[gothic-l] Re: "Eruli", "Goths", "Danes" and wherefrom the runes

[Tim O'Neill]

On Wednesday, December 18, 2002 11:06 AM, bobbusam <bobbusam at yahoo.com> [SMTP:bobbusam at yahoo.com] wrote:

> Let me inject a word of caution.

Ditto.

> Dirk writes> > Again, the Goths of the 5th/6th century were
> Christians! In fact, a large part of the Heruls were likely also
> Christians, some of them even Catholocs as is suggested by tomb stone
> inscriptions from Concordia (see Fibinger).
>
> The Goths and Heruls of this period could not have been Christian in
> more than name.

Why?

> There is no evidence to suggest that they actually
> believed in Christianity as such.

Apart from the churches they built, the manner in which they were
buried, their bibles, crosses, Christian mosaics, accounts of Gothic
priests and monks, religious communities founded in Italy, Spain and
Gaul, Gothic church charters etc etc etc.

On the other hand, the evidence of any Gothic paganism in this period
is fragmentary to non-existant.

Sounds like Christianity in "more than name" to me.

> The Goths adopted an heretical form
> of Christianity for which they would be damned in the eyes of actual
> Judeo-Christian peoples.

The Goths did not "adopt" this form of Christianity - they were
converted to it.  If Wulfila and his successors had be Orthodox they
would have been converted to that form instead.  And the only "Judeo-
Christian peoples" of this period were Jews and the various forms of
Christianity.  The Jews would definitely have regarded Arianism as
a form of Christianity.  As did the other forms of Christianity, even if
some or most of the other forms considered it heretic.  It was still very
much a form of Christianity.

> I suspect that this decision was made for
> political, not religious reasons.

Tell that to St Saba, who along with other Goths suffered martyrdom
at the hands of the Gothic political elite for the (then) very politically
unpopular choice of Christianity over Germanic paganism.  And if
some Goths chose Christianity for political reasons, this did not
make their descendants in the next two centuries any less Christian.

> Choosing an heretical brand of
> Christianity helped them to win the trust of their mainly Christian
> subjects while at the same time keeping them seperate racially and
> politically.

Arianism was actually a political thorn in the side of the early Gothic
kingdoms and created headaches for the political elite.  This is why
it was finally abandoned by the Gothic kings of Spain in favour of
Catholicism.  It was ethnic and cultural differentiation which kept the
Goths Arian while their majority of subjects were Catholic.

>I would call it a kind of segregation of churches. The
> eventual failure of the Arian church as a religion seems also to
> proove that its real purpose was political and not religious.

How do you figure that?

> I suspect that most Goths were entirely agnostic businessmen with a
> penchant for battle.

I suspect that there is a tendancy for some non-Christian modern people
to want to project their own non-Christianity back onto ancient people
like the Goths, since Fifth and Sixth Century Christianity - Arian or Catholic -
is sometimes difficult for us to comprehend.  This is a distortion of history.
All the evidence indicates they were well and truly Christian.

And no - I am not a Christian.  I'm an atheist.  But I'm also a historian and
I don't think we should try to cast the past in our own image.
Best regards,

Tim O'Neill

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