There were several origin stories of the Gothic peoples recorded by Latin and Greek authors in late antiquity (roughly 3rd–8th centuries AD), and these are relevant not only to the study of literature, but also by historians seeking evidence of real historical events involving the Goths and other peoples mentioned in these stories.

The earliest accounts of Gothic origins were influenced by biblical commentary, and the assumption that the Goths were related to peoples who had lived earlier in the same region north of the Black Sea and Lower Danube, especially the Getae, and Scythians. The three most important surviving histories of the Goths in late antiquity are those by Jordanes, Isidore of Seville, and Procopius, although Jordanes focused especially on the Amal clan's supposed history, and Procopius focused less on early origins than the other two.

Jordanes' Getica has been categorized among the most important examples of the origo gentis (origin of a people) genre of literature as understood for example by historian Herwig Wolfram, but whether this category should be described as a genre is questioned, for example by Walter Goffart, because of doubts that the authors understood themselves to be following a shared traditional model.^[1]

The Goths, and other Gothic peoples such as the Gepids, lived north of the Roman empire's frontier on the Lower Danube in an area which had previously been home to Getae, Dacians, and Sarmatians, and much earlier by the Scythians. All of the surviving Gothic origins stories included elements which connected the Goths to at least some of these previous inhabitants of "Scythia".

Already in the first half of the third century, Dexippos, whose history has only survived in fragments, referred to the Goths of his time as Scythians, although from the surviving fragments he did not necessarily intend to assert that all Scythians had common origins.^[2][3]

The first surviving rationales equating Goths with Scythians or Getae were by early Christian scholars, Ambrose (about 340–397), Orosius (about 375–420) and Jerome (about 347–420). Ambrose equated the Scythians and Goths with the Biblical Gog and Magog, barbarians who come from the extreme north, where there are islands.^[4]

Ambrose, in his De Fide II.xvi explains that "Gog" the ruler of "Magog" mentioned in the Book of Ezekiel represented "the Goths" (hoc est Gothis), as the subject of a prophecy in the Bible of an invader from the north, who will come on horseback as a mighty army, and be defeated. Gog and Magog were also associated with islands because God would "send fire on Magog, and among them that dwell carelessly in the isles".^[5]

According to Arne S. Christensen, one precursor of Ambrose's equation of the Goths with the Biblical Gog and Magog was Josephus (died about 100), who equated the Scythians with the descendants of biblical Magog, who he understood as a person, not a country. This was based upon a passage in the Book of Genesis.^[6] A connection between this ancestral Genesis Magog, and the prophesied Gog from Ezekiel, who ruled a country named Magog, or "Gog and Magog" from the similar 1st century AD Book of Revelation prophecy, was made explicit in Jerome. This paved the way for other writers to connect the Goths, as Scythians, to the ancestry of the Scythians as described by Josephus, although Jerome himself did not do this.^[7]

Orosius is among early writers to equate the Goths with Scythians, listing them along with the Huns and Alans as "Scythians" of his time.^[3]

Jerome, like his contemporary Orosius, equated the Goths to the earlier Getae, but did not equate them to Gog and Magog.^[4] Jerome stated that scholars before him and Orosius had made this equation.^[8] Saint Jerome however specifically rejected this equation of the Goths with Gog and Magog.^[9] (Nevertheless, Herwig Wolfram believes that with this assertion "he probably invented the identification of the Goths as Getae".^[3]) Their contemporary, Saint Augustine, argued that Gog and Magog should not be read as Ambrose had, as Goths, but seen as representing peoples all over the world, not any single specific barbarian people.^[8]

Another late 4th century writer who routinely called the Goths "Getae" was the poet Claudian (died about 404).^[10]

Much later, Isidore of Seville (died 636), in his own History of the Goths, suggested that the connection of the Goths to Magog in Ezekiel must have been assumed by previous authors because of the similarity in sound between "Gog" and "Goth". Similarly, he noted that the word for the Scythians (Skuthoi in transliterated Greek), was itself also similar to the name of the Goths (Guthoi). Isidore did not see these similarities of names as false leads, believing that these indicated the true origins of the Goths.^[11]

Procopius called the Goths "Getae" without giving any particular justification for this. More unusually, he avoided using the term Scythian for the Goths, which he used as a more general term. Instead he asserted that the Gothic peoples, among whom he listed not only the Goths but also the Gepids and Vandals, had once been known to writers as the Sarmatians, and also, further back, as the less well-known Melanchlaeni or "black cloaks". Herodotus had specifically described these latter as a non-Scythian people, who had once lived very distant from the Greeks, beyond the Scythians of his time. Procopius specified that some people called the Gothic peoples "Getan people". They were all similar-looking, Arian by religion (in the 6th century) and spoke a language known to Procopius as Gothic.^[12]

Similar to older accounts, Jordanes' Getica equates the Goths to Getae, and believed they were descended from the Scythians, with ancient origins in the far north. For his equation of the Getae and the Goths, even in the title of his work, he explicitly cited the authority of Orosius.^[13] Jordanes had read Josephus and apparently saw his account of the origins of the Scythians as descendants of the Biblical Magog in Genesis as compatible with his own account, though he questioned why Josephus had not specifically named the Goths and discussed their beginnings.^[14]

Differently to other Gothic origins stories however, Jordanes named at least two specific northern places where the ancestors of the Goths had lived more than a thousand years earlier.

Scholars are uncertain about the precise origins of the various details of Jordanes' migration stories, and debate the extent to which real Gothic legends or the study of older Christian and pagan authors may have influenced it. Jordanes himself, in the prefaces to his Romana and Getica, mentions that his project of writing the Getica involved first reading the now lost, and much larger (12 volume) history of the Goths written by Cassiodorus, in Italy. Indeed, he had been asked by a friend to abridge it. He had access to it for three days, he said.

In the time of Jordanes, the Goths lived mainly in or near the Roman empire itself. He reported several ancestral homelands in his migration narrative which stretched over thousands of years.