The First Letter to Timothy — The Church's Charter and a Contested Letter's Path to Canon

Part of the series: The New Testament Canon—How 27 Books Survived the Ancient Gauntlet

There is an irony worth pausing over at the head of the First Letter to Timothy. Around the year 144 the heretic Marcion produced the first known attempt to fix a Christian canon — a shortened Gospel and ten letters of Paul — and the one group of Pauline letters he would not admit was the Pastorals: the two to Timothy and the one to Titus.⁠¹ Of all the letters in the collection, these were the ones his system could least tolerate, because these are the letters that build the institution. They lay out the offices of the Church — bishops and deacons, presbyters and the laying on of hands — and they call that Church, in a phrase that would echo for centuries, “the pillar and foundation of truth.”

Then modern criticism inverted the picture. The letter that ancient orthodoxy scarcely doubted became the one modern scholars doubt most. Since the early nineteenth century the Pastorals have been the flagship case for New Testament pseudonymity, and 1 Timothy in particular has borne the brunt of the argument — the mirror image of 2 Peter, which the early Church doubted more than any other book yet which many conservatives still defend.⁠² The letter almost no one questioned in antiquity is the one most questioned today.

This post examines what 1 Timothy actually says and does — how it built the Church’s offices, why it became a load-bearing text for Catholic teaching on holy orders, the Church, the one Mediator, and the salvation of all — then turns to the modern debate over whether Paul wrote it, and to the quiet, early, and nearly unbroken reception that carried it into the canon.

A letter to steady a young church

First Timothy presents itself as a letter from the Apostle Paul to his younger co-worker Timothy, left behind at Ephesus to keep order in a church under strain. The occasion is named in the opening lines: “I repeat the request I made of you when I was on my way to Macedonia, that you stay in Ephesus to instruct certain people not to teach false doctrines or to concern themselves with myths and endless genealogies, which promote speculations rather than the plan of God that is to be received by faith.”⁠³ A false teaching had taken root — something involving “myths,” speculative “genealogies,” and a claim to a higher “knowledge” — and the letter is Paul’s charge to Timothy to stop it and to set the household of God in order.

The letter is not a treatise but a manual. Around the charge against the false teachers it arranges a series of practical instructions: how the community should pray (chapter 2), what sort of men should be bishops and deacons (chapter 3), how Timothy himself should conduct his ministry against a coming apostasy (chapter 4), how widows and presbyters are to be treated (chapter 5), and how the rich, the enslaved, and the greedy are to be taught (chapter 6). It is the most administrative book in the New Testament, and that is precisely its interest: here, earlier than anywhere else, we watch the Church acquiring an order.⁠⁴

When was it written? That depends on who wrote it — the question the second half of this post takes up. If the letter is Paul’s own, it belongs to a period after the imprisonment with which the Acts of the Apostles ends, on the traditional reconstruction in which Paul was released, traveled further east, and left Timothy at Ephesus before a final arrest and martyrdom under Nero — roughly A.D. 62–65. If it is the work of a later disciple writing in Paul’s name, as most critical scholars hold, it belongs to the last decades of the first century or the opening of the second, when the Church was settling into the offices the letter describes.⁠⁵ Either way, its subject is the same: the ordering of the Church after the apostles.

The charter of church order

No New Testament book has done more to shape the Church’s ministry. Where the undisputed letters glance at “overseers and deacons” in passing, 1 Timothy stops and gives their job descriptions. It opens the third chapter with a line the Catechism still quotes: “This saying is trustworthy: whoever aspires to the office of bishop desires a noble task.”⁠⁶ Then come the qualifications, and they are strikingly ordinary — not mystical gifts but the virtues of a stable and reputable man:

Therefore, a bishop must be irreproachable, married only once, temperate, self-controlled, decent, hospitable, able to teach, not a drunkard, not aggressive, but gentle, not contentious, not a lover of money. He must manage his own household well, keeping his children under control with perfect dignity; for if a man does not know how to manage his own household, how can he take care of the church of God?⁠⁷

The deacons receive their own list a few verses later — “dignified, not deceitful, not addicted to drink, not greedy for sordid gain, holding fast to the mystery of the faith with a clear conscience” — followed by a notice about “women” in the same role, whom many interpreters, ancient and modern, take to be women deacons rather than deacons’ wives.⁠⁸ The whole passage reads like the constitution of a community that expects to endure.

Two things about it repay attention. The first is the vocabulary of office. The letter speaks of the episkopos (overseer, or bishop) and the presbyteros (elder, or presbyter), and it does not, on its own, hold them clearly apart: the presbyters who “preside well” in chapter 5 look like the same men whose qualifications are given for the episkopos in chapter 3.⁠⁹ The sharp, threefold pattern of the later Church — one bishop, a college of presbyters, and deacons under him — is not yet fixed in the letter’s language; it comes into clear focus only a little later, in the letters of Ignatius of Antioch around 110. The Catholic reading is that the sacramental reality is present in seed while the terminology is still settling; the offices of holy orders are apostolic, even where the words for them are not yet stabilized.⁠¹⁰

The second is the transmission of office by the laying on of hands. Twice the letter roots Timothy’s own ministry in an ordination rite: his gift came “with the imposition of hands of the presbyterate,” and Timothy in turn is cautioned, “Do not lay hands too readily on anyone.”⁠¹¹ Here is the seed of the Catholic theology of ordination as the conferral of a grace of office through the imposition of hands — a text the Second Vatican Council would cite when it spoke of the episcopate as a spiritual gift handed on by that same gesture.⁠¹² And when chapter 5 directs that “presbyters who preside well deserve double honor, especially those who toil in preaching and teaching,” it supplies, in a single verse, both the dignity and the material support of the clergy.⁠¹³ The letter that critics read as evidence of a later, more institutional Church is, for Catholic theology, simply the Church learning to describe what it already had.

