Freeing Philemon from the “fugitive slave” theory

“The letter to Philemon is to my mind the most intriguing and beguiling of all Paul’s letters, with its teasing historical allusions and its special rhetorical charms,” wrote John Barclay in his 1997 study guide to Philemon. Indeed, Philemon is a text in search of a context. There are, of course, some things that we know about the situa­tion. Paul was in prison. Philemon was a key leader in a house church somewhere in the Lycus Valley in Asia Minor. Onesimus, who was being sent back home from visiting Paul, was Philemon’s slave, returning with a new Christian faith. And it is clear that Paul’s letter is a plea for Philemon and his community to embrace Onesimus warmly, as if welcoming Paul himself. (In fact, Paul was planning a visit of his own after his release.) Beyond these meager details, our knowledge relies on educated guesswork. The scholarly tendency is to fill in the gaps by reconstructing the historical situation.

You might be thinking: Wasn’t Onesi­mus a delinquent slave who turned fugitive and managed to be set straight by Paul? Many readers of Philemon carry that assumption into the text. But you will search in vain if you look for those details in Paul’s letter. It’s common for an error to wedge its way into popular understanding and overwrite the original, or for a detail in a picture that was never there to become fixed in the shared memory. This is called the Mandela Effect, and it seems to be what happened with Philemon.

The fugitive slave scenario is a situational theo­ry that was introduced sometime in the patristic period, took root (partly due to Chrysostom’s support), was legitimated by modern commentaries (especially J. B. Lightfoot), and—voila!—is now treated by many as fact.