PHILEMON 1 — A PLEA FOR A RUNAWAY SLAVE AND A NEW BROTHER

Philemon is the shortest of Paul's letters and the most personal. It was written from prison, probably in Rome around AD 60–62, at the same time as Colossians, and it was carried to Colossae by Tychicus and Onesimus (Colossians 4:7–9). Philemon was a wealthy member of the church at Colossae, who had apparently been converted through Paul's ministry (verse 19) and who hosted the church in his home. Onesimus, whose name means "useful," was a slave in Philemon's household. He had left, and perhaps stolen something (verse 18), and somehow met Paul in prison, where he became a Christian. Under Roman law, a runaway slave could be severely punished, sometimes with branding, imprisonment, or even death, and the owner had nearly complete power over him. Paul's decision to send Onesimus back, with this letter, was both a legal and a moral matter, and the way he does it is a masterpiece of Christian persuasion, filled with wordplay, tenderness, and quiet pressure. The letter does not directly condemn slavery, but it introduces a principle that undermines it from the inside: the slave is a brother. This is a letter about reconciliation, forgiveness, and what happens when the gospel enters the most unequal relationships.

The letter to Philemon is a remarkably personal and unguarded document, and it has been universally accepted as authentic, even by scholars who question other letters attributed to Paul. Its style, vocabulary, and content are so closely tied to a particular situation that it is difficult to imagine a later writer inventing it. It also connects with Colossians, which names Onesimus as "one of you" and sends him with Tychicus (Colossians 4:7–9), and which shares a list of coworkers with Philemon, including Epaphras, Aristarchus, Mark, Demas, and Luke. These connections between two independent letters, one addressed to a church and the other to an individual, are the kind of undesigned coincidences that point to genuine correspondence. The letter also shows the effect of the gospel on social relations in the Roman world. The Roman author Pliny the Younger wrote a letter around AD 108 asking a friend to forgive a freedman who had offended him, which provides an interesting parallel, since Pliny asks for forgiveness for a young man, but within the framework of Roman social norms, in which the master's authority and the freedman's debt of gratitude were unquestioned. Paul's letter goes further by describing the former slave as a brother in Christ and by placing the relationship of Philemon and Onesimus within the fellowship of the church. This view of human equality in Christ was a significant departure from the assumptions of the ancient world, and it contributed to the later development of Christian opposition to slavery, led by figures such as Gregory of Nyssa in the fourth century, who preached against it, and by William Wilberforce and others in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The fact that a short note to a Christian slaveholder was preserved and included in the New Testament canon shows how much the early church valued the principles that it contained.