Scot McKnight commentary on Philemon: cooler than the new phone book

I am so glad Scot McKnight's commentary on Philemon is out.

This is such good news that I feel like doing this:

McKnight  inaugurated the release with a  helpful post:

10 Reasons Your Church Needs Philemon

Here's a random reason that rocks (Click to see the rest):

9: An example of how to read a book in the Bible.

Philemon can be used to help people learn how to read a whole Bible book. Move then to a letter of John or to Jude or then to a shorter book like Philippians or Galatians then finally to Romans and Corinthians. Perhaps then on to a Gospel.

Reading each line in light of the whole book is possible for Philemon and it’s a good starting point for inductive Bible study methods. Also for historical context (study Roman slavery) and also for Paul’s house church movement of how they learned to live as Christians in an old institution: the house, the home, the family.  link

Bonus: video of him at Asbury (amazing school, my MDiv)

"The Challenge to Philemon" - Dr. Scot McKnight from B.L. Fisher Library on Vimeo.

Also here's a video (audio, actually):

interpretations of Philemon

A chapter in

Onesimus Our Brother: Reading Religion, Race, and Culture in Philemon:

"No Longer as a Slave”L Reading the Interpretation Histor yof Paul’s Epistle to PhilemonDemetrius K. William

Marvin Snurdly, the clipboard approach, and Bible as jigsaw puzzle

Below is an excerpt from  "RE-APPROACHING THE NEW TESTAMENT: THE BIBLE IS NOT A JIGSAW PUZZLE", Chapter 11 of Pagan Christianity by Frank Viola and George Barna.   Used by permission.  Link to PDF. Link to buy the book
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“In handling the subject of ministry in the New Testament it is essential to remember the order in which the books of the New Testament were written. If we assume, as the order in which the books of the New Testament are now presented would lead us to assume, that the Gospels were written first, and then Acts and then the letters of Paul, beginning with Romans and ending with the Pastoral Epistles to Timothy to Titus and the Letter to Philemon, we shall never be able to understand the development of the institutions and the thought of the early church.” —RICHARD HANSON, TWENTIETH-CENTURY PATRISTIC SCHOLAR 

“In the last 50 or 100 years New Testament research has unremittingly and successfully addressed itself to the task of elucidating for us what was known as the „Ecclesia‟in primitive Christianity—so very different from what is to-day called the church both in Roman and  Protestant camps. . . . This insight—which an unprejudiced study of the New Testament and the crying need of the church have helped us to reach—may be expressed as follows: the New Testament Ecclesia,‟ the fellowship of Jesus Christ, is a pure communion of persons and has nothing to do with the character of an institution about it; it is therefore misleading to identify any single one of the historically developed churches, which are all marked by an institutional character, with the true Christian communion.” —EMIL BRUNNER, TWENTIETH-CENTURY SWISS THEOLOGIAN


WHY IS IT THAT WE CHRISTIANS can follow the same rituals every Sunday without ever noticing that they are at odds with the New Testament? The incredible power of tradition has something to do with it. As we have seen, the church has often been influenced by the surrounding culture, seemingly unaware of its negative effects. At other times, it has, quite properly, recognized overt threats—such as heretical teachings about the person and divinity of Jesus Christ. But in an effort to combat those threats, it has moved away from the organic structure that God wrote into the church’s DNA.

But there is something else—something more fundamental that most Christians are completely unaware of. It concerns our New Testament. The problem is not in what the New Testament says. The problem is in how we approach it.

The approach most commonly used among contemporary Christians when studying the Bible is called ―proof texting. The origin of proof texting goes back to the late 1590s.

A group of men called Protestant scholastics took the teachings of the Reformers and systematized them according to the rules of Aristotelian logic.The Protestant scholastics held that not only is the Scripture the Word of God, but every part of it is the Word of God in and of itself—irrespective of context. This set the stage for the idea that if we lift a verse out of the Bible, it is true in its own right and can be used to prove a doctrine or a practice. When John Nelson Darby emerged in the mid-1800s, he built a theology based on this approach. Darby raised proof texting to an art form. In fact, it was Darby who gave fundamentalist and evangelical Christians a good deal of their presently accepted teachings.3 All of them are built on the proof-texting method. Proof texting, then, became the common way that we contemporary Christians approach the Bible. As a result, we Christians rarely, if ever, get to see the New Testament as a whole. Rather, we are served up a dish of fragmented thoughts that are drawn together by means of fallen human logic. The fruit of this approach is that we have strayed far afield from the principles of the New Testament church. Yet we still believe we are being biblical. Allow us to illustrate the problem with a fictitious story.

