 Valentinians treat physical reality with less contempt than other Gnostic groups, and conceive of materiality not as a separate substance from the divine, but as attributable to an "error of perception" which becomes symbolized mythopoetically as the act of material creation.The followers of Valentinius attempted to systematically decode the Epistles, claiming that most Christians made the mistake of reading the Epistles literally rather than allegorically.Valentinians understood the conflict between "Jews" and "Gentiles" in Romans to be a coded reference to the differences between "Psychics" (people who are partly spiritual but have not yet achieved separation from carnality) and "Pneumatics" (totally spiritual people).