Religion
The first report of the Crimean Goths appears in the Vita of Saint Cyril, Apostle to the Slavs (Constantine the Philosopher) who went to Crimea to preach the gospel to the Khazars . He lists "Goths" as people who read and praised the Christian God "in their own language". In 1606 Joseph-Juste Scaliger claimed that the Goths of Crimea read both the Old and New Testaments "in the letters of Wulfia's alphabet". These are the only two reports which refer to the existence of a written form of Crimean Gothic, but also confirm their Christian faith.
While initially Arian Christians like other Gothic peoples, the Crimean Goths had fully integrated with the Trinitarian Roman Church by the 500's. Following the split of the Church, these peoples would remain loyal to Constantinople as part of the Eastern Orthodox Church. In the 8th century John of Gothia, an Orthodox bishop, led an unsuccessful revolt against Khazar overlordship.
Read more about this topic: Crimean Goths
Famous quotes containing the word religion:
“If therefore my work is negative, irreligious, atheistic, let it be remembered that atheism—at least in the sense of this work—is the secret of religion itself; that religion itself, not indeed on the surface, but fundamentally, not in intention or according to its own supposition, but in its heart, in its essence, believes in nothing else than the truth and divinity of human nature.”
—Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872)
“As soon as a religion comes to dominate, it has as its opponents all those who would have been its earliest disciples.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)