“The pillar and foundation of truth”

At the center of the letter sits a single sentence that has carried an enormous doctrinal weight. Paul tells Timothy why he is writing: “But if I should be delayed, you should know how to behave in the household of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and foundation of truth.”⁠¹⁴ The older English renderings say “pillar and ground of the truth”; the Catechism, following a different translation, says “pillar and bulwark of the truth.” The image is architectural: the Church is the column and the buttress that hold the truth upright in the world.⁠¹⁵

This is one of the load-bearing texts of Catholic ecclesiology, and it is not hard to see why. The verse does not say that Scripture is the pillar of the truth, or that the individual believer is; it says the Church is. The Catechism opens its treatment of the transmission of faith with exactly this line: “The Church, ‘the pillar and bulwark of the truth,’ faithfully guards ‘the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints.’ She guards the memory of Christ’s words; it is she who from generation to generation hands on the apostles’ confession of faith.”⁠¹⁶ The Second Vatican Council put the same verse to work in its Constitution on the Church, describing the visible community as the divinely established support of revealed truth.⁠¹⁷

A Protestant reader will point out, fairly, that calling the Church the “pillar” of the truth need not mean the Church stands over Scripture; a pillar supports and displays what rests on it rather than authoring it. The Catholic rejoinder is not that the Church invents the truth but that the verse locates the truth’s earthly guardianship in a visible, teaching community — not in the private judgment of each reader, and not in a text abstracted from the Church that canonized it. The old debate over sola scriptura will not be settled in a verse. What is worth seeing is that this brief aside, in a letter about how to run a congregation, became one of the pillars — the pun is the letter’s own — on which the Catholic understanding of the Church rests.⁠¹⁸

“One mediator between God and men”

A chapter earlier, the letter states the ground of all Christian prayer in a line of almost creedal compression: “For there is one God. There is also one mediator between God and the human race, Christ Jesus, himself human, who gave himself as ransom for all.”⁠¹⁹ Scholars suspect it is a fragment of very early confession, a Christian counterpart to Israel’s “Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord alone.”⁠²⁰ John Chrysostom, preaching on the verse, drew from it the logic of the Incarnation itself: “a mediator ought to have communion with both parties, between whom he is to mediate,” and so the one who joins God and man must be, as the verse says, both — God from God, and “the man Christ Jesus.”⁠²¹

The verse is also a favorite proof-text against Catholic practice: if there is one mediator, how can the Church ask the saints, or Mary, to intercede? The Catholic answer turns on the difference between a rival mediation and a shared one. First Timothy 2:5 excludes any second, independent bridge between God and man; it does not exclude creatures participating in the one bridge that is Christ. The Catechism quotes the verse precisely to make this point — “The cross is the unique sacrifice of Christ, the ‘one mediator between God and men’” — and in the same breath adds that “Jesus desires to associate with his redeeming sacrifice those who were to be its first beneficiaries,” supremely his mother.⁠²² The saints do not compete with the one Mediator; they lean on him. The Council of Trent, defending the invocation of saints, quoted this very verse to the same end — the saints’ intercession is a participation in Christ’s mediation, not a rivalry with it — and Catholic doctrine has held that line ever since.⁠²³ Even the old Douay-Rheims note on the passage draws the distinction plainly: Christ is “the only mediator, who stands in need of no other,” but this “is not against our seeking the prayers and intercession … of the saints and angels in heaven.”⁠²⁴

“God wills everyone to be saved”

The mediator verse has a companion three lines above it, and it is one of the great texts of Christian hope: God “wills everyone to be saved and to come to knowledge of the truth.”⁠²⁵ The claim is universal and unqualified — God’s saving will reaches to everyone — and it has done heavy work in the history of doctrine, above all against every scheme that would restrict the offer of salvation to a predestined few. The Catechism quotes it three times, on the reason for the missions and on the meaning of the Lord’s Prayer.⁠²⁶

The verse raises an old problem: if God wills all to be saved, why are not all saved? Thomas Aquinas gave the classic Catholic resolution by distinguishing two senses of God’s willing. God “antecedently wills all men to be saved,” Aquinas wrote — considered simply in themselves, all are objects of his saving will — “but consequently wills some to be damned, as his justice exacts,” taking into account the free refusal of grace.⁠²⁷ The universal will is real; it is not defeated by the reality of the lost, because it does not override their freedom. Chrysostom drew the pastoral consequence long before Aquinas drew the metaphysical one. Preaching on the verse, he told his people to pray even for their persecutors: “Imitate God! If He wills that all men should be saved, there is reason why one should pray for all, if He has willed that all should be saved, be thou willing also.”⁠²⁸

Marriage, money, and the false teachers

The letter’s fourth chapter turns to the errorists directly, and one of its warnings has echoed through the Church’s arguments about celibacy. The false teachers, Paul says, will be known by their asceticism run to heresy — “forbidding to marry, [commanding] to abstain from meats, which God hath created to be received with thanksgiving.”⁠²⁹ Critics of clerical celibacy have sometimes read the line as a blanket condemnation of any mandated renunciation of marriage — a “doctrine of demons,” the letter calls it. The distinction the Church draws is between a doctrine and a discipline. What the letter condemns is the dualist claim that marriage and certain foods are intrinsically evil — the teaching of the Gnostics, Marcionites, and Encratites who held the material world to be the work of a lower or malign power.⁠³⁰ The Catholic Church has never taught that marriage is evil; it honors marriage as a sacrament. Priestly celibacy is a discipline freely embraced “for the kingdom,” not a claim that the married state defiles — which is exactly the claim the letter anathematizes.⁠³¹

The sixth chapter gives the letter its most quoted line, and it too is regularly misremembered. “For the love of money is the root of all evils,” Paul writes — not money itself, but the love of it — “and some people in their desire for it have strayed from the faith and have pierced themselves with many pains.”⁠³² Polycarp of Smyrna, writing to the Philippians early in the second century, already knew the line and paired it with another from the same chapter: “the love of money is the beginning of all troubles. Knowing therefore that we brought nothing into the world neither can we carry anything out …”⁠³³ That Polycarp could weave two verses of 1 Timothy into a single sentence, around A.D. 110–130, is one of the earliest signs that the letter was already in the Church’s bloodstream.

