This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Wulfila was a fourth century Gothic bishop, probably descended from Cappadocian Christians carried off in a Gothic raid into Roman Asia Minor generations before his own birth, a family history that made him a Christian missionary to a people his own ancestors had been taken from as captives. He was consecrated bishop of the Christian communities among the Goths around 341, and was later forced with his congregation to cross the Danube into the Roman Empire, settling in Moesia under imperial protection after conflict with the Gothic chieftain Athanaric.
To carry his ministry among a people with no written language of their own, Wulfila devised the Gothic alphabet, based mainly on Greek uncial letters with some Latin and Runic additions, so that he could translate the Bible into Gothic. That translation survives chiefly in the sixth century Codex Argenteus.
The consequence of that invention reaches far beyond the Goths themselves: Gothic is otherwise entirely lost as a language, so Wulfila's Bible translation is the single substantial surviving text of the whole East Germanic language branch, and the entire comparative reconstruction of the Germanic language family leans on an accident of religious preservation rather than on any secular record.