The Letter to Philemon — A Runaway Slave, the Shortest Letter Paul Wrote, and Scripture's Quiet Case Against Slavery

Part of the series: The New Testament Canon—How 27 Books Survived the Ancient Gauntlet

The shortest letter Paul ever wrote is a private note about a runaway slave, and by every worldly measure it should have vanished. It runs to a single chapter of twenty-five verses. It settles no doctrine, refutes no heresy, founds no church. It is a personal favor asked of one man on behalf of another, the kind of letter that in any ordinary life would be read once, folded away, and lost.⁠¹ Instead it became Scripture. A note that Paul dashed off from prison to a Christian named Philemon, asking him to take back the slave who had run away from him, sits in the canon of the New Testament between Titus and Hebrews, read at Mass, expounded by the Fathers, and quoted by the Catechism to condemn the very institution it seems, at first glance, quietly to accept.

That last point is the paradox the letter has never shaken. Here is the one book of the New Testament devoted entirely to a case of slavery—and Paul does not attack slavery. He sends the slave back. He addresses the master as a friend, acknowledges his legal claim, and offers to pay whatever the runaway may owe. And yet, in the same few lines, he asks that Onesimus be received “no longer as a slave but more than a slave, a brother.”⁠² Eighteen centuries later, both sides of the American argument over slavery would quote this letter against each other, each certain that Paul was on its side. He was, and he was not, and understanding why is the work of reading him closely.

This post takes up the little letter whole. It follows the three people in it—Paul the prisoner, Philemon the master, Onesimus the slave—and the extraordinary act of persuasion Paul mounts on the runaway’s behalf; it reads what the letter does and does not say about slavery, and how the Catholic Church came, slowly and unevenly, to read its own Scripture against the institution; it turns to the strange fact that so slight a note was ever thought worthy of the Bible at all, and to the ancient writers who defended it against exactly that charge; and it ends with a hypothesis, fascinating and unprovable, that the runaway slave of this letter grew up to become a bishop—and perhaps the man who saved Paul’s letters for the Church.

Three people and a problem

Everything in the letter turns on three people, and the letter is almost all we know of any of them. Philemon was a Christian of Colossae, well-to-do enough to own at least one slave and to host a congregation in his home—Paul greets “the church at your house.”⁠³ He was Paul’s convert, or at least stood in Paul’s debt for his faith; the apostle will remind him before the letter is done that he owes Paul “your very self.” With him are greeted Apphia, called “our sister” and traditionally taken to be Philemon’s wife, and Archippus, “our fellow soldier,” often thought his son—the same Archippus whom the Letter to the Colossians charges to “fulfill the ministry that you received in the Lord.”⁠⁴

The third person is the reason for the letter. Onesimus was Philemon’s slave, and he had run. The New American Bible, translating the delicate verb Paul uses, calls verse 15—“he was away from you for a while”—“a euphemism for his running away.”⁠⁵ Somewhere in his flight the runaway crossed paths with the imprisoned Paul, was converted, and became so dear to the apostle that Paul calls him “my child … whose father I have become in my imprisonment.”⁠⁶ John Chrysostom, preaching on the letter around the year 400, read the situation with no soft edges: Onesimus was “a runaway, a thief, and a robber,” who had “stolen something from his master” and fled—an inference Chrysostom drew from Paul’s own offer to repay whatever the slave owed.⁠⁷

That reconstruction—a fugitive slave who ran, perhaps after theft, and providentially fell in with Paul—was the near-universal reading of the letter for most of Christian history. It is not the only one now. A number of modern scholars, following a 1985 study by Peter Lampe, argue that Onesimus was not a fugitive at all in the legal sense but a slave in trouble with his master who deliberately sought out Paul as an amicus domini—a “friend of the master”—to broker a reconciliation, a recognized recourse under Roman law that did not make a slave a runaway.⁠⁸ The evidence cuts both ways, and the field is genuinely divided; the older runaway reading is still vigorously defended, and neither view can claim the settled majority. For our purposes the difference matters less than the constant: whatever brought Onesimus to Paul, he arrived a slave and left carrying a letter that would ask his master to see him as something else.

Where Paul wrote it is a second open question. The letter is one of the four “captivity epistles,” written from prison alongside Ephesians, Philippians, and Colossians, with which it shares almost its entire cast of companions.⁠⁹ Tradition placed that prison at Rome, near the end of Paul’s life around A.D. 61–63, and Chrysostom simply assumed it: Onesimus, he says, came to Paul “at Rome.”⁠¹⁰ Many modern scholars prefer an earlier and closer imprisonment at Ephesus in the mid-50s, unrecorded in Acts but easier to square with a runaway slave’s short journey from Colossae and with Paul’s request that Philemon “prepare a guest room” for an imminent visit.⁠¹¹ The traditional Roman setting and the modern Ephesian one are both defensible; a stormbound Caesarean imprisonment is the distant third. The letter does not say, and nothing doctrinal hangs on the answer.

A masterpiece of persuasion

For twenty-five verses, the Letter to Philemon is one of the most artful pieces of persuasion in the New Testament, and its art is worth slowing down for, because every move is calculated to leave Philemon free and yet to make refusal nearly unthinkable.

Paul begins by disarming his own authority. He has, he says, “the full right in Christ to order you to do what is proper”—the Greek word is parrēsia, the bold freedom of speech a citizen claimed before the assembly—and he lays it down at once: “I rather urge you out of love, being as I am, Paul, an old man, and now also a prisoner for Christ Jesus.”⁠¹² The apostle who could command chooses to plead, and to plead as an old man in chains. It is the posture of the whole letter: the prisoner appealing, never the apostle commanding.