“I permit no woman to teach”

No passage in 1 Timothy is harder for a modern reader than the close of chapter 2, and it deserves to be quoted in full rather than paraphrased away:

A woman must receive instruction silently and under complete control. I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man. She must be quiet. For Adam was formed first, then Eve. Further, Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and transgressed. But she will be saved through motherhood, provided women persevere in faith and love and holiness, with self-control.⁠³⁴

The verses have been read in sharply different ways, and honesty requires laying the options out rather than choosing the most comfortable. On one reading the prohibition is universal and permanent, grounded as it is by the writer in the order of creation (Adam first) and the fall (Eve deceived): women are not to exercise authoritative teaching over men in the assembly, full stop. On another reading the command is remedial and local — a response to a specific crisis in Ephesus, where women appear to have been among those spreading the false teaching, so that the instruction to “learn in silence” is first of all an instruction to learn, before presuming to teach.⁠³⁵ The letter itself gives some warrant for the second reading, since the whole document is aimed at a particular outbreak of error at Ephesus; but the appeal to Adam and Eve pulls the other way, and no interpretation has won the field.

It is worth being precise about how this passage functions in Catholic teaching, because it is often misdescribed. The Church’s reservation of priestly ordination to men does not rest on 1 Timothy 2. When John Paul II closed the question in 1994, he grounded the teaching in Christ’s own choice of men as his apostles and the constant practice of the Church — not on Paul’s instruction that women keep silent.⁠³⁶ First Timothy 2 belongs to the wider discussion of the roles of men and women in the Church, but it is not the linchpin; the magisterium leans on the example of the Lord, not on this verse. As for the notoriously difficult promise that a woman “will be saved through motherhood,” interpreters have never agreed — some read the childbearing as the birth of Christ, through whom all are saved; others as an affirmation of the ordinary vocation of motherhood, lived in faith, against the false teachers who forbade marriage altogether. The verse is one of the most obscure in the corpus, and the honest commentator says so.⁠³⁷

“Great is the mystery”: a hymn and a famous variant

The third chapter ends with what most scholars take to be a fragment of an early Christian hymn — six rhythmic lines confessing the whole arc of Christ’s work:

Undeniably great is the mystery of devotion, / Who was manifested in the flesh, / vindicated in the spirit, / seen by angels, / proclaimed to the Gentiles, / believed in throughout the world, / taken up in glory.⁠³⁸

Incarnation, resurrection, ascension, the mission to the nations, the world’s faith, the final glory — the hymn is a miniature creed, and its presence in the letter is evidence of a very early and very high Christology, sung before it was argued.⁠³⁹

The opening word of the hymn is also the site of one of the most famous textual variants in the New Testament. The earliest and best manuscripts begin the hymn with a relative pronoun: “who was manifested in the flesh” (Greek hos). The mass of later, Byzantine manuscripts — and behind them the King James Version — read instead “God was manifest in the flesh” (Greek theos). The two words are all but identical in the ancient capital script: written as sacred abbreviations, “who” (ΟΣ) becomes “God” (ΘΣ) by the addition of two tiny strokes, a horizontal bar inside the O and a line above. The critical editions, following the oldest witnesses, print “who”; Bruce Metzger’s standard commentary treats “God” as a later change — whether an accidental misreading of the abbreviation or a deliberate sharpening of the verse’s claim about Christ’s divinity.⁠⁴⁰ The doctrinal difference is smaller than it looks: the “who” of the earliest text still refers to Christ, so the hymn confesses the same mystery either way — the one who “was manifested in the flesh” is the Lord. What the variant changes is the explicitness, not the substance.⁠⁴¹

Did Paul write it?

Now to the question the modern reader has been waiting for. Of the thirteen letters that bear Paul’s name, scholars distinguish seven whose authenticity is essentially undisputed — Romans, First and Second Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, Philemon, and First Thessalonians — from six that are contested in varying degrees. The three Pastorals (1–2 Timothy and Titus) sit at the far, most-doubted end of that contested group. A large majority of critical scholars — a figure commonly put at something like eighty to ninety percent — regard them as the work of a later “Paulinist” writing in the apostle’s name.⁠⁴²

The modern doubt has a precise birthday. In 1807 Friedrich Schleiermacher published an open letter arguing that 1 Timothy specifically could not be Paul’s — that whoever wrote 2 Timothy and Titus could not also have written this letter. He had been anticipated by a few years (J. E. C. Schmidt had already questioned 1 Timothy in 1804), but Schleiermacher’s essay is the landmark. J. G. Eichhorn soon extended the doubt to all three Pastorals; F. C. Baur and the Tübingen school pushed their date into the second century as anti-Gnostic polemic; and in 1880 H. J. Holtzmann’s monograph gave the pseudonymity case its classic, systematic form.⁠⁴³ The arguments have run along four lines ever since.

The first is vocabulary. The Pastorals write in a noticeably different Greek from the undisputed letters. In the standard tally — associated with P. N. Harrison’s 1921 study The Problem of the Pastoral Epistles — the three letters use some 848 distinct words (setting aside proper names), of which more than a third do not appear in the other ten Pauline letters, and a large share of those turn up nowhere else in the New Testament at all. Much of that new vocabulary, Harrison argued, belongs to the Greek of the early second century.⁠⁴⁴ The second is church order: the developed offices of overseer, presbyter, and deacon, with their formal qualification-lists, are said to reflect a later, more institutional era than Paul’s. The third is chronology: the letters presuppose a set of Pauline movements — leaving Timothy at Ephesus, Titus in Crete, wintering at Nicopolis — that cannot be fitted into the framework of Acts, which ends with Paul imprisoned at Rome. And the fourth is the false teaching, whose “myths and genealogies” and “knowledge falsely so called” (6:20) some read as the developed Gnosticism of the second century.⁠⁴⁵

The case for authenticity answers each. The vocabulary differences can be explained, in part, by a different subject (church administration, not the great doctrinal controversies) and, more decisively, by the ancient practice of the secretary. C. F. D. Moule argued that Luke drafted the Pastorals in Paul’s lifetime and at his behest, which would account for the style while preserving the substance as Paul’s; and Anthony Kenny’s statistical study of 1986 concluded that twelve of the thirteen letters could well be the work of a single versatile author, with only Titus standing out — 1 and 2 Timothy falling comfortably within the Pauline range.⁠⁴⁶ The developed church order is not so anachronistic as it seems: overseers and deacons already appear in the undisputed Philippians, and Paul appoints elders in Acts.⁠⁴⁷ The chronology problem dissolves if Paul was in fact released after the imprisonment that ends Acts — the traditional view, supported by the report in 1 Clement that Paul reached “the limits of the West” and by the Muratorian Fragment’s mention of a journey to Spain, though both are debated and neither is independent proof.⁠⁴⁸ And the “knowledge falsely so called” looks less like the full second-century systems than an early, ascetic, speculative Judaizing movement with only proto-Gnostic features.

