Ulfilas, or Gothic Wulfila: little wolf or belonging to Wolf (also Ulphilas.
Orphila) (ca.
310 – 383), bishop, missionary, and Bible translator, is a Goth or half-Goth and half-Greek from Cappadocia who spends time inside the Roman Empire at the peak of the Arian controversy.
Ulfilas is ordained a bishop by Eusebius of Nicomedia and returns to his people to work as a missionary.
In 348, to escape religious persecution by a Gothic chief, probably Athanaric, he obtains permission from Constantius II to migrate with his flock of converts to Moesia and settle near Nicopolis ad Istrum in modern northern Bulgaria.
There, Ulfilas translates the Bible from Greek into the Gothic language.
For this he devises the Gothic alphabet.
Fragments of his translation have survived, notably the Codex Argenteus held since 1648 in the University Library of Uppsala in Sweden.
A parchment page of this Bible was found in 1971 in the Speyer Cathedral.
His parents were of non-Gothic Anatolian origin but had been enslaved by Goths on horseback.
Ulfilas converts many among the Goths, preaching an Arian Christianity, which, when they reach the western Mediterranean, sets them apart from their Orthodox neighbors and subjects.
