Germanic philology, borrowed it and prepared the first edition. Junius’s editio princeps, printed with specially cut Gothic types, appeared at Dordrecht in 1665, accompanied by the Old English Gospels edited by Thomas Marshall. It rearranged the Gospels into the usual order and divided the text into chapters and verses.³⁸

Before Junius’s edition appeared, the manuscript itself had returned to Sweden. In 1662 Magnus Gabriel De la Gardie, Chancellor of the Realm and Chancellor of Uppsala University, bought it from Vossius together with a copy of the text made by a certain Derrer.³⁹ In 1669 De la Gardie presented the codex to Uppsala University, having provided it with a binding of chased silver made in Stockholm by the court goldsmith Hans Selling to a design by David Klöcker Ehrenstrahl.⁴⁰ The gift carried a clear ideological message. In seventeenth-century Sweden the Goths were widely regarded as the ancestors of the Swedes, and Uppsala University Library explains that for De la Gardie the book was “God’s Word such as it had once been revealed to the Goths, our ancestors and the original inhabitants of Sweden”, an “invisible link that united the Gothic heroic antiquity and the present Swedish Age of Greatness”.⁴¹ The silver cover is today regarded as part of the codex, and the manuscript still bears the shelfmark DG 1, the first item of the De la Gardie collection.⁴²

The Ten Missing Leaves

For two centuries after its arrival the codex was both a scholarly resource and a sight for visitors. In the summer of 1834 the German scholar Julius Löbe spent four weeks in Uppsala collating it for the edition of the Gothic texts that he was preparing with Hans Conon von der Gabelentz. He complained of the poor condition of the manuscript and of the frequent interruptions when tourists had to be allowed to handle it. During his work it was realised that ten leaves, previously in place, were missing. Uppsala University Library calls it “a matter of scandalous dimensions”; it was not known how or when the leaves had disappeared, and the loss was kept secret for some years.⁴³

The leaves were recovered through the persistence of Anders Uppström, who later became professor of Moesogothic at Uppsala. His edition of the codex appeared in 1854 with the ten leaves still lacking. Having received no help from the head librarian, Uppström questioned the old library messenger Lars Wallin and conducted a dialogue with him for more than two years. A month before his death, Wallin handed the ten leaves to Uppström at his sickbed. He never admitted to the theft, though Uppström believed him to be the thief, and in the preface to his edition of the recovered leaves in 1857 Uppström wrote of him: “I cannot avoid feeling grateful to the deceased who gave me back what he could have easily destroyed forever. And though I hate his crime, I wish with all my heart that the creator of the world may prove to be a mild rather than severe judge.”⁴⁴ The codex suffered a second theft in 1995, when parts of it were stolen from the exhibition hall; they were recovered some months later and those involved were arrested.⁴⁵

The Speyer Leaf

One more leaf of the codex was found in the twentieth century. In 1970 a single leaf of purple parchment written in silver was discovered in Speyer Cathedral, together with some hidden relics of a saint. It proved to be the last leaf of the Codex Argenteus, containing the final verses of the Gospel of Mark.⁴⁶ The leaf measures 21.7 by 26.5 centimetres, rather more than the leaves in Uppsala, and the Swedish nomination considers it probably quite close to the original size of the pages.⁴⁷ It is kept today in the Historisches Museum der Pfalz in Speyer. As Uppsala University Library observes, it appears to have travelled a somewhat different path from the rest of the book.⁴⁸

The Other Gothic Witnesses

The Codex Argenteus is the best known Gothic manuscript, but it is not the only one, and the others preserve most of what survives of the Gothic Epistles. Nearly all of them are palimpsests: their Gothic text was erased in the seventh and eighth centuries so that the parchment could be reused for Latin works, and it has had to be recovered from beneath the later writing.

