ULFILAS (Ulphilns, loulfilas = little wolf), the celebrated translator of the Bible into Gothic, was born about of .Marcomannian parents, n. of the Danube. among a Gothic population. Consecrated bishop in 348, he was expelled by his heathen com patriots from his native place, and sought refuge, together with a number of newly converted Christians, in lower Mresia, at the foot of the Humus, where he remained for thirty years. In 388 he went to Constantinople (whither lie had gone once before to assist at a council, in 360), and died there shortly afterward. He was one of the chief lights of Arianism (see Antos), in the interest of which lie exerted himself with the utmost energy. Nor was his political influence less felt among his Gothic countrymen., and the contemporaneous Greek historians, no less than those that followed within rt short time after his death. are unanimous in attributing to him the largest share in the religious and social development of the Gothic population. His greatest work, how ever—one which will render his name famous for all ares—is his Gothic translation of the Bible, a work by which he contrived both to fix the Gothic language and to perpetu ate Christianity among the Gothic people. Familiar with Latin. Greek, and Gothic, and accustomed to write in each of them, he undertook to render the whole Bible, with the exception of the two warlike books of Samuel and Kings—the influence of which Le feared for his easily inflammable people—into a language which till then had, as far as we know, never been used for any literary composition of importance. Up to the.
9th c., this sacred and national work accompanied the Goths in al' their migrations.
taut from that period forth, nothing was known of it beyond what was found stated in the ancient ecclesiastical accounts. It was not till the end of the 16th c. that Arnold Mercator discovered in the abbey of Werden the four Gospels of Ulfilas. Thence it found its way to Prague, where it remained till 1648, wheu the Swedes took it as a spoil to Upsal, where it still remains in the university library, under the name of the Codex Argenteus. In 1818, further remnants of the work—a great portion of the letters of St. Paul—were discovered by A. Mai and Castiglioni, on palimpsests, in a Lom bardian monastery, which, added to a few minor fragments, bring the New Testament somewhat near completion. But hardly anything—save a few passages from Ezra and Nehemiah—has survived of the Old Testament. The immense importance of this sole Gothic remnant for Teutonic philology cannot well be overrated. It is principally through it that the wonderfully fine structure of Gothic—a Germanic dialect of surpass ing wealth and purity—has become known.