MEET MARVIN SNURDLY :
Marvin Snurdly is a world-renowned marital counselor. In his twenty-year career as a marriage therapist, Marvin has counseled thousands of troubled couples. He has an Internet presence. Each day hundreds of couples write letters to Marvin about their marital sob stories. The letters come from all over the globe. And Marvin answers them all.

A hundred years pass, and Marvin Snurdly is resting peacefully in his grave. He has a great-great-grandson named Fielding Melish. Fielding decides to recover the lost letters of his great great grandfather. But Fielding can find only thirteen of Marvin’s letters. Out of the thousands of letters that Marvin wrote in his lifetime, just thirteen have survived! Nine were written to couples in marital crisis. Four were written to individual spouses.

 These letters were all written within a twenty-year time frame: from 1980 to 2000. Fielding Melish plans to compile these letters into a volume. But there is something interesting about the way Marvin wrote his letters that makes Fielding’s task somewhat difficult.

First, Marvin had an annoying habit of never dating his letters. No days, months, or years appear on any of the thirteen letters. Second, the letters only portray half the conversation. The initial letters written to Marvin that provoked his responses no longer exist. Consequently, the only way to understand the backdrop of each of Marvin’s letters is by reconstructing the marital situation from Marvin’s response.

 Each letter was written at a different time, to people in a different culture, about a different problem. For example, in 1985, Marvin wrote a letter to Paul and Sally from Virginia, who were experiencing sexual problems early in their marriage. In 1990, Marvin wrote a letter to Jethro and Matilda from Australia, who were having problems with their children. In 1995, Marvin wrote a letter to a wife from Mexico who was experiencing a midlife crisis. Unfortunately, Fielding has no way of knowing when the letters were written.

Take note: twenty years—thirteen letters—all written to different people at different times in different cultures—all experiencing different problems.

 It is Fielding Melish’s desire to put these thirteen letters in chronological order. But without the dates, he cannot do this. So Fielding puts them in the order of descending length. That is, he takes the longest letter that Marvin wrote and puts it first. He puts Marvin’s second longest letter after that. He takes the third longest and puts it third. The compilation ends with the shortest letter that Marvin penned. The thirteen letters are arranged, not chronologically, but by their length.

 The volume hits the presses and becomes an overnight best seller.

 One hundred years pass, and The Collected Works of Marvin Smurdly  compiled by Fielding Melish stands the test of time. The work is still very popular. Another one hundred years pass, and this volume is being used copiously throughout the Western world. The book is translated into dozens of languages. Marriage counselors quote it left and right. Universities employ it in their sociology classes. It is so widely used that someone gets a bright idea on how to make the volume easier to quote and handle.

 What is that idea? It is to divide Marvin’s letters into chapters and numbered sentences (or verses). So chapters and verses are added to The Collected Works of Marvin Snurdly.

 But by adding chapter and verse to these once living letters, something changes that goes unnoticed. The letters lose their personal touch. Instead, they take on the texture of a manual.

Different sociologists begin writing books about marriage and the family. Their main source? The Collected Works of Marvin Snurdly. Pick up any book in the twenty-fourth century on the subject of marriage, and you will find the author quoting chapters and verses from Marvin’s letters.

 It usually looks like this: In making a particular point, an author will quote a verse from Marvin’s letter written to Paul and Sally. The author will then lift another verse from the letter written to Jethro and Matilda. He will extract another verse from another letter. Then he will sew these three verses together and upon them he will build his particular marital philosophy.

Virtually every sociologist and marital therapist that authors a book on marriage does the same thing.
 Yet the irony is this: Each of these authors frequently contradicts the others, even though they are all using the same source!

But that is not all. Not only have Marvin’s letters been turned into cold prose when they were originally living, breathing epistles to real people in real places, they have become a weapon in the hands of agenda-driven men. Not a few authors on marriage begin employing isolated proof texts from Marvin’s work to hammer away at those who disagree with their marital philosophy.

 How is this possible? How are all of these sociologists contradicting each other when they are using the exact same source? It is because the letters have been lifted out of their historical context. Each letter has been plucked from its chronological sequence and removed from its real-life setting.