Codex Carolinus

The first of the palimpsests to be identified was found in the ducal library at Wolfenbüttel in 1756 by Franz Anton Knittel. Four leaves of a Latin manuscript of Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies, written at Bobbio in the eighth century, proved to contain beneath their text a Gothic-Latin bilingual of Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, with fragments of chapters 11 to 15.⁴⁹ Knittel published the Gothic text in 1762.⁵⁰ The manuscript, now in the Herzog August Bibliothek as Cod. Guelf. 64 Weiss., is known as the Codex Carolinus. Its two columns, Gothic and Latin, show how the version was used in a bilingual setting.

The Ambrosian Palimpsests

In 1817 Angelo Mai, then working at the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan, identified Gothic text in five palimpsest manuscripts that had come from the monastery of Bobbio. With Carlo Ottavio Castiglione he published a specimen in 1819, and Castiglione issued the texts between 1819 and 1839.⁵¹ Codices Ambrosiani A and B, of 102 and 77 leaves, preserve most of what is left of the Gothic Pauline Epistles, around 70 per cent of their text, and Codex B contains the whole of 2 Corinthians, the only biblical book preserved complete in Gothic. At the end of Codex A is a fragment of a Gothic calendar, and four leaves belonging to the same manuscript are in Turin. Codex Ambrosianus C has two leaves from Matthew 25 to 27, and Codex Ambrosianus D the three leaves of Nehemiah that are the only remains of the Gothic Old Testament.⁵² The early decipherers treated the leaves with chemical reagents to bring up the erased writing, which has left them in poor condition.

The Skeireins

Codex Ambrosianus E, together with three leaves in the Vatican Library (Vat. lat. 5750), preserves eight leaves of a Gothic commentary on the Gospel of John. It was first published in full by Hans Ferdinand Massmann in 1834, who gave it the name by which it is known, the Skeireins, from the Gothic word for “explanation”. It is most likely a translation of a Greek original.⁵³ It is the only substantial Gothic text that is not part of the Bible.

Codex Gissensis

The most recent Gothic biblical find, and the only one to have been lost again, was a Gothic-Latin bilingual fragment acquired for the University Library of Giessen in 1908 or 1909 through the German Papyrus Cartel, from the region of Antinoë in Egypt. It consisted of two connected leaves cut from a bilingual Gospel book, with the Gothic text of Luke 23:11–14 and 24:13–17 and the Latin text of Luke 23:2–6 and 24:5–9. During the Second World War the Giessen papyri were stored in the vault of the Dresdner Bank, which was flooded in the spring of 1945, and the fragment was destroyed. Photographs taken shortly after its acquisition preserve its text.⁵⁴ It was first published by Paul Glaue and Karl Helm in 1910.⁵⁵ How a Gothic Gospel book written in Ostrogothic Italy reached Egypt is unknown.

Together with a few marginal notes in a manuscript at Verona, some Gothic material in a Viennese manuscript, and the Gothic signatures on two sixth-century papyrus deeds from Ravenna, these manuscripts make up the whole of Gothic literature. Snædal estimates that the Codex Argenteus and the larger manuscripts contain 99.5 per cent of the corpus.⁵⁶ He also cautions that it is somewhat misleading to speak of a Gothic Bible at all, since only a tiny fragment of the Old Testament survives and several books of the New Testament, namely Acts, Hebrews, the Catholic Epistles and Revelation, have left no trace.⁵⁷

Why the Silver Bible Matters

Germanic Philology

Gothic is the oldest Germanic language preserved in substantial texts and the only one surviving from the East Germanic branch, which also included the languages of the Burgundians, Gepids, Heruli, Rugians, Sciri and Vandals.⁵⁸ Its texts are several centuries older than the earliest connected prose in Old English, Old High German or Old Norse. For the comparative study of the Germanic languages, and for the reconstruction of their common ancestor, it is therefore indispensable, and the Codex Argenteus, which contains more than half of the corpus, is its single most important source. Uppsala University Library notes that through Gothic it is also possible to learn more about related languages such as Swedish, German and English.⁵⁹

