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By Root 318 0

readers – including most professed Christians – are unused to and almost entirely indifferent to theology, and so find it very hard to understand why christological or trinitarian definitions aroused such passions in the early church. They did so because the consequence of getting the definition wrong – of believing the wrong thing about the persons of the trinity – was to compromise salvation. Because, after Constantine, the Roman state took on the task of guaranteeing Christian orthodoxy, the political cost of having one’s theological views condemned as heresy was very high. To understand the history of the fourth century, we need to take seriously both the political and the religious significance of theological disputes.

The fact that the Nicene position was not universally accepted by several fourth-century emperors was a particular complication. Constantius Ⅱ, for one, was a convinced supporter of homoean belief and attempted to enforce it as orthodoxy, even though he was defied by many bishops in the empire who supported the Nicene definition of the trinity. Ulfila was a member of the homoean party, and as a consequence of that fact, the earliest evangelism among the Goths brought Christianity in its homoean form. The homoean tendencies of Gothic Christianity were heavily re-enforced by later events under Valens, a fervent homoean who diligently persecuted his Nicene opponents. When he agreed to let many Tervingi into the empire in 376, he may have made some form of conversion a prerequisite for admission, and he had certainly sponsored missions among them before 376.[101] Valens, however, was the last emperor to support homoean doctrine and, upon his death, an overwhelming Nicene reaction meant that any doctrine with Arian tendencies would thereafter remain a reviled heresy. Over the years, however, Gothic Christians remained committed to their homoean doctrine and its homoean liturgy. When, a hundred years after Ulfila’s first mission, a powerful Gothic kingdom existed inside the Roman empire, Arianism functioned both as a defining symbol of Gothic identity, and as a major obstacle to peaceful coexistence between Gothic kings and the Nicene Romans over whom they ruled.

All the same, when his mission began, by 341 at the latest, Ulfila was simply adhering to the form of Christian doctrine endorsed as official orthodoxy by the emperor and those bishops whom he favoured. Ulfila was meant to serve as bishop for all the Christians already in the land of the Goths, but we have no idea how many such Christians there might have been, nor how many of them were descendants of former captives from the Roman empire and how many were converts won beyond the frontier. Within a decade of Ulfila’s arrival in Gothic territory, however, the number of Christians must have grown large enough to worry Gothic leaders, who associated the new religion with imperial power and therefore found the loyalty of Gothic Christians somewhat suspect. We do not know what sparked it, or indeed which Gothic leaders were involved, but eight years after Ulfila’s arrival in Gothia a persecution of Gothic Christians began. An offhand remark by bishop Cyril of Jerusalem seems to imply that this persecution produced martyrs, though none are known by name.[102] Ulfila and his followers were driven out of Gothic territory and into the empire, where they were granted lands in the province of Moesia Secunda, possibly around the city of Nicopolis.[103] Constantius addressed Ulfila as a new Moses, for leading his people out of servitude in their trans-Danubian Egypt.[104] Inside the empire, Ulfila became heavily involved in the ecclesiastical politics of Constantius’ reign and by the time of his death in 383 had been an influential theologian for many years.

The Gothic Bible

Ulfila and his followers in Moesia may have maintained close connections with co-religionists beyond the Danube, but we cannot be sure because the evidence comes from the fifth-century church historian Sozomen, who often misunderstands or oversimplifies fourth-century events. It