HKB
[Sidenote: Character and Contents.]
Philemon had a Phrygian slave named Onesimus, who first {178} robbed him and then ran away. Onesimus was able without much difficulty to get to Rome, and here he met the apostle, who received him into the Church. The young convert served him with such eager willingness that St. Paul would have been glad to keep him with him, but he decides to send him back to Philemon with this letter to ensure his forgiveness.
We have, therefore, in this letter a picture of St. Paul in a new relation. There is no other letter in the New Testament of such a private nature except 3 John. The great apostle of the Gentiles is taking his pen to provide a dishonest runaway slave with a note that shall shield him from the just anger of his master. He writes both with a strong sense of justice and with his own perfect diplomatic instinct. The letter is at once authoritative, confident, and most gentle. He does not command or insist, yet it is quite clear that Philemon must do just what he asks. There is no violent attack upon slavery as an institution. Any such attack would have been both foolish and criminal. For it would have encouraged slaves to make Christianity a cloak for revolt, and precipitated horrors far worse than those which it could have professed to remove. But St. Paul asserts a principle which will eventually prove fatal to slavery. When he tells Philemon to receive Onesimus "as a brother beloved," he is really saying that our estimate of men must not be based on their social class, but rather on their relation to God.
This letter has been compared with a letter written under similar circumstances by the younger Pliny, one of the best of the pagan gentlemen of Rome. But while the letter of Pliny is more elegant in language, the letter of St. Paul is a finer masterpiece of feeling. A Roman slave was still allowed no rights and no family relationship, and for the smallest offence he might be tortured and killed. In the next century the Emperor Hadrian first took away from masters the power of life and death over their slaves, and it was not until the time {179} of the Emperor Constantine, who established Christianity, that the laws affecting slavery pointed to the future triumph of emancipation. But the ancient conception of slavery was doomed as soon as "slave-girls like Blandina in Gaul, or Felicitas in Africa, having won for themselves the crown of martyrdom, were celebrated in the festivals of the Church with honours denied to the most powerful and noblest born of mankind." [1]
ANALYSIS
Salutation from Paul and Timothy to Philemon and Apphia (? wife), to Archippus and the Church in Philemon's house; thanksgiving for Philemon's faith; a plea for the pardon of Onesimus, St. Paul promises to be responsible for what was stolen; a lodging to be prepared for St. Paul; concluding salutations, benediction.
[1] Lightfoot, Colossians and Philemon, p. 325.
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