Iv. The Significance Of The Letter
INTRODUCTION TO PHILEMON
I. AUTHORSHIP
The letter to Philemon is one of the two truly personal letters in the NT. The other is 3 John, sent to one Gaius by his friend “the elder” (otherwise unnamed). In both letters one man is addressed by one man. In the letter to Philemon the one man who addresses the other introduces himself as Paul. While Paul associates Timothy with himself in the prescript, and greetings are sent to members of Philemon’s extended household, the body of the letter is a private communication from Paul to Philemon.
The Pauline authorship has been accepted by most critics. The letter is too short for the most efficient computer to yield a significant analysis of its style and vocabulary.1 If its authenticity is questioned, it is questioned mainly on account of its close association with Colossians, which some exegetes are unable to accept as Pauline. For Colossians and Philemon were, to all appearances, written at the same time and place, sent to the same place, carried by the same messenger or messengers.2 Of the six companions of Paul who send their greetings in Colossians, five send greetings to Philemon.3 Apart from these, Archippus is mentioned in both, and Onesimus evidently reaches his destination at the same time as both letters.
Ernest Renan was so sure of the genuineness of Philemon that for its sake he was willing to admit the genuineness of Colossians. “The Epistle to the Colossians,” he wrote, “though full of eccentricities, does not embrace any of those impossibilities which are to be found in the Epistles to Titus and to Timothy. It furnishes even many of those details which reject the hypothesis [of its pseudonymity] as false. Assuredly of this number is its connection with the note to Philemon. If the epistle is apocryphal, the note is apocryphal also; yet few of the pages [of the Pauline corpus] have so pronounced a tone of sincerity; Paul alone, as it appears to us, could write that little masterpiece.”4
But it might be argued that Renan’s romantic nature was so responsive to the human appeal of the letter to Philemon that the edge of his critical faculty was blunted. Ferdinand Christian Baur also appreciated the human appeal of the letter, but his critical faculty retained its keenness. “What,” he asked, “has criticism to do with this short, attractive, graceful and friendly letter, inspired as it is by the noblest Christian feeling, and which has never yet been touched by the breath of suspicion?”5 Yet, he went on, even here apostolic authorship must not be taken for granted. Since the other “captivity epistles” to which Philemon is so clearly related are not authentically Pauline, the authenticity of this epistle too must be abandoned: it is in fact (said Baur) a Christian romance in embryo, comparable in this respect to the third-century Clementine Homilies. The Clementine Homilies show how “Christianity is the permanent reconciliation of those who were formerly separated by one cause or another, but who by a special arrangement of affairs brought about by Divine Providence for that very purpose, are again brought together; through their conversion to Christianity they know each other again, the one sees in the other his own flesh and blood.”6 So the letter to Philemon suggests that perhaps Onesimus and his master were temporarily separated in order that they might be reunited and belong to each other forever, no longer as slave and master but as loving brothers in Christ.
W. C. van Manen, who rejected the authenticity of all thirteen Pauline letters, including even the four “capital letters” which Baur accepted (those to the Romans, Corinthians, and Galatians), added to Baur’s arguments against the genuineness of Philemon some considerations of his own. For one thing, the ambiguity of the direction speaks against Pauline authorship: the letter is addressed by Paul and Timothy to three named individuals and a household church, while the bulk of it is a personal letter from Paul to Philemon. “This double form ... is not a style that is natural to any one who is writing freely and untrammelled, whether to one person or to many.”7 More probably the unknown writer has modeled his composition on a letter sent by the younger Pliny to his friend Sabinianus, interceding on behalf of a freedman of the latter who has offended his patron and has sought Pliny’s good offices in bringing about a reconciliation.8 The writer to Philemon makes the freedman into a slave, and rewrites the letter so as to portray the ideal “relations which, in his judgment, that is, according to the view of Pauline Christians, ought to subsist between Christian slaves and their masters, especially when slaves have in some respect misconducted themselves, as for example by secretly quitting their master’s service.”9
This reconstruction is hypercritical and naive at the same time. There is no need to propound such a farfetched explanation of a document which bears a much more probable explanation on its face—namely, that it is a genuine letter of Paul, concerning a slave called Onesimus, who somehow needs the apostle’s help in restoring good personal relations between himself and his master (one of Paul’s friends), and that Paul quite naturally takes the opportunity at the beginning and end of the letter to send greetings and good wishes to other members of the household. Because of what they recognize as the transparent genuineness of this letter, several scholars who are unable to accept the whole of Colossians as Pauline feel constrained nevertheless to salvage some of it for the apostle—enough, at least, to keep Philemon company.10
II. DATE AND PROVENANCE
If, then, it was written by Paul, was it sent from Rome in the beginning of the 60s, or from some other place a few years earlier? Over and above the issues relating to this group of “captivity letters” in general, debate with regard to Philemon has fastened on two points: (1) the length of the journey that Onesimus must have made from his master’s home to the place of Paul’s confinement, and (2) Paul’s request for the preparation of a guestroom in view of his hope of an early release and a visit to the Lycus valley.
