ULFILAS, or WULFILA, a Gothic bishop and translator of the Bible; born in one of the Gothic settlements to the N. of the Danube in A. D. 311. He was probably of pure, perhaps noble Gothic blood, the story told by Philostorgius, that his progenitors were among the prisoners brought by the Goths from Cappadocia in 258, resting on very in sufficient authority. Being sent to Con stantinople on a embassy—possibly as a hostage—he adopted the Christianity of the capital, which was then of the Arian type, and was appointed "Anagnostes"; and it was probably while holding this office, which in the Greek Church involves preaching as well as reading, that he executed the Gothic translation of the Scriptures. Early in the year 341, having just reached the required age, he was consecrated bishop of the Goths by Eusebius of Nicomedia at Antioch, and immediately returned to his people across the Danube. After laboring among them for seven years, he and his converts were obliged by the persecution of the heathen Prince Athanaric to take refuge within the limits of the Roman empire, and for the rest of his life he continued to labor in the country of the Balkans.
Subsequently to the first Gothic immi gration and shortly before the battle of Adrianople in 378 he seems to have been employed in fruitless negotiations be tween the Gothic and Imperial generals; and three years after (in 381) he died in Constantinople, having gone there partly to remonstrate with a lapsed sect of semi-Arians; partly to petition the emperor for a General Council. He translated into Gothic both the Old and the New Testaments, with the exception apparently of four books (I and II Sam uel, and I and II Kings) ; but only a small proportion of his work has been preserved. Mark is the only one of the
Gospels that is complete; the Acts of the Apostles, the Epistle to the Hebrews, those of James, Peter, John, and Jude, and the Apocalypse, are altogether lost; and the Old Testament has left only a few fragments. But the fact that they furnish the oldest text of any German tongue, renders even the minor relics of inestimable value to the philologist. The principal MS. is the "Codex Argenteus," written with silver letters on a purple parchment, which was discovered by Arnold Mercator about the end of the 16th century in the Abbey of Werden near Diisseldorf, and after various vicis situdes was enshrined in silver at Up sala in Sweden. Portions of the Epistle to the Romans were found on a palimp sest ("Codex Carolinus") at Wolfenbfit tel in 1756, and portions of other Pauline epistles on palimpsests at Bobbio by Mai and Castiglione in 1818. A Gothic para phrase, probably of the 6th century, based on Ulfilas' version of John's Gos pel, was published by Massmann (Munich 1834). The chief editions of Ulfilas are Francis Junius (Dort. 1665, Amst. 1684), Edward Lye (Oxf. 1750), Lahn (Weis senfels 1805), Gabelentz and Lobe (Leip. 1843-1860), Massmann (Stuttg. 1857), Stamm (Paderborn 1858, etc., new ed. by Heyne, 1874), Bernhardt (Halle, 1875).