Where does that leave the reader? With a genuinely open question — and, for the Catholic, an open question that touches nothing essential. The Church’s own scholarship reflects the range. A robust modern defense of Pauline authorship has come, notably, from a critical scholar not given to apologetics: Luke Timothy Johnson, in the Anchor Bible commentary, argues that authenticity cannot be strictly demonstrated but that the pseudonymity consensus rests less on the weight of argument than on the weight of scholarly custom.⁠⁴⁹ Others, such as I. Howard Marshall, occupy a middle position — not Paul’s own hand, but not a forgery either, rather a faithful disciple writing under the apostle’s authority, which Marshall called “allonymity.”⁠⁵⁰

The Catholic Church has room for the whole range. In 1913 the Pontifical Biblical Commission answered a series of questions on the Pastorals by affirming their Pauline authorship and rejecting the theory that they were stitched together from fragments. But the early decrees of that Commission were later understood to bind only where faith and morals are at stake; in 1955 its own secretaries declared that Catholic scholars now enjoyed “full freedom” on questions of that kind, and the Second Vatican Council located the inerrancy of Scripture in what God wished to affirm “for the sake of our salvation” — not in the identity of the human hand.⁠⁵¹ A letter may be canonical, inspired, and apostolic in authority whether Paul held the pen himself or a disciple wrote in his name and under his charge. That is why an official Catholic study Bible can discuss the pseudonymity theory calmly, with no sense that anything is at risk. The question is real; it is simply not a crisis.⁠⁵²

The journey to canon

For all the modern argument, the ancient reception of 1 Timothy is remarkably placid. It begins, as these stories so often do, with a heretic — but this time by way of rejection rather than acceptance.

Around 144 Marcion of Sinope built his canon of one Gospel and ten Pauline letters, and he left the Pastorals out. Tertullian, refuting him near the turn of the third century, marvels at the omission: having admitted the tiny letter to Philemon, Marcion “rejected the two epistles to Timothy and the one to Titus, which all treat of ecclesiastical discipline.”⁠⁵³ Whether Marcion knew the letters and refused them — their warnings against “knowledge falsely so called” and their insistence on the goodness of the created order read almost as rebukes of his system — or whether they had simply not reached him is disputed, and bears directly on the dating question. But Marcion is the striking exception, not the rule. One later report, from Jerome, adds that the second-century figure Tatian accepted Titus while rejecting the letters to Timothy; that too is a fourth-century notice about a second-century man, and the exception only proves how uncontested the letters otherwise were.⁠⁵⁴

The orthodox witnesses arrive early and speak with one voice. The Muratorian Fragment, the oldest surviving list of New Testament books, includes all three Pastorals, noting that Paul wrote “one to Philemon, one to Titus, and two to Timothy … held sacred in the esteem of the Church catholic for the regulation of ecclesiastical discipline” — and, in the same breath, rejects two letters forged in Paul’s name “to further the heresy of Marcion.”⁠⁵⁵ Irenaeus, around 180, opens his great work against the Gnostics by quoting 1 Timothy’s warning about “endless genealogies,” and he takes the very title of that work — a refutation of “knowledge falsely so called” — from the letter’s last chapter; he plainly reads it as Paul’s.⁠⁵⁶ Polycarp had echoed it a half-century earlier still (as we saw), and Clement of Alexandria would quote its closing warning against the Gnostics by name.⁠⁵⁷ By the early fourth century the matter was long closed: when Eusebius drew up his inventory of the New Testament, Paul’s letters stood among the acknowledged books without qualification — “Paul’s fourteen epistles are well known and undisputed” — the fourteen including, without comment, the two to Timothy and the one to Titus.⁠⁵⁸

The manuscript record tells the same story, with one accident of survival worth naming. First Timothy is missing from Papyrus 46, the great early codex of Paul’s letters copied around A.D. 200 — but the codex has lost its final leaves, and whether it ever contained the Pastorals is a genuinely open question that scholars have argued from Kenyon in the 1930s down to the present.⁠⁵⁹ More surprising is that 1 Timothy is also absent from Codex Vaticanus, one of the two great fourth-century Bibles — not by any judgment against it, but because the manuscript’s original hand breaks off in the middle of Hebrews, before it reaches the Pastorals. In fact 1 Timothy survives in only a single papyrus, and a late one — P133 (P.Oxy. 5259), a third-century fragment identified only recently; the earliest continuous witness to the letter is the other great fourth-century codex, Sinaiticus.⁠⁶⁰ Thin as the earliest manuscript thread is, the canon lists more than compensate: the Muratorian Fragment, the Cheltenham list, the councils of Laodicea, Hippo, and Carthage, and Athanasius’s Festal Letter of 367 — the first to name exactly our twenty-seven books — all count the letters to Timothy among Paul’s.⁠⁶¹ A book this early, this widely used, and this uniformly received was never in danger. The contrast with its modern reputation is the whole irony of the letter: the book that critics most suspect is the book the ancient Church least doubted.

What the Catholic Church makes of 1 Timothy

Strip away the authorship debate — which, as we have seen, the Church can hold lightly — and what remains is a letter woven through the whole fabric of Catholic life. Its qualifications for bishops and deacons still stand behind the theology of holy orders; its command to hand on the office by the laying on of hands still describes what happens at every ordination.⁠⁶² Its naming of the Church as “the pillar and bulwark of the truth” anchors the Catholic doctrine of the Church as the guardian of revelation.⁠⁶³ Its “one mediator” grounds both the uniqueness of Christ’s redemption and, rightly read, the participated intercession of the saints; its “God wills everyone to be saved” anchors the universal scope of that redemption.⁠⁶⁴ The letter keeps its place in the Church’s prayer as well, supplying readings across the weekday and Sunday lectionary, and it has drawn the Church’s greatest expositors: John Chrysostom preached eighteen homilies on it, and Thomas Aquinas lectured through it verse by verse.⁠⁶⁵

There is a fitting symmetry in all of this. The letter that the first canon-maker refused because it was too institutional, and that modern critics suspect for the same reason, turns out to be the book that taught the Church how to be a church — how to choose its ministers, order its worship, guard its truth, and pray for the salvation of all. Its authorship may never be settled to everyone’s satisfaction. Its work in the Church was settled long ago.