Then comes the name. Onesimus (Onēsimos) was a common slave’s name, and it meant “useful” or “beneficial”—the kind of hopeful label masters gave their property. Paul turns it into a small masterpiece of wordplay: the slave “who was once useless to you but is now useful to … you and me.”⁠¹³ Useless, achrēstos; useful, euchrēstos—and the runaway who did not live up to his name when he fled now does. Paul plays the same string once more at the letter’s climax: “Yes, brother, may I profit from you in the Lord”—the verb, onaimēn, is cousin to the very name Onesimus, so that Paul asks Philemon to let the apostle, too, have the “benefit” the slave was named for.⁠¹⁴

The heart of the appeal is a piece of accounting. If Onesimus “has done you any injustice or owes you anything,” Paul writes, “charge it to me,” and then, breaking into the letter in his own hand, “I, Paul, write this in my own hand: I will pay”—technical language, the New American Bible notes, of debt and account-keeping.⁠¹⁵ It is a genuine offer, and it is also a trap sprung with great gentleness, because Paul immediately adds the counter-entry: “May I not tell you that you owe me your very self.” Philemon may hold a claim against his slave; Paul holds a claim against Philemon, and it is the larger one—the man’s own soul. The debt is called in without ever being demanded.

Everything is left, formally, to Philemon’s freedom. Paul says he would have kept Onesimus to serve him but “did not want to do anything without your consent, so that the good you do might not be forced but voluntary.”⁠¹⁶ And then the line that has launched a thousand commentaries: “knowing that you will do even more than I say.”⁠¹⁷ More than what? Paul does not spell it out—and the reticence is the point. He closes by asking Philemon to ready a guest room, because he hopes soon to come in person.⁠¹⁸ The master is left free to decide, under the eyes of the whole church that meets in his house, with the apostle himself about to arrive to see what he chose. It is a letter that commands nothing and leaves almost no room to refuse.

“No longer a slave but a brother”

What, exactly, is Paul asking? On the surface, only that Philemon take back a runaway without the savage punishment Roman law allowed a master to inflict, and receive him kindly. But the letter reaches for something far larger than clemency. Paul asks Philemon to have Onesimus back “forever, no longer as a slave but more than a slave, a brother, beloved especially to me, but even more so to you, as a man and in the Lord.”⁠¹⁹ The phrase “as a man and in the Lord”—literally, “in the flesh and in the Lord”—refuses the easy dodge of a merely spiritual brotherhood. Onesimus is to be a brother in both orders, the earthly household and the heavenly one. Between a master and his slave, in the first century, that is a revolutionary sentence.

And yet Paul does not say the word a modern reader waits for. He never tells Philemon to free Onesimus. The letter contains no command to manumit, no denunciation of the institution, not even an explicit request for the slave’s liberty. What it contains is that open-ended “even more than I say,” and readers have been arguing ever since over what falls into the gap. Most commentators hear in the cumulative pressure of the letter—the brotherhood, the “welcome him as you would me,” the IOU, the “even more”—a broad hint that Philemon should set Onesimus free, and perhaps return him to Paul’s service; others answer that “even more” need mean no more than receiving the slave back without punishment and treating him as a brother, and note that Paul nowhere asks Philemon to free his other slaves or condemns anyone else’s.⁠²⁰

Here is the tension the letter has always carried, and it is worth stating plainly rather than resolving too quickly. On one reading, Paul plants a principle that must, in time, dissolve slavery from within: once master and slave are brothers who greet each other at the same table and the same altar, the word “slave” has been hollowed of its meaning, whatever the civil law still says. On the other reading, Paul accepts the institution as he found it—he returns the runaway, honors the master’s property, works within the system to reform a relationship rather than to abolish a practice. Both readings are honest to the text, and the letter’s later history shows that both were available to be used. What is not in the letter is the thing later centuries most wished to find there: a flat apostolic condemnation of slavery. Paul gives a seed, not a decree. Whether a seed is enough is a question the Church would spend eighteen centuries answering.

Did Paul write it?

With most of the letters in this series, the modern reader’s first question is whether Paul actually wrote them, and the answer is contested. With Philemon, the question is almost beside the point, and the contrast is instructive.

Of the thirteen letters that bear Paul’s name, critical scholarship sets seven apart as beyond serious dispute—Romans, First and Second Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, First Thessalonians, and Philemon. On these there is a near-unanimity that runs across the whole spectrum of scholarship; whatever else is debated, these seven are Paul’s.⁠²¹ Philemon is one of them, and its authenticity is if anything the least assailable of all: it is too short, too particular, too free of doctrine to be worth forging, and its incidental details—a name, a debt, a guest room—read like life rather than invention. The very brevity that made ancient readers doubt whether the letter was worth keeping is, for the modern critic, the strongest guarantee that it is genuine.

So the doubt that hangs over the Pastorals—the letters to Timothy and Titus, which a critical majority assigns to a later hand—does not touch Philemon. That inversion is the key to the letter’s canonical story. For Philemon, the interesting question was never who wrote it. It was why so small a thing belonged in the Bible at all.

Too slight for Scripture?

The first person we know to have kept the Letter to Philemon is a heretic, and the reason he kept it is a small joke of history. Around the year 144, Marcion of Sinope built the first Christian canon out of a shortened Gospel and ten letters of Paul, cutting from the epistles whatever offended his theology. He kept Philemon whole. Tertullian, refuting him near the turn of the third century, could not resist the irony: “To this epistle alone did its brevity avail to protect it against the falsifying hands of Marcion.”⁠²² The letter was too short to be worth mutilating. What made it seem trivial is exactly what preserved it intact.

