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Bible, Actually

Philemon: The Short Letter Both Sides of the Slavery Debate Claimed

Philemon contains just twenty-five verses. Yet this short letter became a battleground in the nineteenth-century American debate over slavery. Defenders of slaveholding and advocates of abolition both appealed to Paul. Understanding how that happened requires attention to what the letter says, what it leaves unsaid, and what later readers brought to it.

A brother returns

Paul writes from imprisonment on behalf of Onesimus, whom he calls his child and his own heart. He sends him to Philemon and asks that he be welcomed as Paul himself would be welcomed. Verse 16 describes the new relationship: “no longer as a slave but more than a slave, a beloved brother.”

The usual reconstruction identifies Onesimus as Philemon’s enslaved household member. Many readers suppose that he had run away; others suggest he sought Paul’s mediation in a dispute. The letter never explicitly calls him a fugitive. Its mention of a possible wrong or debt in verse 18 also does not establish that he stole something. These are reconstructions of a situation to which we have only one side of the correspondence.

Onesimus and Philemon, historiated initial from a medieval illuminated manuscript, British Library A historiated initial from a medieval illuminated manuscript depicting Onesimus returning to Philemon with Paul’s letter · British Library collection · Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons. Image record.

What exactly is Paul requesting?

Paul gives no general program for abolishing slavery. Nor does he issue an unambiguous legal instruction to emancipate Onesimus. He nevertheless asks considerably more than leniency: Philemon must receive Onesimus as a brother, “both in the flesh and in the Lord,” and treat him as he would the apostle.

Scholars disagree about the practical force of that appeal. Scot McKnight’s commentary argues strongly for emancipation as its intended outcome. John M. G. Barclay’s study examines the dilemma that Christian brotherhood creates within slave ownership. These approaches draw attention to the letter’s social demands without turning it into a modern policy document. The question is whether brotherhood requires the legal relationship to end, or radically changes expectations within a relationship Paul does not explicitly dissolve.

Two nineteenth-century readings

Thornton Stringfellow’s A Brief Examination of Scripture Testimony on the Institution of Slavery, in the supplement to its 1850 edition, uses the return of Onesimus to defend slaveholding. For him, Paul’s conduct and lack of an explicit institutional condemnation demonstrate slavery’s compatibility with Christianity.

Albert Barnes reaches a different conclusion in his Notes on the Bible. His comments on Philemon 16 and the concluding reflections after verse 25 argue that the obligations of Christian brotherhood tend toward slavery’s abolition. Where Stringfellow treats Paul’s silence as permission, Barnes emphasizes the implications of Paul’s positive demands.

Neither example settles every historical question about Paul’s intention. Together they expose the importance of the reader’s governing assumptions. They also show why a biblical quotation, by itself, is not evidence that the social arrangement defended by its user is just.

Reading without an easy escape

Slavery’s violence and denial of human freedom should not be minimized. Acknowledging the letter’s interpretive difficulties does not make that moral judgment uncertain. It does, however, keep us from making Paul answer a modern question more explicitly than he did.

For preaching, the strongest starting point is the concrete demand that Philemon welcome a socially vulnerable person as he would Paul himself. The history of this letter asks readers to examine how they handle both the silences and the disruptive demands of Scripture. Didymus Lab brings original-language study and reception history together for that work.

References

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