The case has been argued one way and the other, by none more ably than by G. S. Duncan and C. H. Dodd. Duncan’s case for an Ephesian provenance, because Ephesus was so much nearer to Colossae than Rome was (100 miles over against more than 1,000), was answered by Dodd, who thought the remoter city more probable. Duncan replied to Dodd, but the question has remained unresolved.
With regard to Onesimus’s choice of a place of refuge, “only in the most desperate circumstances,” said Duncan, “such as the letter gives us no reason to assume, would a fugitive from justice have undertaken over unknown and dangerous roads a thousand miles by land, together with two sea voyages extending over some five days, especially when comparatively near at hand there was a city with which he was no doubt already familiar, and which was of sufficient size to afford him all the security that he was likely to require.”11
With regard to the visit proposed by Paul in v. 22, Duncan went on to say:
How natural such a visit would be at a time when his activities, temporarily interrupted by imprisonment, were directed towards the evangelisation of Asia: not far from him as he lay at Ephesus were those churches in the Lycus valley which in some indirect way no doubt owed their origin to his missionary-work in the province, but which he had never so far visited, and in at least one of which, Colossae, the conditions gave him grave cause for anxiety. On the other hand, how unlikely was he to contemplate such a visit, let alone give thought to the provision of a lodging there, when he lay a prisoner at Rome. . . . From Rome he meant, not to turn back to the Lycus valley, but to advance into Spain.12
To the argument that Onesimus was more likely to have fled to neighboring Ephesus than to distant Rome, Dodd says:
This seems plausible. But a moment’s reflection may convince us that we are here talking of things about which we know nothing. We cannot know either what was in Onesimus’ mind or what his opportunities for travel may have been. If we are to surmise, then it is as likely that the fugitive slave, his pockets lined at his master’s expense, made for Rome because it was distant, as that he went to Ephesus because it was near. But this meeting of the runaway slave with the imprisoned apostle is in any case an enigma. Did he mean to go to Paul? Or was it the long arm of coincidence that brought about such an improbable meeting? No secure argument can be based upon an incident which we cannot in any case explain.13
To the argument that Paul’s request for a lodging at Colossae comes more naturally if he was at Ephesus at the time than if he was at Rome, he says:
This is a real point in favour of the Ephesian hypothesis. At the same time we do not know that Paul would have held to his intention in the greatly changed circumstances. Like all practical men, he was open to change his mind, as in fact we know both from Acts and from the Epistles he not infrequently did. On the Roman hypothesis, the emergence of the Colossian heresy may well have led Paul to plan a visit to Asia before setting out on further travels, whether or not the plan was ever fulfilled.14
When Duncan replied to these points, he added little on the first score to what he had said before (apart from a footnote allusion to the suggestion of J. Pongrácz that the temple of Artemis could have provided a place of refuge for Onesimus at Ephesus); on the second score he conceded that Paul might have changed his plans during his Roman imprisonment and decided to visit Colossae.