Further reading

The major critical commentaries on the Pastorals span the authorship debate. For a robust defense of authenticity by a leading critical scholar, see Luke Timothy Johnson, The First and Second Letters to Timothy, Anchor Bible 35A (New York: Doubleday, 2001); for the amanuensis position, William D. Mounce, Pastoral Epistles, Word Biblical Commentary 46 (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2000); and for the mediating “allonymity” view, I. Howard Marshall (with Philip H. Towner), A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Pastoral Epistles, International Critical Commentary (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1999). The classic case for pseudonymity is Percy Neale Harrison, The Problem of the Pastoral Epistles (London: Oxford University Press, 1921). For the letter’s place in Paul’s corpus and the broader debate, Raymond E. Brown, An Introduction to the New Testament (New York: Doubleday, 1997); and for a stylometric assessment, Anthony Kenny, A Stylometric Study of the New Testament (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986). On the canon, Bruce M. Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development, and Significance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987).

Frequently Asked Questions

Did Paul write 1 Timothy?

The question is genuinely contested. A large majority of critical scholars — a figure often put at roughly eighty to ninety percent — regard 1 Timothy (with 2 Timothy and Titus) as written by a later disciple in Paul’s name, on the grounds of its distinctive vocabulary, its developed church offices, and travels that do not fit the Acts framework. A substantial minority, including conservative and Catholic scholars such as Luke Timothy Johnson and William Mounce, defends Pauline authorship, often invoking a secretary such as Luke to explain the style. No ancient writer doubted its authorship. For Catholics the point is not decisive either way: the Church holds the letter to be inspired and canonical whether Paul held the pen himself or a disciple wrote under his authority.

What does “the pillar and bulwark of the truth” mean in 1 Timothy 3:15?

Paul calls the Church — “the church of the living God” — “the pillar and foundation of truth” (the Catechism’s translation reads “pillar and bulwark of the truth”). The image is architectural: the Church is the column that holds the truth upright and displays it to the world. Catholic theology reads it as a cornerstone of ecclesiology — the visible, teaching Church is the divinely appointed guardian of revealed truth (CCC 171) — and often cites it in discussions of the authority of the Church alongside Scripture.

Does 1 Timothy 2:5 (“one mediator”) disprove praying to the saints?

No, on the Catholic reading. First Timothy 2:5 excludes any rival or independent mediator between God and man: there is one bridge, Christ. It does not exclude creatures participating in that one mediation. When the Church asks Mary or the saints to pray, it asks them to intercede in and through Christ, not alongside or instead of him — the way one asks a friend on earth to pray. The Catechism quotes the verse (CCC 618) precisely while affirming that Jesus “desires to associate with his redeeming sacrifice” those he saves.

Who were the false teachers 1 Timothy is fighting?

The letter targets teachers at Ephesus preoccupied with “myths and endless genealogies” and a so-called “knowledge” (Greek gnosis), who “forbid marriage” and demanded abstinence from certain foods (1 Tim 4:3). Their exact identity is debated: some see an early, ascetic, speculative Judaizing movement; others read the “knowledge falsely so called” of 6:20 as an early form of the Gnosticism that would flower in the second century. Either way, the letter’s insistence on the goodness of creation and marriage is a direct answer to their dualism.

Where does “the love of money is the root of all evil” come from?

It is 1 Timothy 6:10: “For the love of money is the root of all evils.” The verse is often misquoted as “money is the root of all evil” — but the letter blames not money but the love of it (Greek philargyria), which leads some to “stray from the faith.” Polycarp of Smyrna was already quoting the line early in the second century, pairing it with 1 Timothy 6:7, “we brought nothing into the world,” one of the earliest signs the letter was circulating and honored.

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This post is part of an ongoing series covering every book in the New Testament canon and the early Christian texts that nearly joined them. See the full series at The New Testament Canon—How 27 Books Survived the Ancient Gauntlet.

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Footnotes

1. 1. On Marcion's ten-letter Pauline collection, which omitted the three Pastorals, see the discussion below and [The New Testament Canon](/new-testament-canon/); Bruce M. Metzger, *The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development, and Significance* (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 90–99.

2. 2. On [2 Peter](/second-peter/) as the most-doubted book in the ancient Church (Eusebius classed it among the disputed writings), and the Pastorals as the leading modern case for pseudonymity, see Raymond E. Brown, *An Introduction to the New Testament* (New York: Doubleday, 1997), 638–680, 762–767.

3. 3. 1 Tm 1:3–4 (New American Bible, Revised Edition; hereafter NABRE), bible.usccb.org. The NABRE note on 1:3–7 sets the scene as Timothy's task at Ephesus of suppressing "idle religious speculations."

4. 4. On the letter as a manual of church order rather than a doctrinal treatise, see Brown, *Introduction*, 638–654; the NABRE Introduction to 1 Timothy describes its concern with "sound teaching . . . and good order in the affairs of the Church."

5. 5. On the two datings — c. A.D. 62–65 on the "second imprisonment" reconstruction, or the last decades of the first century (and into the early second) on the pseudonymity view — see the section "Did Paul write it?" below, and Brown, *Introduction*, 654–668.

6. 6. 1 Tm 3:1 (NABRE). The NABRE note observes that this "trustworthy saying" formula recurs in the Pastorals (cf. 1 Tm 1:15; 4:9). The Catechism quotes the verse at CCC 1590.

7. 7. 1 Tm 3:2–5 (NABRE). "Married only once" renders the Greek "husband of one wife" (Douay-Rheims); the Douay note explains that the rule bars from orders anyone married more than once, not that a bishop must be married.

8. 8. 1 Tm 3:8–13 (NABRE); the reference to "women" is 3:11. The NABRE note prefers to read these as women deacons rather than deacons' wives, "because the word is used absolutely" and is introduced, like the deacons, by "similarly."

