Letter on the Faith, Life and Death of Ulfilas
A memoir of Ulfilas by a bishop who had been his pupil from boyhood. It gives the outline of his career, his teaching about the Father, Son and Spirit, and the creed he left on his deathbed. It is an account by someone who knew him.
Read the text at faculty.georgetown.edu ↗Latin text, with an introductory note (Georgetown University) ↗
Auxentius, bishop of Durostorum on the lower Danube, says in the letter that Ulfilas took him from his parents as a child, taught him the Scriptures and brought him up as a son. He wrote after his teacher’s death. The letter does not survive on its own. It is quoted at length within another text of the same party, which is copied in the margins of a manuscript of Ambrose of Milan’s work On the Faith. The translator dates the letter to about 400 or a little earlier.
The letter is a pupil’s tribute and a statement of doctrine. Most of it sets out what Ulfilas taught, against the Nicene party and against those who said “of like substance”, and it ends with his creed. The biographical frame is short but precise: lector, then bishop at thirty; seven years among the Goths; flight across the Danube under Constantius; thirty-three more years; death at Constantinople at seventy. It says that he preached and wrote in Greek, Latin and Gothic. It does not mention the translation of the Bible, for which the evidence is the later historians and the Gothic manuscripts themselves.
Cited in
- about AD 341, estimated date