Revised by Mary Hinkle Shore, 10/23
According to details within the letter itself, the ApostleDerived from a Greek word meaning "one who is sent," an apostle is a person who embraces and advocates another person's idea or beliefs. At the beginning of his ministry Jesus called twelve apostles to follow and serve him. Paul became an apostle of Jesus... PaulThe Apostle Paul, originally known as Saul of Tarsus, was the author of several New Testament letters and the founder of many Christian communities. has left Ephesus, where he has carried on a ministry, and has gone to Macedonia. He tells Timothy to remain at Ephesus and to carry on instruction in sound teaching, oppose false teachers and their teaching, and supervise the ordering of the church. Some scholars have sought to find a place for the letter within a chronology of Paul’s lifetime, such as after Paul’s departure from Ephesus to Macedonia, according to Acts 20:1. But that does not work since, according to the narrative of Acts, Timothy did not remain in Ephesus (at Acts 20:4 he is already with Paul). Moreover, Timothy is regarded as a young man in the letter (1 Timothy 4:12), but he would be mature at the time presupposed by Acts 20. It is more probable that 1 Timothy is a deutero-Pauline bookDeutero-Pauline books are New Testament epistles ascribed to the Apostle Paul but were not written by him. Ephesians, Colossians, 2 Thessalonians, 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, and Titus claim Pauline authorship and show Paul's influence, but a majority of scholars judge them to have been written..., written pseudonymously sometime after the death of Paul. Further information from within the book shows that it presupposes a background in which false teachers have entered the community for which the book was written. They teach an asceticAn ascetic is one who willingly lives a life of self-denial and refrains from worldly pursuits. John the Baptist lived a life of asceticism. Such a lifestyle, which was believed to promote spirituality, was not uncommon in the early and medieval church. form of Christian life, opposing marriage and forbidding the eating of certain foods (4:3). They promote a highly speculative system of teaching with “myths and genealogies” (1:4), which the author says is “falsely called knowledge” (gnosis, 6:20), and which may be some form of incipient GnosticismGnosis means "knowledge," although it often refers to secret or mystical knowledge revealed to a specialized few. "Gnosticism" is a generalized term of reference to movements during the second and subsequent centuries that taught, contrary to other Christian teachings, that matter was evil and salvation....
