Members of religious hierarchy in codex argenteus in the context of cultural linguistics

The educational and translation activities of Bishop Wulfila served as the source for the entire written tradition of the Gothic language. His work was the first experience of translating sacred Christian texts into the Gothic language, he or under his leadership created a unique style of the Gothic Christian text, conveying a world view of Christianity by means of the Gothic language and recreating elements of Christian culture on the basis of the Gothic language and Gothic paganism. The article deals with the ways of representing members of religious hierarchy in the Gothic translation of the Sacred Scriptures, known as “Codex Argenteus” or the Silver Book. This work views Gothic correspondences to Greek ἱερεύς and ἀρχιερεύς in the context of cultural linguistics, discusses the peculiarities and limitations of the analysis deriving from the sacred character of the material, surveys the etymology and inner form of the gothic lexical units. Representation of the members of religious hierarchy in Gothic are viewed as linguistic and cultural concepts combining features of both pagan and Christian cultures. The results of etymological and quantitative analyses lead to conclusion that Gothic auhumists gudja has acquired most of Christian cultural implications in comparison with the other linguistic concepts in Gothic.