The limits of the evidence are equally clear. Snædal observes that the whole surviving corpus amounts to about 67,876 word forms, of a little more than 3,000 lexemes once names and loanwords are removed, and that the vocabulary is far from representative of everyday speech: the Gothic word for “horse” is not known with certainty, because no horse is mentioned in the Gospels or Pauline Epistles. Because most passages survive in a single manuscript, suspected scribal errors cannot be checked against another copy.⁶⁰ The history of Gothic scholarship is accordingly a history of ever closer reading of the Codex Argenteus itself, from Junius’s edition of 1665 and the eighteenth-century work of Erik Benzelius, Johan Ihre and Erik Sotberg to Uppström, whose edition von Friesen and Grape considered philologically final.⁶¹

New Testament Textual Criticism

For students of the Greek New Testament the Gothic version is one of the earliest translations, contemporary with Jerome’s revision of the Latin Bible that became the Vulgate, and older than any surviving complete Greek manuscript of the Byzantine tradition. Because the translation is so literal, its Greek model can usually be reconstructed. Falluomini finds that the Gothic text agrees primarily with the Byzantine text type, with a significant number of readings that agree with “Western” or Alexandrian witnesses. In her analysis 38 per cent of the significant readings in Matthew and 44 per cent in John are non-Byzantine, although only 7 per cent in Matthew and 6 per cent in John are supported exclusively by “Western” witnesses.⁶²

The “Western” readings have long been explained as the result of contact with the Old Latin Bible, either through Ulfilas’s own use of a Latin exemplar or through later revision of the Gothic text in bilingual Italian manuscripts such as the Codex Carolinus and the Codex Gissensis, a milieu shared with Greek-Latin bilinguals such as Codex Bezae. Falluomini rejects the view that all the non-Byzantine readings are later than Ulfilas. If the Byzantine text is understood as a slowly developing tradition, the non-Byzantine elements of the Gothic version may be conservative readings “reflecting a mid-fourth century Greek text in which the process of standardization was still far away”. On this view the Gothic version is particularly valuable for tracing the oldest stage of the Byzantine text, the form of the Greek New Testament that was being copied in Constantinople and the Balkans in the generation of Ulfilas, before the great uncials such as Codex Alexandrinus were written.⁶³ It belongs with the other ancient versions of the New Testament as a witness to the Greek text that its translators read.

The Silver Bible in the Digital Age

The modern history of the codex has been shaped by photography. In 1917 the chemist The Svedberg, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1926, carried out photographic experiments on leaves of the Codex Argenteus with Ivar Nordlund, to find ways of making the faded silver legible. Their ultraviolet and fluorescence techniques were used for a facsimile edition published for the 450th anniversary of Uppsala University in 1927, with pages in gold ink reproduced by additional methods including X-rays and oblique lighting, and with a Latin introduction by Otto von Friesen and Anders Grape.⁶⁴ The facsimile, which has since passed into the public domain, is available in full in the digital collections of Uppsala University Library.⁶⁵

In the early twenty-first century Uppsala University Library undertook Project Codex Argenteus Online. It began with the work of David Landau of Tampere, who scanned, coded and indexed the 1927 edition, and grew into the scanning and online publication of the codex and all its printed editions, under the philological supervision of Magnús Snædal. The photography was carried out by the library’s photographic services in cooperation with its preservation section.⁶⁶ The images of the manuscript can now be browsed in Alvin, the library’s platform for digitised cultural heritage, and the codex was inscribed on UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register in 2011.⁶⁷ The original remains in Uppsala, where a double opening and the silver cover are normally on display in Carolina Rediviva; the library has announced a new exhibition for the codex, due to open in the summer of 2027.⁶⁸

Ulfilas’s Bible was made for a people on the move between the Roman Empire and the world beyond its frontier, and it outlived both the Gothic kingdoms and the Gothic language. It survived in a single luxury copy of the Gospels, a handful of erased Epistle manuscripts and a few scattered fragments, preserved by accident in an abbey on the Ruhr, a library in Milan and a ducal collection in Wolfenbüttel. Read alongside the Greek and Latin manuscripts of the same centuries, such as Codex Sinaiticus, Codex Vaticanus and the Codex Amiatinus, it shows the transmission of the Bible in late antiquity as the work not only of Greek and Latin scribes but also of a translator who created a written language in order to give his people the Scriptures.