But long before he could have arrived at that remote and unimportant town in the Lycus valley, must we not allow of the eager news preceding him of his release, his journeyings eastwards, his subsequent arrival at Ephesus or some such centre in Asia? That one so situated should bespeak quarters at Colossae suggests the air-mindedness of the twentieth century rather than the rigorous conditions, which Paul himself knew so well (2 Cor. 11:25 ff.), of travel in the first.15
On this last point it might be said that long before the air-minded twentieth century most students of the letter to Philemon, including some who experienced travel conditions not notably less rigorous than those which Paul endured in the first century, had no difficulty in believing that Paul did from Rome bespeak quarters at Colossae. And it was not only the Colossian heresy that caused Paul concern. The developing situation in the province of Asia as a whole, as he learned of it from Epaphras and other visitors, may well have seemed to him to demand his presence as soon as he regained his freedom (if indeed he did regain it). His opponents there were exploiting his absence to gain support for their policy and to undermine his authority. Even if things had not yet reached the pass described in 2 Tim. 1:15, where “all who are in Asia” are said to have turned away from him, the beginnings of this trend were already apparent.
As for a Caesarean provenance,16 unless this can be established for the companion letters, nothing in the letter to Philemon supports it. Onesimus might make his way to Ephesus because it was near, or work his passage to Rome because it was distant, but what could take him to Caesarea?
If Philemon be considered by itself, the arguments for an Ephesian provenance are weighty. But when Philemon is considered along with Colossians, they are outweighed by the arguments for a Roman provenance.
III. PAUL AND ONESIMUS
The picture sometimes drawn of Paul’s meeting Onesimus as a fellow-prisoner is misleading. One of G. S. Duncan’s arguments against a Roman provenance for the letter is the radical change in the conditions of Paul’s imprisonment which would have to be envisaged “if, following on two years spent in his own hired house (Acts 28:30), he was reduced to sharing the same prison-cell as a fugitive slave.”17
But there is no need to conjure up any such picture in our minds. Nothing in the letter suggests that Onesimus was a prisoner: he was evidently free to set out on a journey, as Paul was not. We may think of Paul as still living under house-arrest in his lodgings, albeit handcuffed to his military guard (and therefore technically a prisoner), when Onesimus came to him.
E. R. Goodenough had recourse to Athenian law to illustrate the situation.18 In Athenian law a slave in danger of his life was permitted to seek sanctuary at an altar. That altar might be the hearth of a private family. The head of the family would then be obliged to give the slave protection while he tried to persuade him to return to his master; he would no doubt use his good offices to mollify the master’s anger. If the slave refused to go back, the householder’s duty was to put him up for auction and hand over the price received for him to his former master. This provision operated in Egypt under the Ptolemies, and survived into Roman imperial times, since it influenced Ulpian’s jurisprudence early in the third century A.D. Philo of Alexandria, who knew the Egyptian practice, modified the Deuteronomic law of the fugitive slave to conform with it.19
In explaining the case of Onesimus in terms of this Athenian provision, Goodenough found it necessary to suppose that Paul was free at the time, and that his reference to being in chains might be figurative.20 But if the apostle was under house-arrest in his own lodgings, might not the place where he lived count as his “hearth” within the meaning of the act—always supposing that the provision was valid in that city, and that Onesimus availed himself of it?
There is no way of deciding how in fact Onesimus made his way to Paul. Perhaps Epaphras of Colossae, who was on a visit to Paul at the time, came across Onesimus in the city, recognized him, and brought him to Paul because he knew that Paul would help him in his predicament. One cannot be sure. It may even be outrunning the evidence to conclude that Onesimus was a runaway slave in the usual sense of the term. It could be argued that his master had sent him to fulfil some commission, and that he had overstayed his leave and required a note of excuse from Paul begging pardon for his unduly long absence. In view of our ignorance of so many details, the possibilities are numerous.