9. 9. Cf. 1 Tm 3:1–7 (the *episkopos*) with 5:17 (presbyters who "preside well"). The NABRE note on 3:1–7 remarks that "no list of qualifications for presbyters appears in 1 Timothy," and that the "presbyter-bishops here and in Titus . . . lack certain functions reserved here for Paul and Timothy."

10. 10. On the crystallization of the threefold ministry (one bishop, presbyters, deacons) in Ignatius of Antioch (c. 110), see Ignatius, *To the Magnesians* 6 and *To the Trallians* 3, in *The Apostolic Fathers*, and the discussion in Brown, *Introduction*, 646–648. The Catholic reading of the offices as apostolic in substance is set out at CCC 1554–1571.

11. 11. 1 Tm 4:14 (NABRE renders "with the imposition of hands of the presbyterate"; Douay, "the imposition of the hands of the priesthood") and 5:22. On the "gift" (*charisma*) conferred, cf. 2 Tm 1:6.

12. 12. Second Vatican Council, *Lumen Gentium* (Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, 1964), no. 21, which grounds episcopal consecration in the imposition of hands and cites 1 Tm 4:14 together with 2 Tm 1:6–7, vatican.va. On ordination as the conferral of a grace of office, CCC 1573, 1585–1589.

13. 13. 1 Tm 5:17 (NABRE): "Presbyters who preside well deserve double honor, especially those who toil in preaching and teaching"; 5:18 supports the material sense of "honor" by citing "A worker deserves his pay." *Lumen Gentium* 28 cites 1 Tm 5:17 in its account of the presbyterate; *Presbyterorum Ordinis* draws on the same chapter for the support of the clergy.

14. 14. 1 Tm 3:15 (NABRE): "the church of the living God, the pillar and foundation of truth." The Douay-Rheims reads "the pillar and ground of the truth"; the Revised Standard Version, "the pillar and bulwark of the truth."

15. 15. The Greek *stylos kai hedraiōma tēs alētheias* pairs "pillar" with a rare word for a foundation or support; the architectural metaphor is deliberate. Douay's own note on 3:15 draws the ecclesiological conclusion: "the church of the living God can never uphold error, nor bring in corruptions, superstition, or idolatry."

16. 16. CCC 171 (quoting 1 Tm 3:15 and Jude 3), scborromeo.org. The Catechism cites the same verse again at CCC 2032 on the teaching office of the Church.

17. 17. *Lumen Gentium* 8 describes the Church as "the pillar and mainstay of the truth" (citing 1 Tm 3:15), vatican.va.

18. 18. The Protestant reading — that a "pillar" supports and displays a truth it does not author, so that the verse is compatible with the primacy of Scripture — and the Catholic rejoinder are surveyed in the standard commentaries; on Scripture and Tradition as a single deposit guarded by the Church, see CCC 80–82 and *Dei Verbum* 9–10.

19. 19. 1 Tm 2:5–6 (NABRE). The Douay reads "one mediator of God and men, the man Christ Jesus."

20. 20. The NABRE note on 1 Tm 2:1–7 observes that 2:5 "contains what may well have been a very primitive creed," which "some interpreters have called . . . a Christian version of the Jewish *shema*" (Dt 6:4–5).

21. 21. John Chrysostom, *Homily 7 on First Timothy* (on 1 Tm 2:5), in *Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers*, First Series, vol. 13, trans. Philip Schaff (Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1889), newadvent.org: "a mediator ought to have communion with both parties, between whom he is to mediate . . . As therefore He became Man, so was He also God."

22. 22. CCC 618 (quoting 1 Tm 2:5), scborromeo.org. The verse is quoted again at CCC 1544. On Mary's and the saints' "subordinate" mediation as a participation in Christ's one mediation, see *Lumen Gentium* 60–62 and CCC 970.

23. 23. Council of Trent, Session 25 (1563), Decree on the Invocation, Veneration, and Relics of Saints, which defends the intercession of the saints against the charge that it derogates from "the one mediator of God and men, Christ Jesus" (1 Tm 2:5); Denzinger 984 (DS 1821).

24. 24. Douay-Rheims note on 1 Tm 2:6, drbo.org: Christ "is also the only mediator, who stands in need of no other to recommend his petitions to the Father. But this is not against our seeking the prayers and intercession, as well of the faithful upon earth, as of the saints and angels in heaven."

25. 25. 1 Tm 2:4 (NABRE): God "wills everyone to be saved and to come to knowledge of the truth."

26. 26. CCC 74 (on the transmission of revelation), 851 (on the motive of the missions), and 2822 (on the petition "thy will be done"), each quoting 1 Tm 2:4, scborromeo.org.

27. 27. Thomas Aquinas, *Summa Theologiae* I, q. 19, a. 6, ad 1 (whose objection quotes 1 Tm 2:4), trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, newadvent.org: "God antecedently wills all men to be saved, but consequently wills some to be damned, as His justice exacts." Aquinas attributes the antecedent/consequent distinction to John Damascene.

28. 28. Chrysostom, *Homily 7 on First Timothy* (on 1 Tm 2:4), NPNF, First Series, vol. 13, newadvent.org.

29. 29. 1 Tm 4:1, 3 (Douay-Rheims), drbo.org: the errorists teach "doctrines of devils . . . forbidding to marry, to abstain from meats, which God hath created to be received with thanksgiving." The NABRE renders "who forbid marriage and require abstinence from foods."

30. 30. Douay-Rheims note on 1 Tm 4:3, drbo.org: Paul "speaks of the Gnostics, the Marcionites, the Encratites, the Manicheans, and other ancient heretics, who absolutely condemned marriage, and the use of all kind of meat; because they pretended that all flesh was from an evil principle."

31. 31. On celibacy "for the sake of the kingdom" as a freely embraced counsel (cf. Mt 19:12; 1 Cor 7:7, 32–35) rather than a claim that marriage is evil, see CCC 1618–1620 and, on priestly celibacy as a discipline of the Latin Church, CCC 1579.