But triviality was also, for some, a reason to doubt it belonged in Scripture. By the fourth century there were Christians who found the letter beneath the dignity of the Bible—a private note about a single slave, teaching no doctrine, unworthy of an apostle’s inspiration. We know this because the great expositors of the age turned aside to answer them. John Chrysostom opens his homilies on Philemon by stating the objection and demolishing it: “because some say, that it was superfluous that this Epistle should be annexed, since he is making a request about a small matter in behalf of one man, let them learn who make these objections, that they are themselves deserving of very many censures.”⁠²³ Nothing the apostles did, he argues, is too small to profit us; he would gladly know even what they ate and where they walked. From the little letter he draws lesson after lesson—that we must be earnest in small things, that no one, not even a runaway thief of a slave, is beyond redemption—and ends by rounding on the objectors once more: “does any one think it superfluous that this Epistle was inserted? And would not this be extreme folly?”⁠²⁴

Jerome, writing his commentary on the letter around 387, met the same objection and answered it with a principle. Some in his day denied that Paul wrote it, or granted that he did but held that a note about a runaway slave could teach nothing worth an apostle’s pen. Jerome replied that inspiration admits of many degrees; that Paul’s letters everywhere touch the ordinary stuff of life—a cloak left behind at Troas, a traveling companion, a debt—and that to suppose common life stands outside God’s concern is the error of the Manichees, who scorned the flesh and the world. The letter’s very brevity, packed as it is with the beauty of the Gospel, he took to be a mark of inspiration, not an argument against it.⁠²⁵ Theodore of Mopsuestia, the great Antiochene exegete, likewise wrote on Philemon and defended its place, holding that even this small letter yields a lesson for the Church.⁠²⁶ The doubters, tellingly, are anonymous—a “some” whom the Fathers quote only to answer. Every named authority of the age stood on the letter’s side.

The official lists never wavered. The Muratorian Fragment, the oldest surviving catalogue of New Testament books, counts Philemon among Paul’s letters—“one to Philemon, one to Titus, and two to Timothy”—held sacred “for the regulation of ecclesiastical discipline.”⁠²⁷ Eusebius, in the early fourth century, placed Paul’s letters among the acknowledged books without qualification.⁠²⁸ And when Athanasius, in his Festal Letter of 367, gave the first surviving list of exactly the twenty-seven books we now call the New Testament, he named the fourteen letters of Paul in order and closed the roll with the smallest of them: “and lastly, that to Philemon.”⁠²⁹ The synods of Hippo and Carthage, at the century’s end, ratified the same list.⁠³⁰ Whatever a handful of readers thought of its dignity, no council and no canon ever left Philemon out. The manuscript tradition tells the same story of quiet security: the letter is copied among Paul’s from the earliest collections onward, so that even the accident by which Codex Vaticanus breaks off in Hebrews and never reaches it leaves Sinaiticus and the rest to carry it without a gap.⁠³¹

Onesimus the bishop?

Half a century after Paul wrote, another letter passed through the same city of Ephesus, and it too greets a man named Onesimus. Ignatius of Antioch, on his way to martyrdom at Rome around A.D. 107–110, wrote to the Ephesian church in praise of its bishop—“Onesimus, a man of inexpressible love, and your bishop in the flesh”—and, a few lines later, made a small joke on his name that is unmistakably the same joke Paul had made: “May I always have joy of you,” using the very verb, onaimēn, that Paul had punned on in Philemon.⁠³² A bishop of Ephesus named “Useful,” greeted with the same wordplay Paul used for a slave named “Useful,” two generations later and a short journey from Colossae.

The coincidence launched one of the most attractive hypotheses in New Testament scholarship. In 1935 the American scholar John Knox proposed that the runaway slave of Philemon was the same Onesimus who, decades on, became the bishop Ignatius praised—and, further, that this Onesimus was the man who first gathered Paul’s scattered letters into a collection, which would neatly explain how so private a note as Philemon came to be preserved and published among them: a freed slave, now a churchman, would have every reason to keep the letter that had won him his freedom.⁠³³ Knox pressed the case still further, reading a coded plea for the slave’s liberty into the charge given Archippus in Colossians and making Archippus, not Philemon, Onesimus’s real master—but that last step has convinced almost no one, and most scholars keep Philemon as the master the letter plainly addresses.⁠³⁴

How much of this is history? Honesty requires the answer: we cannot know. Onesimus was among the commonest of slave names, and a bishop of Ephesus who bore it around 110 need have no connection to a runaway of the 50s. The identification can be neither proved nor refuted, and it should be held as what it is—a possibility, luminous and unverifiable, not a fact. The gentler part of Knox’s thesis, that a former slave’s devotion to the letter helps explain its survival in the Pauline corpus, is attractive precisely because it fits the paradox we began with: the note that should have been lost was, on this reading, saved by the very man it was written to save. Whether or not the bishop was the slave, the letter did survive, and it survived because the Church, unlike some of its individual readers, never doubted that even this small kindness of Paul’s belonged in the book.

Slavery and the Catholic conscience

We come at last to the hard question the letter forces, and it will not do to answer it with a slogan. Paul returned a slave to his master. Does Scripture, then, sanction slavery? The Catholic Church’s answer has been no—but the Church took a long time and a crooked road to say so plainly, and the honest account of how it read this letter is more instructive than a tidy one.

Begin with where the Church has arrived. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, treating the Seventh Commandment, condemns enslavement in the strongest terms: the commandment “forbids acts or enterprises that for any reason … lead to the enslavement of human beings, to their being bought, sold and exchanged like merchandise, in disregard for their personal dignity.” And to seal the point, the Catechism quotes this very letter: “St. Paul directed a Christian master to treat his Christian slave ‘no longer as a slave but more than a slave, as a beloved brother.’”⁠³⁵ The letter’s own words have become the Church’s proof-text against the thing it seems to tolerate. That is the destination. The road there ran through the Fathers, through some deeply mixed centuries, and only lately into daylight.

