I Timothy largely focuses upon organization, doctrine, and Christian behavior, but also emphasizes the fact that the early Church was confronting "false teaching," an indication of the divisions which would fracture initial Christians into groups such as the Gnostics, who would later be classified as "heretics". .
Though there were many Gnostic sects, they all agreed on certain basic assumptions. They maintained that Jesus was a human martyr, rather than divine. According to Gnostic belief, the Holy Spirit and Jesus of Nazareth were two separate beings; Jesus was a man of flesh who, at baptism, received the Holy Spirit and became Christ. The spirit inhabited His body until the crucifixion, and was then altered and released. Gnostic teaching is based upon the knowledge of transcendence through internal and innate methods expressed as an exclusive religious experience. Most Gnostic scriptures take the form of myth in which a true, ultimate, and uplifting God, who is beyond all created universes and has, in fact, never created anything, has radiated from within Himself the substance of all that there is in the world, consequently everything consists of the substance of God. Despite this, many segments of the initial divine essence have been cast so far from the source that they endured objectionable alterations. All of the mythical variations of the Gnostics refer specifically to Aeons, the immediate godlike entities which exist between the True God and humans. Along with the True God, they comprise the realm of Fullness (the Pleroma) in which spirituality is able to operate. The corporeal universe was created not by the True God, but by a divinity which was himself created when the Aeon Sophia (Wisdom) sought to familiarize herself with the perfect, pre-existing Aeon. This desire had to be separated from her in order for her to remain within the Pleroma; she thereby emanated from herself a defective being who fashioned material and psychic space.