32. 32. 1 Tm 6:10 (NABRE): "the love of money is the root of all evils." The Greek *rhiza pantōn tōn kakōn* is anarthrous, which many modern versions render "a root of all kinds of evils"; the Catholic versions read "the root of all evils." The point is that it is *love* of money (*philargyria*), not money itself, that is condemned.

33. 33. Polycarp, *To the Philippians* 4.1 (echoing 1 Tm 6:10 and 6:7), trans. J. B. Lightfoot, earlychristianwritings.com: "But the love of money is the beginning of all troubles. Knowing therefore that we brought nothing into the world neither can we carry anything out . . ." Polycarp writes *archē* ("beginning") where 1 Timothy has *rhiza* ("root").

34. 34. 1 Tm 2:11–15 (NABRE). The NABRE note on 2:12 records that "a man" here "could also mean 'her husband.'"

35. 35. For the culturally-situated reading, which sets the passage against the Ephesian crisis in which women appear among those influenced by the false teachers (cf. 1 Tm 5:13–15; 2 Tm 3:6–7), see the discussion in the major commentaries (Johnson; Marshall; Mounce). The universal-prohibition reading rests on the writer's own appeal to Genesis in 2:13–14.

36. 36. John Paul II, *Ordinatio Sacerdotalis* (Apostolic Letter on Reserving Priestly Ordination to Men Alone, 1994), which grounds the teaching in Christ's choice of male apostles and the constant tradition of the Church; its single citation of 1 Timothy is to 3:1–13 (on the ministers of the Church), not to 2:11–15, vatican.va.

37. 37. 1 Tm 2:15 (NABRE: "she will be saved through motherhood"; Douay: "saved through childbearing"). On the range of readings — the birth of Christ, or the ordinary vocation of motherhood lived in faith against the ascetic false teachers — see the commentaries; the NABRE note reads it as an assurance of salvation for women who "perform their role as wives and mothers in faith and love."

38. 38. 1 Tm 3:16 (NABRE). The NABRE note identifies the passage as "part of a liturgical hymn used among the Christian communities in and around Ephesus," consisting of "three couplets in typical Hebrew balance."

39. 39. On the pre-Pauline hymnic fragments in the New Testament (cf. Phil 2:6–11; Col 1:15–20), each characteristically opening with a relative pronoun, see the standard commentaries and Brown, *Introduction*, 494–496.

40. 40. On the variant at 1 Tm 3:16 (*hos*, "who"; *theos*, "God"; *ho*, "which") see Bruce M. Metzger, *A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament*, 2nd ed. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1994), 573–574. The critical text reads *hos*, supported by the original hands of Sinaiticus (ℵ*), Alexandrinus, and Ephraemi Rescriptus; the *theos* reading is the mass of later Byzantine manuscripts and the Textus Receptus behind the King James Version. The NABRE note on 3:16 concurs: the earliest reading is "Who," referring to Christ; "many later . . . predominantly Byzantine manuscripts read 'God,' possibly for theological reasons."

41. 41. The relative pronoun still has Christ as its antecedent (the "mystery of devotion" made manifest), so the confession of the Incarnation is unchanged; the *theos* reading makes explicit a claim the *hos* reading already implies. See Metzger, *Textual Commentary*, 574.

42. 42. The seven undisputed letters are Romans, 1–2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon; see Brown, *Introduction*, 4–6. The "eighty to ninety percent" is the figure commonly attributed to Brown's discussion of the Pastorals (*Introduction*, 662–668); it is widely cited but should be taken as a rough estimate of the state of critical opinion rather than a precise measurement.

43. 43. Friedrich Schleiermacher, *Ueber den sogenannten ersten Brief des Paulos an den Timotheos: Ein kritisches Sendschreiben an J. C. Gaß* (Berlin: Realschulbuchhandlung, 1807); he was anticipated by J. E. C. Schmidt (1804). J. G. Eichhorn extended the doubt to all three Pastorals in his *Einleitung in das Neue Testament* (c. 1812); F. C. Baur, *Die sogenannten Pastoralbriefe des Apostels Paulus aufs neue kritisch untersucht* (Stuttgart and Tübingen, 1835); H. J. Holtzmann, *Die Pastoralbriefe, kritisch und exegetisch behandelt* (Leipzig: Engelmann, 1880).

44. 44. Percy Neale Harrison, *The Problem of the Pastoral Epistles* (London: Oxford University Press, 1921). The vocabulary figures — roughly 848 distinct words apart from proper names, of which some 306 appear in no other Pauline letter and about 175 nowhere else in the New Testament — are as commonly summarized (e.g., in D. A. Carson and Douglas J. Moo, *An Introduction to the New Testament*, 2nd ed.). Harrison himself concluded the letters "received their present shape at the hands, not of Paul, but of a Paulinist living in the early years of the second century," while preserving genuine Pauline note-fragments — the "fragment hypothesis."

45. 45. On the four arguments (vocabulary, church order, chronology, and the character of the false teaching), see Brown, *Introduction*, 662–668, and the surveys in the commentaries. The "knowledge falsely so called" is 1 Tm 6:20.

46. 46. C. F. D. Moule, "The Problem of the Pastoral Epistles: A Reappraisal," *Bulletin of the John Rylands Library* 47 (1965): 430–452 (proposing Luke as Paul's drafter); Anthony Kenny, *A Stylometric Study of the New Testament* (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), who found "no reason to reject the hypothesis that twelve of the [thirteen] Pauline Epistles are the work of a single, unusually versatile author," with Titus the lone outlier and 2 Timothy ranking especially high.

47. 47. "Overseers and deacons" appear together in the undisputed Phil 1:1; Paul and Barnabas appoint "elders" (*presbyteroi*) in every church in Acts 14:23.

48. 48. On the "second imprisonment" reconstruction, see 1 Clement 5:7 (Paul reached "the limits of the West"), a phrase most take to mean Spain (Clement writing from Rome), though the reference is debated; and the Muratorian Fragment, which mentions "the departure of Paul from the city [of Rome] . . . when he journeyed to Spain." Paul had voiced the intention in Rom 15:24, 28. There is no independent evidence that the Spanish mission occurred.

49. 49. Luke Timothy Johnson, *The First and Second Letters to Timothy*, Anchor Bible 35A (New York: Doubleday, 2001), who devotes a long introduction to the authorship question, concedes that Pauline authorship "cannot be demonstrated," and argues that the pseudonymity consensus rests more on scholarly custom than on the force of the evidence.

