First Epistle to Timothy

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The First Epistle to Timothy is one of the three Pastoral Epistles of the New Testament — letters of practical instruction addressed not to congregations but to individual ministers — grouped with Second Timothy and Titus. It takes the form of a letter from the apostle Paul to Timothy, his younger associate, left in charge of the church at Ephesus and counseled on how it should be run.

Its concern is the ordering of a community. Where the undisputed letters of Paul argue doctrine under pressure, this one reads as a handbook for an institution settling in for the long term. It sets out the qualifications expected of an overseer (the Greek episkopos, later “bishop”) and of deacons, gives rules for the conduct of men and women in the assembly, regulates a roll of supported widows, and presses sound teaching against the speculation it sees spreading. Some of its instructions — that a woman should learn in silence, that an overseer be the husband of one wife — have been among the most argued-over lines in Christian history, cited and contested for nineteen centuries. The letter also supplies two phrases that passed into common speech: that the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, and the counsel to take a little wine for the stomach’s sake.

For an account of esoteric history the letter matters most at its close. It warns Timothy to guard what has been entrusted to him and to turn away from “the profane and vain babblings, and oppositions of science falsely so called” — where the Greek word rendered “science” is gnōsis, knowledge. The verse is among the earliest Christian texts to set apart an authorized teaching from a rival knowledge claiming the same name, and later readers found in it a forecast of the clash with the second-century movements gathered under “Gnosticism.” Whether the letter’s author already had such groups in view, or something looser, is debated; the wording is general.

The traditional view holds that Paul wrote all three Pastorals late in life. Most modern scholarship regards them instead as written in Paul’s name after his death — pseudonymous, by the common ancient practice of composing under a revered authority’s name — on the grounds of a vocabulary and style markedly unlike the undisputed letters and a church structure more developed than the apostle’s own generation knew. On that reading the letter is a document of the early second century, the moment a movement was hardening into a church with offices, a roster, and a guarded deposit of teaching. A minority of scholars still defends direct Pauline authorship. The dating remains contested, and the letter is read, in practice, on both sides of that divide.

→ Related: Epistle To The Romans · Epistle To The Ephesians · Epistle To The Philippians · Gnosis