#ulfilas

[illustratus]

Bishop Wulfila explains the Gospels to the Goths

[blogquantumreality]

Thoughts on Wulfila

As followers of my blog may or may not know, I have an interest in learning the Gothic language. Because of the fact that the only major surviving source of this language is a partial translation of the Bible, it basically forces the learner to become very familiar with the intricacies of the structuring of the New Testament.

Credit for the overall translation work, as well as the creation of the Gothic alphabet, is uniformly given to Wulfila (or “Ulfilas”). Since the Gothic alphabet itself is unique to that language and, with only minor changes from one scribe to the next, has been used in all known Gothic Bible translations, it can be rather reliably assumed that the original document(s) were rather faithfully reproduced through the next three or four centuries before it froze into a liturgical language and then essentially died out by circa 800 - 1000 AD.

Now, in the course of reading about Wulfila, I was struck by a particular fact: in the collected biographies that one can find in a few books (some are from the 18th and 19th centuries and so are free on Archive.org or Project Gutenberg), there is no mention that he ever had a wife, and it is well-known that he adopted a son, or equivalently, had a foster son.

What then got my attention was that given the degree of care taken in the translation of the Greek text (in fact, debate has raged over just how “Gothic” the Gothic Bible is because of the near word for word translation work in many sections), there is a very curious and striking omission in the one extant passage  - 1 Timothy 1:9 and 10 - known, in Greek, to include a condemnation of homosexuality .

The Revised Standard Version gives it thus:

“[9] ... for manslayers, [10] immoral persons, sodomites, kidnapers, liars, perjurers, and whatever else is contrary to sound doctrine,”

The equivalent Gothic text is this:

“... mannans maurþrjandam, horam, mannans gaþiwandam, liugnjam, ufarswaram, jah jabai hua aljis þizai hailon laiseinai andstandiþ,“

A very careful reading and parsing of the above reveals that the Greek word “arsenokoitais” which was translated as “sodomites” (or “them that defile themselves with mankind“ more floridly in the King James) was left out of the Gothic translation.

You can see “man-murderers, whorers, man-stealers, liars, false-witnessers, and ...” in the Gothic text, and no word in that text translates as “homosexual” or anything of that sort.

This is not a case of a page being missing; although the Codex Ambrosianus isn’t digitized online, the website wulfila.be has taken some care in ensuring the accuracy of the transliteration into an augmented Latin alphabet. The word was clearly purposely omitted.

And so out of all this it occurs to me to wonder if Wulfila might actually have been gay, and so could not bring himself to translate that one Greek word even though it broke the accuracy of the translation, and nobody who followed him decided to gainsay his rendering of the text.

I find it a very intriguing possibility, and rather appropriate to Pride Month amid commentary that has touched on persistent erasure of wlw and mlm from history, that such a major and influential figure who first set down a large body of text in the oldest known Germanic language might have been counted among those ranks.

[danieltov]

«La Biblia gótica es el monumento más antiguo de las lenguas germánicas. Ulfilas [el obispo de los godos, 311 - 383] hubo de superar vastas dificultades; la Biblia, más que un libro, es una literatura; reproducir esa literatura, a veces compleja y abstrusa, en un dialecto de guerreros y de pastores es un trabajo que parecería,  a  priori, imposible. Ulfilas lo cumplió con decisión, a veces con agudeza. Prodigó, como es natural, barbarismos y neologismos; tuvo que civilizar el idioma. Su lectura nos reserva sorpresas. En el Evangelio de Marcos (VIII, 36) está escrito: “¿Qué aprovechará al hombre, si granjeare todo el mundo y perdiere su alma?” Ulfilas traduce mundo (cosmos, orden en el original) por bella casa. Siglos después, los anglosajones traducirían mundo por woruld (wereald, edad del hombre), que contrapone el tiempo humano a la infinita duración de la divinidad. Los conceptos de cosmos y de mundo eran harto abstractos para los sencillos germanos.

Así, por obra de Ulfilas, remoto precursor de Wyclif y de Lutero, los visigodos fueron el primer pueblo de Europa que dispuso de una Biblia vernácula».

Jorge Luis Borges y María Esther Vázquez, Literaturas germánicas medievales, Alianza Editorial, España, 2000.

[hargaden-blog]

"With the exception of the Franks, most of the Germans who settled in the empire were Arians. They owed their faith to Ulfilas, a Christian living under Gothic rule, who in c.341 had been sent as an ambassador to the Emperor Constantius, who arranged for him to be consecrated Bishop of the Goths at a time when the court was moderate Arian. Ulfilas translated the liturgy and the Bible into Gothic, omitting the four books of Kings which he considered too bloodthirsty for his converts."

Bernard Hamilton, The Christian World Of The Middle Ages