The Fathers read the letter as the Church would long read it: not as a charter of abolition but as a summons to transform the relationship from within. Chrysostom is candid about the limits of Paul’s aim. Paul, he says, would not even keep the useful Onesimus for himself without the master’s consent—“we ought not to withdraw slaves from the service of their masters”—and he cites Paul’s own counsel to the Corinthians—“Are you called, being a servant? Care not for it”—which Chrysostom glosses bluntly: “that is, abide in slavery.”⁠³⁶ The historical Chrysostom is no abolitionist. His concern is that the Gospel not be blasphemed as a solvent of the social order, and that the Christian slave display a holiness that shames his pagan master. This is the reading that cuts both ways: it grounds the “leaven from within” account of how Christianity would erode slavery, and it hands the critic his sharpest complaint—that Paul and the Fathers, given the chance, told the slave to stay a slave.

The Church’s own most searching statement of the matter came late, from Leo XIII, and it is worth attending to because it concedes the tension rather than hiding it. In the 1888 encyclical In plurimis, written to the bishops of Brazil as that country abolished slavery, Leo read Philemon exactly as the model of Paul’s method—“the case of St. Paul when he exerted himself in behalf of Onesimus, the fugitive of Philemon”—and then described the Church’s strategy in words that grant the whole difficulty: “she has cut out and destroyed this dreadful curse of slavery … She has deprecated any precipitate action in securing the manumission and liberation of the slaves, because that would have entailed tumults.”⁠³⁷ Gradualism, stated in the Church’s own voice: the leaven works slowly, the loaf is centuries in the rising. Leo grounds the equality of all in Christ on Paul’s own “there is neither bond nor free … for you are all one in Christ Jesus”—the principle Philemon enacts in miniature.⁠³⁸

The gradualism has to be weighed against the record, and the record is genuinely mixed. Against the early condemnations—Eugene IV forbidding the enslavement of the Canary Islanders in 1435, Paul III declaring in 1537 that the peoples of the Americas “are by no means to be deprived of their liberty”—stand papal documents that ran the other way, above all Nicholas V’s Dum Diversas of 1452 and Romanus Pontifex of 1455, which authorized the kings of Portugal to reduce “Saracens, pagans, and other enemies of Christ” to perpetual servitude and helped underwrite the Atlantic trade.⁠³⁹ The unqualified condemnation of slavery as such—not merely of enslaving Christians, or of the trade, but of the institution as an offense against the dignity of the person—crystallized only across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Gregory XVI condemning the slave trade in 1839, Leo XIII the institution in 1888 and 1890, the Second Vatican Council naming slavery among the “infamies” that “insult human dignity,” and the Catechism at last making Philemon’s own “beloved brother” the ground of the prohibition.⁠⁴⁰ This is a real development of doctrine, and it does the Church no credit to pretend the line was ever straight. It was not. It bent toward the freedom the little letter had quietly implied, but it bent slowly.

Nothing shows the letter’s double edge more starkly than what Americans did with it. In the decades before the Civil War, Philemon was a favorite text on both sides. Defenders of slavery pointed to the plain fact that Paul returned a fugitive to his master—proof, they argued, that the apostle accepted the institution and that returning runaways was a Christian duty; the Episcopal bishop John Henry Hopkins was among those who reasoned so, submitting, he said, his own anti-slavery “prejudices” to the authority of Scripture. Abolitionists answered with the letter’s other half—“no longer as a slave … but a beloved brother”—and argued that Paul had emptied the category of slave of its meaning; some, like Albert Barnes, contended the letter’s principles abolished slavery outright, while others held that Paul plainly expected Philemon to free Onesimus.⁠⁴¹ The two sides read the same twenty-five verses and heard opposite commands. That is possible only because the letter really does hold two things at once: a slave sent back, and a brotherhood that makes the sending-back provisional, a way-station on the road to something the letter gestures toward but does not compel.

Behind all of it lies the pre-modern Christian judgment, given its sharpest form by Aquinas: slavery is no part of the natural law considered in itself, for by nature all men are equally free; it belongs rather to the ius gentium, the law of nations, a human arrangement that entered the world with sin.⁠⁴² That judgment left slavery a permitted but never a natural institution—a thing of fallen human custom, not of God’s design—and it was from that seedbed, watered by Philemon’s “beloved brother,” that the later condemnation grew. The seed was in the soil from the beginning. It simply took the Church, like Philemon, a long time to do “even more than I say.”

What the Catholic Church makes of Philemon

Set beside the great doctrinal letters, Philemon looks like a footnote, and for centuries it was treated as one. Yet the Church has never let the little letter fall silent. It keeps its place in the Church’s prayer: in the Sunday cycle it is read on the Twenty-Third Sunday in Ordinary Time, paired—pointedly—with the Gospel in which Jesus tells the crowds that whoever “does not renounce all his possessions” cannot be his disciple, so that the letter about a man asked to give up his claim on another is heard alongside the summons to give up everything.⁠⁴³ It has drawn the Church’s best expositors out of all proportion to its length: Origen wrote a commentary on it, now lost but used by Jerome; Jerome wrote his own; Chrysostom preached three homilies on its twenty-five verses; and Thomas Aquinas lectured through it line by line.⁠⁴⁴

What they found in it is what the Church still finds. The letter is the Gospel worked out in a single hard case—not in the abstract, where principles are easy, but in the concrete, where a real master must decide what to do with a real slave who has wronged him and come home a Christian. Paul does not lecture Philemon on the dignity of man. He asks him to look at one man, Onesimus, and to see a brother where the law and the ledger saw a piece of property. That is how the Gospel actually undoes an evil: not usually by decree from above but by the slow, personal work of teaching one Christian to see another rightly, until the seeing makes the old arrangement unbearable. The Church was slow—shamefully slow, at times—to draw the conclusion the letter implied. But it was this letter, and the verse the Catechism now quotes against slavery, that held the conclusion in trust the whole time.

