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The Word "Baptism" in Gothic
My baptistic friends (or any of my friends that think that only immersion is baptism) will be glad to know that in the Gothic Bible, one of the words that is translated, rather than transliterated, is the word we transliterate “baptism.” In “The Goths of the Fourth Century,” Heather et al. provide the following item:…
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The Passion of St. Saba the Goth
Many Goths who professed faith (whether Nicene or not) suffered martyrdom – sometimes at the hands of the pagan Goths, sometimes at the hands of other Christians. St. Saba the Goth was an apparently orthodox (i.e. Nicene) Christian who died at the hands of the pagans. For a variety of reasons, it’s hard to have…
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Ulfila: The Trinity, the One True Church, and Appeals to Scripture and Tradition
In a previous post (link) we mentioned that we would be discussing Ulfila’s trinitarian errors. What did Ulfila believe? In “The Goths of the Fourth Century,” pp. 128-29, authors Heather et al. explain: Ulfila’s theology shares with Arius its emphatic differentiation between the three Persons of the Trinity. Auxentius further reports his hostility to both…
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Ulfila and Early Church Priorities
Ulfila (also sometimes written as Ulfilas, Ulphilas, Uliphilus, or the like) is possibly the most famous of the Goths in church history. For those caught up in the terminology of today, no we’re not talking about Emo types, but the Germanic warriors who dominated a big chunk of Europe toward the end of the Roman…
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Ancient Historians – More or Less Reliable than Modern Historians?
The fathers weren’t always good historians. When we challenge some of their particular historical claims, it’s not rare for people to argue “Surely father X, being over a thousand years closer to the event in question, had access to better sources than we do. Therefore, we should trust the fathers’ account.” There is some intuitive…