Notes

1. Uppsala University Library, “Codex argenteus”. ↩
2. Philostorgius, Ecclesiastical History, epitome of Photius, 2.5, trans. E. Walford (London: Bohn, 1855), online text. ↩
3. Auxentius of Durostorum, Letter on Wulfila, trans. J. Marchand, online text. ↩
4. Philostorgius, Ecclesiastical History 2.5 (Walford). ↩
5. On the date, see “Ulfilas”, Grokipedia; for the chronology of a forty-year episcopate, Auxentius, Letter on Wulfila. ↩
6. Auxentius, Letter on Wulfila (Marchand). ↩
7. Auxentius, Letter on Wulfila (Marchand). ↩
8. Socrates Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History 4.33, online text. ↩
9. Auxentius, Letter on Wulfila (Marchand). ↩
10. Auxentius, Letter on Wulfila (Marchand). ↩
11. Socrates, Ecclesiastical History 4.33; Philostorgius, Ecclesiastical History 2.5 (Walford). ↩
12. Magnús Snædal, The Gothic Language (Uppsala University Library, 2010), “The alphabet and pronunciation”. ↩
13. Carla Falluomini, The Gothic Version of the Gospels and Pauline Epistles: Cultural Background, Transmission and Character, Arbeiten zur neutestamentlichen Textforschung 46 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), doi:10.1515/9783110334692; summarised and quoted in Tommy Wasserman, “Falluomini on The Gothic Version of the Gospels and the Pauline Epistles”, Evangelical Textual Criticism, 5 August 2015. ↩
14. Snædal, The Gothic Language, “The alphabet and pronunciation”. ↩
15. Sweden, nomination of the Codex Argenteus to the UNESCO Memory of the World Register, “Codex Argenteus – the ‘Silver Bible’” (2010), §4.3(e); Snædal, The Gothic Language, “The amount of the Gothic corpus”. ↩
16. Snædal, The Gothic Language, “The alphabet and pronunciation”. ↩
17. Falluomini, Gothic Version, ch. 4, as summarised by Wasserman. ↩
18. Philostorgius, Ecclesiastical History 2.5 (Walford). ↩
19. Snædal, The Gothic Language, “The manuscript resources” (Codex Ambrosianus D). ↩
20. Snædal, The Gothic Language, “Introduction”. ↩
21. Falluomini, Gothic Version, chs 2–3, as summarised by Wasserman. ↩
22. Sweden, nomination of the Codex Argenteus to the UNESCO Memory of the World Register, “Codex Argenteus – the ‘Silver Bible’” (2010), summary and §4.3. ↩
23. Nomination, §4.1, citing G. Possnert and L. Munkhammar, “Silverbibelns ålder och bindningshistoria i ljuset av C14-analys”, Kungl. Vetenskapssamhällets i Uppsala Årsbok 33 (1999–2000), pp. 53–65. ↩
24. Nomination, §4.3(e). ↩
25. Nomination, §3.2; Uppsala University Library, “The history of Codex argenteus”. ↩
26. Nomination, §4.3(e). ↩
27. Uppsala University Library, “The history of Codex argenteus”. ↩
28. Project Wulfila, University of Antwerp, “Manuscripts of the Gothic Bible and Minor Fragments”, no. 1. ↩
29. Uppsala University Library, “Printed editions of Codex argenteus”, section on Anders Uppström’s edition. ↩
30. Nomination, §4.3(c). ↩
31. Uppsala University Library, “Codex argenteus”; Snædal, The Gothic Language, “The manuscript resources” and “The amount of the Gothic corpus”. ↩
32. Nomination, §3.2. ↩
33. Uppsala University Library, “Printed editions of Codex argenteus”, section on Franciscus Junius. ↩
34. Snædal, The Gothic Language, “Gothic Grammar”. ↩