There is a fittingness, finally, in the shape of the thing. The smallest and most private of Paul’s letters, the one his contemporaries thought too slight for Scripture, turned out to carry a charge that would help topple one of the oldest institutions of the ancient world—and to do it not with a thunderclap but with a name, a debt forgiven, and the quiet, immense request that a slave be received as a brother. The letter should have been lost. Instead it waited in the canon, patient as its author, for the Church to catch up to it.

Further reading

The major critical commentaries treat Philemon closely despite its brevity; for a thorough and accessible one, see Joseph A. Fitzmyer, The Letter to Philemon, Anchor Bible 34C (New York: Doubleday, 2000), and Markus Barth and Helmut Blanke, The Letter to Philemon, Eerdmans Critical Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000). On the amicus domini reading of Onesimus’s flight, the foundational study is Peter Lampe’s 1985 article in the Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft; for a vigorous defense of the older runaway view, see John G. Nordling, “Onesimus Fugitivus: A Defense of the Runaway Slave Hypothesis in Philemon,” in the Journal for the Study of the New Testament. The Onesimus-as-collector thesis is set out in John Knox, Philemon Among the Letters of Paul (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1935; rev. ed. Nashville: Abingdon, 1959). On the letter’s use in the American slavery debate, see the survey by D. F. Tolmie, “How Onesimus Was Heard—Eventually,” in Acta Theologica (2019), and the fuller studies by J. Albert Harrill and John Barclay it cites. For the letter’s place in Paul’s corpus, Raymond E. Brown, An Introduction to the New Testament (New York: Doubleday, 1997); and on the canon, Bruce M. Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development, and Significance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). The Catholic magisterial teaching on slavery is gathered most fully in Leo XIII’s encyclical In plurimis (1888).

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Letter to Philemon about?

It is the shortest letter Paul wrote—a single chapter of twenty-five verses—and it concerns a runaway slave named Onesimus. Onesimus had fled his master, Philemon, a Christian of Colossae in whose house a church met; somewhere in his flight he encountered the imprisoned Paul and was converted. Paul writes to send Onesimus back, but asks Philemon to receive him “no longer as a slave but more than a slave, a brother” (v. 16), and offers to pay any debt the slave owes. The letter is a masterpiece of gentle persuasion, and it has become the New Testament’s central text on slavery and Christian brotherhood.

Does the Letter to Philemon support slavery?

Not in the Catholic reading—though the letter is subtle. Paul returns the runaway rather than harboring him, and he never explicitly commands Philemon to free Onesimus; on that basis defenders of slavery once cited the letter. But Paul also asks that the slave be received as “a beloved brother … both in the flesh and in the Lord,” a brotherhood that empties the master-slave bond of its meaning. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC 2414) actually quotes this verse to condemn enslavement as “a sin against the dignity of persons.” The Church reads the letter as planting the seed of abolition rather than commanding it—while honestly acknowledging that it took the Church itself many centuries, and a mixed record, to condemn slavery outright.

Did Paul really write Philemon?

Yes; this is a rare point of near-total scholarly agreement. Philemon is one of the seven “undisputed” letters (with Romans, First and Second Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, and First Thessalonians) that virtually all critical scholars accept as authentically Paul’s. Its brevity and its unglamorous personal details—a name, a debt, a request for a guest room—are exactly what make forgery implausible. Unlike the disputed Pastoral Epistles, Philemon’s authorship is not seriously questioned. For this letter the real historical puzzle was never who wrote it, but whether so slight and private a note belonged in Scripture at all.

Who was Onesimus?

Onesimus was Philemon’s slave, who ran away and was later converted by Paul in prison. His name (Greek Onēsimos) means “useful” or “beneficial,” and Paul plays on it in the letter (the slave “once useless … now useful,” v. 11). By an attractive but unprovable hypothesis, associated with the scholar John Knox, this Onesimus may have become the bishop Onesimus of Ephesus whom Ignatius of Antioch praises around A.D. 110—and possibly the man who first gathered Paul’s letters into a collection, which would help explain how so private a note survived. Because Onesimus was an extremely common slave name, the identification cannot be proved, but it fits the letter’s strange survival remarkably well.

Why did Paul send Onesimus back to his master?

Under Roman law a runaway slave remained his master’s property, and harboring one exposed the harborer to legal liability; by returning Onesimus with a letter of recommendation, Paul both respected Philemon’s rights and gave the slave the safest possible path home. But the return was not a simple restoration of the old arrangement. Paul asks that Onesimus be received as a brother, not punished as a fugitive, and hints—“knowing that you will do even more than I say” (v. 21)—at something beyond mere pardon. Whether that “even more” means freedom is the letter’s famous open question; Paul leaves the decision, pointedly, to Philemon’s own free choice.

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This post is part of an ongoing series covering every book in the New Testament canon and the early Christian texts that nearly joined them. See the full series at The New Testament Canon—How 27 Books Survived the Ancient Gauntlet.