 Put another way, the letters of Marvin Snurdly have been transformed into a series of isolated, disjointed, fragmented sentences—so anyone can lift one sentence from one letter, another sentence from another letter, and then paste them together to create the marital philosophy of his or her choice.

 An amazing story, is it not? Well, here is the punch line. Whether you realize it or not, this is a description of your New Testament!

THE ORDER OF PAUL‟S LETTERS
The New Testament is made up mostly of the apostle Paul’s letters; in fact, he wrote two-thirds of it. He penned thirteen letters in about a twenty-year time span. Nine letters were written to churches in different cultures, at different times, experiencing different problems. Four letters were written to individual Christians. The people who received those letters were also dealing with different issues at different times.

Take note: twenty years—thirteen letters—all written to different people at different times in different cultures—all experiencing different problems.

 In the early second century, someone began to take the letters of Paul and compile them into a volume. The technical term for this volume is ―canon.‖5 Scholars refer to this compiled volume as ―the Pauline canon.‖ The New Testament is essentially this compilation with a few letters added after it, the four Gospels and Acts placed before it, and Revelation tacked on the very end.

 At the time, no one knew when Paul’s letters were written.
Even if they had, it would not have mattered. There was no precedent for alphabetical or chronological ordering. The first-century Greco-Roman world ordered its literature according to decreasing length.

Look at how your New Testament is arranged. What do you find? Paul’s longest letter appears first. It is Romans. First Corinthians is the second longest letter, so it follows Romans. Second Corinthians is the third longest letter. Your New Testament follows this pattern until you come to that tiny little book called Philemon. In 1864, Thomas D. Bernard delivered a series of talks as part of the Bampton Lectures. These lectures were published in 1872 in a book entitled The Progress of Doctrine in the New Testament. In the book, Bernard argued that the present order of Paul’s letters in the New Testament was divinely inspired and commended. This book became very popular among Bible teachers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As a result, virtually every theological text, exegetical text, or biblical commentary written in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries follows the present chaotic order, which blinds us from seeing the entire panoramic view of the New Testament. Canonical criticism is big among seminarians. This is the study of the canon as a unit in order to acquire an overall biblical theology. What is needed today is a theology built, not on the present canon and its misarrangement, but on the chronological narrative of the New Testament church.

 Here is the present order as it appears in your New Testament. The books are arranged according to descending length:

•  Romans
•  1 Corinthians
•  2 Corinthians
•  Galatians 
• Ephesians
•  Philippians
•  Colossians
•  1 Thessalonians
•  2 Thessalonians 
• 1 Timothy
•  2 Timothy
• Titus 
• Philemon

 What, then, is the proper chronological order of these letters? According to the best available scholarship, here is the order in which they were written:

•  Galatians 
• 1 Thessalonians
•  2 Thessalonians 
• 1 Corinthians
•  2 Corinthians 
• Romans
•  Colossians
•  Philemon
•  Ephesians 
• Philippians
•  1 Timothy
•  Titus
•  2 Timothy

 THE ADDITION OF CHAPTERS AND VERSES
In the year 1227, a professor at the Uniof Paris named Stephen Langton added chapters to all the books of the Bible.
 Then in 1551, a printer named Robert Stephanus (sometimes called Robert Estienne) numbered the sentences in all the books of the New Testament.

 According to Stephanus’s son, the verse divisions that his father created do not do service to the sense of the text. Stephanus did not use any consistent method. While riding on horseback from Paris to Lyons, he versified the entire New Testament within Langton’s chapter divisions.

 So verses were born in the pages of holy writ in the year 1551. And since that time God’s people have approached the New Testament with scissors and glue, cutting and pasting isolated, disjointed sentences from different letters, lifting them out of their real-life setting, lashing them together to build floatable doctrines, and then calling it ―the Word of God.

 Seminarians and Bible college students alike are rarely if ever given a panoramic view of the free-flowing story of the early church with the New Testament books arranged in chronological order.  As a result, most Christians are completely out of touch with the social and historical events that lay behind each of the New Testament letters. Instead, they have turned the New Testament into a manual that can be wielded to prove any point. Chopping the Bible up into fragments makes this relatively easy to pull off.