The letter throws little light on Paul’s attitude to the institution of slavery. More formal teaching on the subject is given in the household codes of Colossians and Ephesians, but Paul’s mind on the subject finds clearest expression in incidental remarks in 1 Cor. 7:20-24.21 What the letter to Philemon does is to bring the institution into an atmosphere where it could only wilt and die. Where master and slave were united in affection as brothers in Christ, formal emancipation would be but a matter of expediency, the legal confirmation of their new relationship. If the letter were a document on slavery, it could be copiously illustrated by accounts of conditions in the Roman Empire over several centuries. One might quote an advertisement of 156 B.C. requesting information about two runaway slaves and giving a description of the slaves themselves and of the goods which they had on them when they were last seen,22 or one might refer to an inscribed bronze collar of the late fifth or early sixth century A.D., worn by the slave of a Christian archdeacon in Sardinia.23
Paul had no means of compelling Onesimus to go back to Philemon: if Onesimus had refused to go, or had changed his mind on the way back to Phrygia, Paul could have done nothing about it. (The idea of reporting Onesimus to the authorities, as a fugitive slave, was out of the question.) That Onesimus agreed to go back, and presumably did so, must be seen as evidence that the grace of Christ which worked so powerfully in Paul, and which (Paul hoped) would work in Philemon, was also at work in Onesimus. It would help Onesimus, no doubt, to have the congenial and encouraging companionship of Tychicus on his way back: it may well have been Tychicus’s departure for the Lycus valley that provided Paul with a suitable opportunity for sending Onesimus back.
IV. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE LETTER
A clearer idea of the nature and purpose of the letter to Philemon may be gained if three questions are asked:
(1) What is Paul requesting?
(2) Was his request granted?
(3) Why was the letter preserved?
Although formally these are three distinct questions, materially they are parts of one comprehensive question, covering the character of the document and its place in the New Testament.
(1) What is Paul requesting? He is requesting his friend and convert, Philemon of Colossae, to receive back his slave Onesimus on a new footing—no longer as a slave but as a fellow-Christian and as a partner in the service of the gospel to which Philemon, like Paul himself, is dedicated. In addition, he is delicately letting Philemon know that what he would really like him to do is to send Onesimus back to him to continue the personal service that he has already begun to render Paul.
It has indeed been argued that the request is addressed not to Philemon but to Archippus, to whom Paul and Timothy also send their greetings in the prescript.24 John Knox, who propounds this argument, finds it supported in the cryptic message to Archippus at the end of the letter to the Colossian church, where the church is directed to tell Archippus to make sure to fulfil the ministry that he has received “in the Lord” (Col. 4:17). Paul there enlists the aid of the Colossian church in persuading Onesimus’s master to do what Paul wants him to do.
Who then was Philemon? Philemon, it is said, was overseer of the churches of the Lycus valley; he lived at Laodicea. Paul arranged that the letter about Onesimus should be delivered to Philemon first because he could use his influence with Archippus; this was the “letter from Laodicea” which Paul asked the church of Colossae to procure and read (Col. 4:16).
It is quite probable that the ministry which Archippus was to fulfil had something to do with Laodicea, since it is mentioned immediately after the reference to the “letter from Laodicea.” But after the extraordinary delicacy with which Paul’s plea for Onesimus is worded in the letter to Philemon, it would be incredibly maladroit to put pressure on Onesimus’s owner by name in another letter which was to be read aloud at a church meeting where the owner would presumably be present. No one should be embarrassed by the unobtrusive commendation of Onesimus in Col. 4:9: “Onesimus, our trusty and dear brother, who is one of yourselves”—it would perhaps add just a little more weight to Paul’s plea in the letter to Philemon, but would not put Onesimus’s owner on the spot. Any attempt to put him on the spot would neutralize the confident—and confidential—diplomacy of the letter to Philemon.
That diplomacy would be even more effectively neutralized if the letter to Philemon were read aloud before an assembled church. Greetings are indeed sent in that letter to the church in the recipient’s house as well as to Philemon, Apphia, and Archippus; but that does not mean that the private contents of vv. 4-21 were to be divulged even to that household church, not to speak of the wider city church.
“It is evident that Philemon’s house is meant”:25 Philemon’s name comes first among those saluted in the prescript, and this in itself is “fatal to the theory that Archippus is primarily the one addressed.”26 Philemon is Onesimus’s master, to whom Paul’s very personal plea is directed. It is unlikely that Knox would have come to any other conclusion but for his desire to link the burden of the letter to Philemon with the ministry laid on Archippus in Col. 4:17.