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Footnotes

1. 1. The Letter to Philemon runs to a single chapter of twenty-five verses and is the shortest of the thirteen letters that bear Paul's name. (The shortest book in the New Testament by word count is the [Third Letter of John](/3-john/); Philemon is the shortest of the Pauline letters.) It is one of the four “captivity” or prison epistles; unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations follow the New American Bible, Revised Edition (hereafter NABRE), bible.usccb.org.

2. 2. Phlm 16 (NABRE). The full clause reads “no longer as a slave but more than a slave, a brother, beloved especially to me, but even more so to you, as a man and in the Lord.”

3. 3. Phlm 1–2 (NABRE). The NABRE note on Phlm 2 observes that “your” in “the church at your house” is singular and “more likely refers to Philemon than to the last one named, Archippus; Philemon is then the owner of the slave Onesimus.” That Philemon lived at Colossae is inferred from Col 4:9, which calls Onesimus “one of you,” i.e., a Colossian; see [The Letter to the Colossians](/epistle-to-the-colossians/).

4. 4. Phlm 2 (NABRE); Col 4:17 (NABRE), bible.usccb.org. Apphia is traditionally identified as Philemon's wife and Archippus as his son, though the letter says only “sister” and “fellow soldier”; the identifications are ancient inferences, not stated in the text. The NABRE note on Phlm 2 records an alternate ancient view that Archippus, not Philemon, was Onesimus's master; see the note on Col 4:17.

5. 5. Phlm 15 (NABRE), with the NABRE note: the verb rendered “was away from” literally means “was separated from,” and the note calls it “a euphemism for his running away.”

6. 6. Phlm 10 (NABRE): “I urge you on behalf of my child Onesimus, whose father I have become in my imprisonment.”

7. 7. John Chrysostom, *Homilies on Philemon*, Argument, in *Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers*, First Series, vol. 13, trans. Philip Schaff (Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1889), newadvent.org: “This excellent man, then, had a certain slave named Onesimus. This Onesimus, having stolen something from his master, had run away. . . . For that he had stolen, hear what he says: ‘If he has wronged you, or owes you anything, I will repay you.’” Chrysostom's inference of theft rests on Phlm 18.

8. 8. The *amicus domini* reading originates with Peter Lampe, “Keine ‘Sklavenflucht’ des Onesimus,” *Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft* 76 (1985): 135–137, drawing on Roman legal texts (esp. *Digest* 21.1.17.4, preserving the jurist Proculus) under which a slave who flees to a friend of his master to seek mediation is not a *fugitivus*. For a defense of the traditional runaway reading against Lampe, see John G. Nordling, “Onesimus *Fugitivus*: A Defense of the Runaway Slave Hypothesis in Philemon,” *Journal for the Study of the New Testament* 41 (1991): 97–119. Scholarship remains genuinely divided; neither reading commands a settled majority.

9. 9. Philemon shares nearly its entire roster of companions with Colossians: compare Phlm 23–24 (Epaphras, Mark, Aristarchus, Demas, Luke) with Col 4:10–14, and note that Onesimus is sent back to Colossae together with Tychicus in Col 4:7–9. Because the Pauline authorship of Colossians is itself disputed while Philemon's is not, the overlap is best treated as Colossians drawing on the genuine Philemon rather than as an independent second witness; see [The Letter to the Colossians](/epistle-to-the-colossians/).

10. 10. Chrysostom, *Homilies on Philemon*, Argument (as in n. 7): “Coming therefore to Paul at Rome, and having found him in prison . . . he there also received Baptism.” The traditional dating places the Roman captivity c. A.D. 61–63 (cf. Acts 28:16, 30).

11. 11. The Ephesian-imprisonment hypothesis (mid-50s) is favored by many modern scholars on the grounds that Colossae lies a short journey from Ephesus, easing the movements of Onesimus and of Paul's planned visit (Phlm 22), and that Paul alludes to affliction in Asia (1 Cor 15:32; 2 Cor 1:8–9) though Acts records no Ephesian imprisonment. See Raymond E. Brown, *An Introduction to the New Testament* (New York: Doubleday, 1997), 502–510. A Caesarean provenance (Acts 23–26) is the least favored of the three.

12. 12. Phlm 8–9 (NABRE). The NABRE note on Phlm 8 explains that “full right” renders *parrēsia*, “often translated ‘boldness,’” connoting “the full franchise of speech . . . the right of a citizen to speak before the body politic.” The NABRE note on Phlm 9 records the conjecture that “old man” (*presbytēs*) should be read as “ambassador” (*presbeutēs*) but calls it “totally without manuscript support.”

13. 13. Phlm 11 (NABRE), with the NABRE note: “Here Paul plays on the name Onesimus, which means ‘useful’ or ‘beneficial.’” The Greek pair is *achrēstos* (“useless”) and *euchrēstos* (“useful”); the *chrēst-* root also sounds like *Christos* (“Christ”).

14. 14. Phlm 20 (NABRE): “Yes, brother, may I profit from you in the Lord.” The NABRE note on Phlm 11 observes that “the verb translated ‘profit’ in Phlm 20”—Greek *onaimēn*, from *oninēmi*—“is cognate” with the name Onesimus. Ignatius of Antioch makes the identical pun on a later Onesimus; see n. 32.

15. 15. Phlm 18–19 (NABRE), with the NABRE note on Phlm 18–19 identifying “charge it to me . . . I will pay” as “technical legal and commercial terms in account keeping and acknowledgment of indebtedness.” The concluding clause reads “May I not tell you that you owe me your very self.”

16. 16. Phlm 13–14 (NABRE).

17. 17. Phlm 21 (NABRE): “With trust in your compliance I write to you, knowing that you will do even more than I say.”

18. 18. Phlm 22 (NABRE): “At the same time prepare a guest room for me, for I hope to be granted to you through your prayers.” The prospect of a personal visit adds quiet pressure to the appeal.

