The Age of Monks and Empires · 451-c. 680 · Iberia, Italy, North Africa
Gothic, Vandal & Lombard Homoian Christianity
An open theological question
Historians and Christians themselves are divided on whether this group's core beliefs fall inside the historic Christian creeds.
About This Movement
Most of the peoples who took over the western Roman provinces — Goths, Vandals, Burgundians, and later the Lombards — were Christians before they arrived, but of a kind the Nicene churches did not recognize. Homoian, holding that the Son is like the Father rather than of one being with him. Their tradition went back to Ulfila, the fourth-century missionary bishop who devised an alphabet for Gothic and translated most of the Bible into it, and it worked as a real church, with clergy, liturgy, scripture in the vernacular, and arguments of its own. In Vandal Africa it was the persecuting party, exiling and maiming Nicene bishops in a campaign its victims documented in detail. In Ostrogothic Italy it lived alongside the Catholic church in separate buildings, some of which still stand in Ravenna. Where it ended, it ended two ways. In Africa and Ostrogothic Italy it was destroyed by Byzantine reconquest. In Spain and among the Lombards it ended by conversion. The Visigothic king Reccared brought his kingdom over at the third council of Toledo in 589, and the last Arian Lombard kings gave way in the seventh century.
Sources
- The Gothic Bible of Ulfila (Codex Argenteus etc.; ed. Streitberg) (primary) — The tradition's founding artifact - scripture in Gothic; substantial NT portions survive; texts freely online (Wulfila Project); the Skeireins John-commentary fragments add a rare slice of Gothic exegesis.
- Auxentius of Durostorum, Letter on the life and creed of Ulfila (trans. in P. Heather & J. Matthews, The Goths in the Fourth Century, TTH 11, 1991) (primary) — The Homoian church's own memory of its apostle, with his creed - preserved in the Dissertatio Maximini; affordable English translation with commentary.
- Victor of Vita, History of the Vandal Persecution (trans. John Moorhead, TTH 10, 1992) (primary) — Documented by its victims: Nicene account of Vandal Homoian coercion in Africa (429-489); hostile witness - read against the grain for Homoian church life; affordable TTH translation.
- Acts of the Third Council of Toledo (589) (primary) — The tradition's endpoint: Reccared and the Gothic bishops formally abandon Homoian Christianity; Latin in Vives, Concilios visigoticos (1963); English excerpts in sourcebooks - no standard complete English translation.
- Robin Whelan, Being Christian in Vandal Africa: The Politics of Orthodoxy in the Post-Imperial West (2018) (secondary) — The key modern corrective - reconstructs Homoian Christianity as a functioning church with clergy, texts and arguments, not a caricature; UC Press.
- Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 2, ch. 2, 'Germanic and Celtic Christianities' (Knut Schaferdiek) (reference) — Reference-tradition chapter by the leading specialist on Gothic (Homoian) Christianity.