#ulfilas

Credit for the overall translation work, as well as the creation of the Gothic alphabet, is uniformly given to Wulfila (or “Ulfilas”). Since the Gothic alphabet itself is unique to that language and, with only minor changes from one scribe to the next, has been used in all known Gothic Bible translations, it can be rather reliably assumed that the original document(s) were rather faithfully reproduced through the next three or four centuries before it froze into a liturgical language and then essentially died out by circa 800 - 1000 AD.

Now, in the course of reading about Wulfila, I was struck by a particular fact: in the collected biographies that one can find in a few books (some are from the 18th and 19th centuries and so are free on Archive.org or Project Gutenberg), there is no mention that he ever had a wife, and it is well-known that he adopted a son, or equivalently, had a foster son.

What then got my attention was that given the degree of care taken in the translation of the Greek text (in fact, debate has raged over just how “Gothic” the Gothic Bible is because of the near word for word translation work in many sections), there is a very curious and striking omission in the one extant passage  - 1 Timothy 1:9 and 10 - known, in Greek, to include a condemnation of homosexuality .

The Revised Standard Version gives it thus:

“[9] ... for manslayers, [10] immoral persons, sodomites, kidnapers, liars, perjurers, and whatever else is contrary to sound doctrine,”

The equivalent Gothic text is this:

“... mannans maurþrjandam, horam, mannans gaþiwandam, liugnjam, ufarswaram, jah jabai hua aljis þizai hailon laiseinai andstandiþ,“

A very careful reading and parsing of the above reveals that the Greek word “arsenokoitais” which was translated as “sodomites” (or “them that defile themselves with mankind“ more floridly in the King James) was left out of the Gothic translation.

You can see “man-murderers, whorers, man-stealers, liars, false-witnessers, and ...” in the Gothic text, and no word in that text translates as “homosexual” or anything of that sort.

This is not a case of a page being missing; although the Codex Ambrosianus isn’t digitized online, the website wulfila.be has taken some care in ensuring the accuracy of the transliteration into an augmented Latin alphabet. The word was clearly purposely omitted.

And so out of all this it occurs to me to wonder if Wulfila might actually have been gay, and so could not bring himself to translate that one Greek word even though it broke the accuracy of the translation, and nobody who followed him decided to gainsay his rendering of the text.