19. 19. Phlm 15–16 (NABRE), with the NABRE note on Phlm 16: “As a man: literally, ‘in the flesh.’ With this and the following phrase, Paul describes the natural and spiritual orders.”

20. 20. The letter contains no explicit request for manumission; the interpretive weight falls on the open-ended “even more than I say” (Phlm 21). A majority of commentators read the letter as hinting that Philemon should free Onesimus (and perhaps return him to Paul's service), while others hold that “even more” may mean only receiving him back without punishment and as a brother. The question cannot be closed from the text alone; see Fitzmyer and Barth-Blanke (Further Reading).

21. 21. On the seven undisputed letters—Romans, 1–2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon—see Brown, *Introduction*, 502–510 (on Philemon) and his general treatment of the Pauline corpus. Philemon's authenticity is essentially uncontested; the modern authorship debate that surrounds the [Pastoral Epistles](/1-timothy/) does not reach it.

22. 22. Tertullian, *Against Marcion* 5.21, in *Ante-Nicene Fathers*, vol. 3, trans. Peter Holmes (Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1885), newadvent.org (chapter head: “The Epistle to Philemon. This Epistle Not Mutilated”): “To this epistle alone did its brevity avail to protect it against the falsifying hands of Marcion. I wonder, however, when he received . . . this letter which was written but to one man, that he rejected the two epistles to Timothy and the one to Titus, which all treat of ecclesiastical discipline.” On Marcion's canon of c. 144, see [The New Testament Canon](/new-testament-canon/) and Bruce M. Metzger, *The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development, and Significance* (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 90–99.

23. 23. Chrysostom, *Homilies on Philemon*, Argument (as in n. 7): “But because some say, that it was superfluous that this Epistle should be annexed, since he is making a request about a small matter in behalf of one man, let them learn who make these objections, that they are themselves deserving of very many censures.”

24. 24. Chrysostom, *Homilies on Philemon*, Argument (as in n. 7): “There being then so many good effects . . . does any one think it superfluous that this Epistle was inserted? And would not this be extreme folly?” The three lessons Chrysostom draws are that “in all things it becomes one to be earnest,” that “we ought not to abandon the race of slaves, even if they have proceeded to extreme wickedness,” and that “we ought not to withdraw slaves from the service of their masters.”

25. 25. Jerome, *Commentary on Philemon*, preface (*Commentariorum in Epistolam ad Philemonem*, Migne, *Patrologia Latina* 26), written c. 387 for Paula and Eustochium. As the editorial summary in *Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers*, Second Series, vol. 6, puts it, the preface is “a defence of the genuineness of the Epistle against those who thought its subject beneath the dignity of inspiration,” arguing that inspiration has “many degrees,” that Paul's letters often touch small affairs of ordinary life (the cloak left at Troas), and that to divide common life from God is the error of the Manichees. English translation in Thomas P. Scheck, *St. Jerome's Commentaries on Galatians, Titus, and Philemon* (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010).

26. 26. Theodore of Mopsuestia included Philemon in his *Commentary on the Minor Epistles of Paul* and defended its canonicity against those who dismissed it as trivial; English translation in Rowan A. Greer, *Theodore of Mopsuestia: The Commentaries on the Minor Epistles of Paul*, Writings from the Greco-Roman World 26 (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2010). Though Theodore rejected several other New Testament books, Philemon was not among them; he, Chrysostom, and Jerome all defended the letter rather than doubting it.

27. 27. The Muratorian Fragment, lines 59–63, in Metzger, *Canon of the New Testament*, 305–307: Paul wrote “out of affection and love one to Philemon, one to Titus, and two to Timothy; and these are held sacred in the esteem of the Church catholic for the regulation of ecclesiastical discipline.”

28. 28. Eusebius, *Ecclesiastical History* 3.3.4–5, in *Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers*, Second Series, vol. 1, trans. Arthur Cushman McGiffert, newadvent.org: “Paul's fourteen epistles are well known and undisputed.” At HE 3.25.2 the epistles of Paul stand among the acknowledged books (*homologoumena*); Philemon is included silently among the fourteen.

29. 29. Athanasius, *Festal Letter* 39 (367), in *Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers*, Second Series, vol. 4, newadvent.org: after listing the Gospels, Acts, and the catholic epistles, Athanasius names “fourteen Epistles of Paul . . . two to Timothy; one to Titus; and lastly, that to Philemon.” This is the earliest surviving list to match the modern twenty-seven-book New Testament exactly.

30. 30. The synods of Hippo (393) and Carthage (397) enumerate “thirteen epistles of the apostle Paul” plus Hebrews; Philemon is included among the thirteen, though not named individually. See Metzger, *Canon of the New Testament*, 237–238, 315.

31. 31. Philemon is transmitted among the Pauline letters in the major uncial codices; Codex Sinaiticus (ℵ, 4th c.) preserves it in full. Codex Vaticanus (B, 4th c.) breaks off in Hebrews (at Heb 9:14) and so, in its original hand, does not reach Philemon—an accident of transmission, not a sign of doubt about the letter.

32. 32. Ignatius of Antioch, *Epistle to the Ephesians* 1, 2, 6, in *Ante-Nicene Fathers*, vol. 1, trans. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, newadvent.org (c. A.D. 107–110): “I received . . . your whole multitude in the name of God, through Onesimus, a man of inexpressible love, and your bishop in the flesh” (ch. 1); “May I always have joy of you” (ch. 2)—the verb *onaimēn*, the same pun Paul makes at Phlm 20 (n. 14).