35. Uppsala University Library, “The history of Codex argenteus”. ↩
36. Uppsala University Library, “The history of Codex argenteus”; nomination, §3.2. ↩
37. Nomination, §3.2. ↩
38. Uppsala University Library, “Printed editions of Codex argenteus”, section on Franciscus Junius. ↩
39. Uppsala University Library, “Printed editions of Codex argenteus”, section “Junius and De la Gardie”. ↩
40. Nomination, §3.2; Uppsala University Library, “The history of Codex argenteus”. ↩
41. Uppsala University Library, “Printed editions of Codex argenteus”, “The donation of Codex Argenteus”. ↩
42. Nomination, §3.2. ↩
43. Uppsala University Library, “Printed editions of Codex argenteus”, sections on Gabelentz and Löbe and on “The ten missing leaves”. ↩
44. Uppsala University Library, “Printed editions of Codex argenteus”, sections on Anders Uppström, quoting the preface to his edition of 1857. ↩
45. Uppsala University Library, “The history of Codex argenteus”, “Stolen parts”. ↩
46. Uppsala University Library, “The history of Codex argenteus”; Snædal, The Gothic Language, “The manuscript resources”; Project Wulfila, “Manuscripts”, no. 13. ↩
47. Nomination, §3.2. ↩
48. Uppsala University Library, “The history of Codex argenteus”. ↩
49. Herzog August Bibliothek, manuscript database, Cod. Guelf. 64 Weiss.; Snædal, The Gothic Language, “The manuscript resources”. ↩
50. F. A. Knittel, Ulphilae versionem gothicam nonnullorum capitum Epistolae Pauli ad Romanos (Braunschweig, 1762); Snædal, The Gothic Language. ↩
51. Snædal, The Gothic Language, “The manuscript resources”; A. Mai and C. O. Castiglione, Ulphilae partium ineditarum in Ambrosianis palimpsestis ab Angelo Maio repertarum specimen (Milan, 1819). ↩
52. Snædal, The Gothic Language, “The manuscript resources”; Project Wulfila, “Manuscripts”, nos. 2–6 and 9. ↩
53. Snædal, The Gothic Language, “The manuscript resources”; Project Wulfila, “Manuscripts”, nos. 6 and 10. ↩
54. Universitätsbibliothek Gießen, “Das verlorene gotisch-lateinische Bibelfragment der Universitätsbibliothek”. ↩
55. Snædal, The Gothic Language, “The manuscript resources”. ↩
56. Snædal, The Gothic Language, “The manuscript resources”. ↩
57. Snædal, The Gothic Language, “The manuscript resources”. ↩
58. Snædal, The Gothic Language, “Introduction”, also quoted by Uppsala University Library, “The Gothic language”. ↩
59. Uppsala University Library, “Codex argenteus”. ↩
60. Snædal, The Gothic Language, “The amount of the Gothic corpus” and “Gothic Grammar”. ↩
61. Uppsala University Library, “Printed editions of Codex argenteus”. ↩
62. Falluomini, Gothic Version, chs 5–6, as summarised by Wasserman. ↩
63. Falluomini, Gothic Version, chs 5–6, as summarised by Wasserman. ↩
64. Uppsala University Library, “Printed editions of Codex argenteus”, “1927 – The Facsimile Edition”. ↩
65. Uppsala University Library, Alvin, Codex argenteus Upsaliensis jussu Senatus Universitatis phototypice editus (1927). ↩
66. Uppsala University Library, “Project Codex Argenteus Online”. ↩
67. UNESCO, “Codex Argenteus – the ‘Silver Bible’”, Memory of the World; Uppsala University Library, “Codex argenteus”. ↩
68. Uppsala University Library, “Codex argenteus”. ↩