Ulfilas or Wulfila (perhaps meaning "little wolf") (c. 310 - 383), bishop, missionary, and translator, was a Goth or half-Goth who had spent time inside the Byzantine Empire at a time when Arianism was dominant. Ulfilas was ordained a bishop by Eusebius of Nicomedia and returned to his people to work as a missionary. Ulfilas converted many among the Visigoths and Ostrogoths, preaching an Arian Christianity. The creed of Ulfilas, as appended to a letter praising him written by his foster-son and pupil the Scythian Auxentius of Durostorum (modern Silistra) on the Danube, who became bishop of Milan, is a clear statement of central Arian tenets, which separated God the father ("unbegotten") from the second, lesser God, the Christ ("only-begotten"), who was born before time and who created the world, and the Holy Spirit, created by the Father through the Son.

Gothic tribes we consider Gothic were nominally Arians during the period of time when Ulfilas translated the Christian bible into Gothic, meaning that they followed the teachings of Arius about the person and nature of Jesus Christ. Ulfilas translated the Bible from Greek into the Gothic language. Of the original 336 parchment folia, 188 have since been preserved, containing the translation of the greater part of the four gospels. The folia were preserved at the former Benedictine abbey of Werden, near Essen, Rhineland monastery of the Holy Roman Empire whose abbots were imperial princes and had a seate in the imperial diets, where it was rediscovered in the 16th century. A part of it is at permanent display at the Carolina Rediviva library in Uppsala, Sweden. After Theodoric the Great's death in 526 the Silver Bible is not mentioned in inventories or book lists for a thousand years. The Codex Argenteus (or "Silver Bible") is a 6th century manuscript, originally containing bishop Ulfilas's 4th century translation of the bible into the Gothic language was probably written for the Ostrogothic King Theodoric the Great, either at his royal seate in Ravenna, or in the Po valley or at Brescia.

 

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