33. 33. John Knox, *Philemon Among the Letters of Paul* (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1935; rev. ed. Nashville: Abingdon, 1959), building on the corpus-collection thesis of Edgar J. Goodspeed. The proposal that Onesimus gathered and published the Pauline letters—which would explain the preservation of so private a note—attracted a number of scholars; the further identification of the slave with Ignatius's bishop remains a possibility, not a demonstrated fact.

34. 34. Knox read the charge to Archippus in Col 4:17 (“fulfill the ministry that you received”) as a coded appeal to free Onesimus, and made Archippus rather than Philemon the slave's master. The reconstruction has found little support; most scholars take Philemon, the first-named addressee (Phlm 1), as the master, and read Col 4:17 as a charge to a general ministry. The NABRE note on Phlm 2 records the Archippus-as-master view as an alternate opinion.

35. 35. CCC 2414, vatican.va: “The seventh commandment forbids acts or enterprises that for any reason—selfish or ideological, commercial, or totalitarian—lead to the enslavement of human beings, to their being bought, sold and exchanged like merchandise, in disregard for their personal dignity. It is a sin against the dignity of persons and their fundamental rights to reduce them by violence to their productive value or to a source of profit. St. Paul directed a Christian master to treat his Christian slave ‘no longer as a slave but more than a slave, as a beloved brother, . . . both in the flesh and in the Lord.’” The Catechism's own footnote (193) cites Phlm 16.

36. 36. Chrysostom, *Homilies on Philemon*, Argument (as in n. 7): “we ought not to withdraw slaves from the service of their masters”; and, glossing 1 Cor 7:21 (“Are you called, being a servant? Care not for it”), “that is, abide in slavery.” Chrysostom's overriding concern is “that the word of God be not blasphemed” (cf. 1 Tm 6:1) as though Christianity meant “the subversion of everything, masters having their servants taken from them.”

37. 37. Leo XIII, *In plurimis* (5 May 1888), nos. 8–9, vatican.va: “Specially remarkable is the case of St. Paul when he exerted himself in behalf of Onesimus, the fugitive of Philemon” (no. 8, quoting Phlm 12, 18); and “she has cut out and destroyed this dreadful curse of slavery . . . She has deprecated any precipitate action in securing the manumission and liberation of the slaves, because that would have entailed tumults” (no. 9).

38. 38. Leo XIII, *In plurimis*, no. 6 (as in n. 37), quoting Gal 3:26–28: “there is neither Jew, nor Greek; there is neither bond, nor free . . . For you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

39. 39. On the mixed record: Eugene IV's *Sicut dudum* (13 January 1435) forbade the enslavement of the (converting) Canary Islanders under pain of excommunication; Paul III's *Sublimis Deus* (2 June 1537) declared that the peoples of the Americas “are by no means to be deprived of their liberty or the possession of their property . . . nor should they be in any way enslaved.” Against these stand Nicholas V's *Dum Diversas* (18 June 1452) and *Romanus Pontifex* (8 January 1455), which authorized the Portuguese crown to reduce “Saracens, pagans, and other enemies of Christ” to perpetual servitude and helped underwrite the Atlantic slave trade. The papal record on slavery is genuinely mixed before the nineteenth century.

40. 40. Gregory XVI, *In supremo apostolatus* (3 December 1839), condemned the slave trade; Leo XIII, *In plurimis* (1888) and *Catholicae Ecclesiae* (20 November 1890), condemned slavery as opposed to religion and human dignity; the Second Vatican Council, *Gaudium et Spes* 27 (1965), vatican.va, lists “slavery” among the things that, as “whatever insults human dignity . . . are infamies indeed”; and CCC 2414 grounds the prohibition in the dignity of the person, quoting Phlm 16 (n. 35). The condemnation moves, over time, from the trade to the institution to an intrinsic offense against the person—a development of doctrine.

41. 41. On Philemon in the American slavery debate, see D. F. Tolmie, “How Onesimus Was Heard—Eventually,” *Acta Theologica* 39, Supplement 27 (2019): 101–117, and the studies by J. Albert Harrill and John M. G. Barclay cited there. Pro-slavery writers (e.g., Bishop John Henry Hopkins of Vermont) argued that Paul's return of a fugitive sanctioned the institution and the duty of returning runaways; abolitionists countered with Phlm 16 (“no longer as a slave . . . but a beloved brother”), some (e.g., Albert Barnes, *An Inquiry into the Scriptural Views of Slavery*, 1846) arguing the letter's principles abolished slavery, others that Paul expected Onesimus to be freed.

42. 42. Thomas Aquinas, *Summa Theologiae* II-II, q. 57, a. 3, newadvent.org: slavery belongs not to the natural law considered absolutely but to the *ius gentium* (the law of nations), a determination of human reason; by nature all are equally free. Aquinas follows Augustine, *City of God* 19.15, in treating servitude as a consequence of sin rather than of nature. The same Augustine passage is quoted by Leo XIII, *In plurimis*, no. 3.

43. 43. Philemon 9–10, 12–17 is the second reading on the Twenty-Third Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C, paired with Lk 14:25–33 (“anyone of you who does not renounce all his possessions cannot be my disciple”); the letter is also read on Thursday of the Thirty-Second Week in Ordinary Time, Year II (Phlm 7–20). See the Roman Lectionary at bible.usccb.org.

44. 44. Origen's commentary on Philemon is lost but was known to and used by Jerome (see Jerome's preface, n. 25). Chrysostom's three *Homilies on Philemon* are in *Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers*, First Series, vol. 13; Jerome's commentary is in *Patrologia Latina* 26; Thomas Aquinas, *Super Philemonem* (a reported lecture, *reportatio*), is available in translation at aquinas.cc.