50. 50. I. Howard Marshall (with Philip H. Towner), *A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Pastoral Epistles*, International Critical Commentary (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1999), who rejects direct Pauline authorship but proposes a non-deceptive "allonymity" — composition by a faithful disciple under Paul's authority.

51. 51. The Pontifical Biblical Commission's response on the authenticity of the Pastoral Epistles (12 June 1913) affirmed their Pauline authorship and rejected the fragmentary hypothesis. In 1955 the Commission's secretaries, Athanasius Miller, O.S.B., and Arduin Kleinhans, O.F.M., published articles stating that Catholic scholars enjoyed "full freedom" (*plena libertate*) with respect to the earlier decrees except where they touch faith and morals (the articles' own authority was debated at the time). On inerrancy as located in what God wished affirmed "for the sake of our salvation," see *Dei Verbum* 11.

52. 52. The NABRE Introduction to the Pastoral Epistles discusses the pseudonymity theory as a serious scholarly option without suggesting that the faith is at stake, bible.usccb.org.

53. 53. Tertullian, *Against Marcion* 5.21, in *Ante-Nicene Fathers*, vol. 3, trans. Peter Holmes (Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1885), newadvent.org: "I wonder . . . that he rejected the two epistles to Timothy and the one to Titus, which all treat of ecclesiastical discipline." The "letter . . . written but to one man" that Marcion did admit is Philemon.

54. 54. Jerome, *Prologue to the Commentary on Titus* (PL 26), reports that Tatian, founder of the Encratites, rejected some of Paul's letters yet held that Titus in particular was the apostle's — implying he did not receive the letters to Timothy. As with all our knowledge of Tatian's canon, this is Jerome's fourth-century notice, not a surviving statement of Tatian.

55. 55. The Muratorian Fragment, lines 59–66, in Metzger, *Canon of the New Testament*, Appendix IV, 305–307: Paul wrote "out of affection and love one to Philemon, one to Titus, and two to Timothy; and these are held sacred in the esteem of the Church catholic for the regulation of ecclesiastical discipline," while the letters "to the Laodiceans" and "to the Alexandrians" are "forged in Paul's name to [further] the heresy of Marcion." The traditional date is c. 170–200; a scholarly minority (Sundberg 1973; Hahneman 1992) argues for the late fourth century.

56. 56. Irenaeus, *Against Heresies* 1.pref.1 (quoting 1 Tm 1:4), in *Ante-Nicene Fathers*, vol. 1, trans. Alexander Roberts and William Rambaut, ccel.org: false teachers "bring in lying words and vain genealogies, which, as the apostle says, 'minister questions rather than godly edifying which is in faith.'" The title of the work — a refutation of "knowledge falsely so called" — is drawn from 1 Tm 6:20.

57. 57. Polycarp, *To the Philippians* 4.1 (see n. 33 above); Clement of Alexandria, *Stromateis* 2.11, quotes 1 Tm 6:20–21 ("O Timothy, guard . . . the profane babbling and . . . knowledge falsely so called") against the Gnostics.

58. 58. Eusebius, *Ecclesiastical History* 3.3.5, in *Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers*, Second Series, vol. 1, trans. Arthur Cushman McGiffert (Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1890), newadvent.org: "Paul's fourteen epistles are well known and undisputed." At HE 3.25.2 the "epistles of Paul" stand among the acknowledged books (*homologoumena*). The count of fourteen includes the Pastorals; only the Pauline authorship of Hebrews, not of the Pastorals, is flagged as disputed.

59. 59. Papyrus 46 (P. Chester Beatty II, c. A.D. 200) breaks off in 1 Thessalonians; its final leaves are lost. Whether the codex ever included the Pastorals is contested: F. G. Kenyon calculated that there was insufficient room; Jeremy Duff ("𝔓46 and the Pastorals: A Misleading Consensus?" *New Testament Studies* 44 [1998]: 578–590) argued that the scribe was compressing his text so as to include them; Brent Nongbri (*Novum Testamentum* 64 [2022]: 388–407) concludes that the contents of the lost leaves cannot be determined. P46 is therefore not a witness to 1 Timothy in its surviving state, and cannot securely be cited either for or against an early Pastoral-less Pauline collection.

60. 60. Codex Vaticanus (B, 4th c.) breaks off in Hebrews (at 9:14) and so its original hand lacks the Pastorals, Philemon, and Revelation; it is not a witness to 1 Timothy. First Timothy survives in only one papyrus, P133 (P.Oxy. 5259), a third-century fragment identified only recently; the earliest papyrus of any Pastoral, P32, a fragment of Titus (c. 175–200), is earlier still; and the earliest continuous-text witness to 1 Timothy is Codex Sinaiticus (ℵ, 4th c.).

61. 61. The three Pastorals appear in the Muratorian Fragment (c. 170–200), the Cheltenham/Mommsen list (c. 359), the canon of the Synod of Laodicea (c. 363, canon 60 — itself possibly a later appendage), the synods of Hippo (393) and Carthage (397), and Athanasius's 39th Festal Letter (367), the first surviving list matching the modern twenty-seven-book New Testament exactly; see Metzger, *Canon of the New Testament*, 209–238, 305–315.

62. 62. On the qualifications for orders (1 Tm 3) and ordination by the imposition of hands (1 Tm 4:14), see CCC 1577, 1590, and *Presbyterorum Ordinis*, which cites 1 Tm 3:2–5 for the qualities of presbyters.

63. 63. 1 Tm 3:15; CCC 171, 2032; *Lumen Gentium* 8; see nn. 16–17 above.

64. 64. 1 Tm 2:5 (CCC 618, 1544) and 2:4 (CCC 74, 851, 2822); see nn. 22, 26 above.

65. 65. Chrysostom's eighteen *Homilies on First Timothy* are in NPNF, First Series, vol. 13; Thomas Aquinas, *Super I ad Timotheum* (Commentary on the First Letter to Timothy), is available in translation at aquinas.cc. On the letter in the lectionary, 1 Timothy supplies both Sunday readings (in Year C) and weekday readings in Ordinary Time.