(2) Was Paul’s request granted? Yes; otherwise the letter to Philemon would not have survived. That it survived at all is a matter calling for comment, but if Philemon had hardened his heart and refused to pardon and welcome Onesimus, let alone send him back to Paul, he would certainly have suppressed the letter.
(3) Why was the letter preserved? Here we come to those features of John Knox’s Philemon among the Letters of Paul which make it one of the most important and fascinating studies of this letter ever to have been published.
Knox’s work took shape against the background of the Chicago school of NT studies led by Edgar J. Goodspeed. Goodspeed pioneered the view that the Pauline corpus of ten letters (that is, lacking the three Pastorals) was edited and published at Ephesus about the end of the first century A.D., and that the document which we know as the letter to the Ephesians was composed by the editor to serve as an introduction to the corpus.27 Other members of the school undertook supporting studies, and Knox’s book belongs to this category.
Knox accepts the general Goodspeed position and goes on to suggest a reason for the inclusion of Philemon in the ten-letter corpus. It was included because it meant very much to a man who played a prominent part in the publication of the corpus—namely, Onesimus.
Here is his argument. When Ignatius, bishop of Antioch in Syria, was being taken to Rome for execution about A.D. 110, he was visited in Smyrna by the bishop of Ephesus, who was named Onesimus. But why should one connect this Onesimus with the Onesimus who figures in the letter to Philemon fifty years earlier?
Because, says Knox, Ignatius shows himself familiar with this letter when he writes a letter of thanks to the church of Ephesus. Ignatius’s letter to the Ephesians is, indeed, one of the few places in patristic literature which clearly echoes the language of the letter to Philemon. Not only so, but the part of Ignatius’s letter which echoes the language of the letter to Philemon is the part which mentions Bishop Onesimus—the first six chapters. In these six chapters the bishop is mentioned fourteen times;28 in the remaining fifteen chapters he is not mentioned at all (apart from one more general reference to the bishop’s office: “obey the bishop and the presbytery with an undisturbed mind”).29
This consideration is impressive. One especially impressive point is that, just as Paul plays on the meaning of Onesimus’s name (”profitable”) when he says to Philemon, “may I have this ’profit’ from you” (v. 20), so apparently does Ignatius when he writes to the Ephesian church, “may I always have ’profit’ from you” (2:2).30
All this does not demonstrate the identity of the two Onesimi; it could simply be that the name of the bishop of Ephesus reminded Ignatius of the Onesimus whom Paul befriended.31 As the earlier Onesimus, formerly unprofitable, was henceforth going to be as profitable as his name promised,32 so Onesimus of Ephesus was eminently worthy of that “well-loved name.”33 But the identification is not impossible; one might go farther and say that it is not improbable. We have no idea how old Paul’s Onesimus was when he wrote about him; but a young man in his later teens or early twenties at that time would be about seventy by the time of Ignatius’s martyrdom—not an incredible age for a bishop in those days.
Knox then ventures farther in his reconstruction of the situation. If (as the Goodspeed school held) Ephesus was the place where the Pauline corpus was first published, early in the second century, then the Onesimus of Ignatius’s letter was bishop of Ephesus around that time and must have had some responsibility with regard to the editing of the corpus. Why should he not have been the editor himself? If so, we need look no farther for the reason for the careful preservation of the letter to Philemon and its inclusion in the published corpus of Paul’s letters. But if Onesimus was editor of the corpus, then (according to the Goodspeed school) he would have been author of the canonical letter to the Ephesians. If that were so, Paul accomplished something more wonderful than he could have realized the day he won Onesimus to faith in Christ!
But the Goodspeed line has not found wide acceptance.34 For those who are unable to follow it, Knox’s reconstruction has more of fancy than of fact about it. Yet the preservation and canonization of this private letter must be explained. To Onesimus the letter was his charter of liberty. That Onesimus did become bishop of Ephesus is not improbable. If so, then, wherever and by whomsoever the Pauline corpus was first compiled and published, Onesimus could scarcely fail to get to know about it, and would make sure that his Pauline letter found a place in the collection.