HOW WE APPROACH THE NEW TESTAMENT
We Christians have been taught to approach the Bible on one of eight ways:

• You look for verses that inspire you.
•  Upon finding such verses, you either highlight, memorize, meditate upon, or put them on your refrigerator door.
•   You look for verses that tell you what God has promised so that you can confess it in faith and thereby obligate the Lord to do what you want. 
•  You look for verses that tell you what God commands you to do. 
•  You look for verses that you can quote to scare the devil out of his wits or resist him in the hour of temptation. 
•  You look for verses that will prove your particular doctrine so that you can slice-and-dice your theological sparring partner into biblical ribbons. (Because of the proof-texting method, a vast wasteland of Christianity behaves as if the mere citation of some random, decontextualized verse of Scripture ends all discussion on virtually any subject.) 
•  You look for verses in the Bible to control and/or correct others. 
•  You look for verses that ―preach‖ well and make good sermon material. (This is an ongoing addiction for many who preach and teach.) 
•  You sometimes close your eyes, flip open the Bible randomly, stick your finger on a page, read what the text says, and then take what you have read as a personal ―word‖ from the Lord.

 Now look at this list again. Which of these approaches have you used? Look again: Notice how each is highly individualistic. All of them put you, the individual Christian, at the center. Each approach ignores the fact that most of the New Testament was written to corporate bodies of people (churches), not to individuals.

But that is not all. Each of these approaches is built on isolated proof texting. Each treats the New Testament like a manual and blinds us to its real message. It is no wonder that we can approvingly nod our heads at paid pastors, the Sunday morning order of worship, sermons, church buildings, religious dress, choirs, worship teams, seminaries, and a passive priesthood—all without wincing.

 We have been taught to approach the Bible like a jigsaw puzzle. Most of us have never been told the entire story that lies behind the letters that Paul, Peter, James, John, and Jude wrote. We have been taught chapters and verses, not the historical context.

 For instance, have you ever been given the story behind Paul’s letter to the Galatians? Before nodding, see if you can answer these questions off the top of your head: Who were the Galatians? What were their issues? When and why did Paul write to them? What happened just before Paul penned his Galatian treatise? Where was he when he wrote it? What provoked him to write the letter? And where in Acts do you find the historical context for this letter? All of these background matters are indispensable for understanding what our New Testament is about. Without them, we simply cannot understand the Bible clearly or properly.

One scholar put it this way, ―The arrangement of the letters of Paul in the New Testament is in general that of their length. When we rearrange them into their chronological order, fitting them as far as possible into their life-setting within the record of the Acts of the Apostles, they begin to yield up more of their treasure; they become self-explanatory, to a greater extent than when this background  is ignored.

Another writes, "If future editions [of the New Testament] want to aid rather than hinder a reader’s understanding of the New Testament, it should be realized that the time is ripe to cause both the verse and chapter divisions to disappear from the text and to be put on the margin in as inconspicuous a place as possible. Every effort must be made to print the text in a way which makes it possible. Some of us have been taught a little about the historical background of the Bible. But it isjust enough to inoculate usfrom searching further and getting the whole story. for the units which the author himself had in mind to become apparent."

You could call our method of studying the New Testament the "clipboard approach." If you are familiar with computers, you are aware of the clipboard component. If you happen to be in a word processor, you may cut and paste a piece of text via the clipboard. The clipboard allows you to cut a sentence from one document and paste it into another.

 Pastors, seminarians, and laymen alike have been conditioned by the clipboard approach when studying the Bible. This is how we justify our man-made, encased traditions and pass them off as biblical. It is why we routinely miss what the early church was like whenever we open up our New Testaments. We see verses. We do not see the whole picture. This approach is still alive and well today, not only in institutional churches but in house churches as well. Let me use another illustration to show how easily anyone can fall into it—and the harmful effects it can have.

The above is an excerpt from Chapter 11 of Pagan Christianity by Frank Viola and George Barna.   Used by permission.  Link to PDF. Link to buy the book

--
Related:

Sweet and McLaren: Versus Verses and Verse-itis

A Bible without verses

σπλάγχνα in Philemon: getting to the guts

Rob Plummer video:

Philemon.mp4 from Daily Dose of Greek on Vimeo.

Paul asks Philemon to "illegally" welcome Onesimus

In two places, Shane Claiborne suggests  Paul asks Philemon to engage in civil disobedience by "illegally" welcoming Onesimus:

 "...we find that Paul offered a biting critique of power and a creative path of revolutionary love. We might remember Paul urging his friend Philemon to illegally welcome back home a fugitive slave, Onesimus, as a brother, instead of killing him for running away. This is a scandalous subversion of Roman hierarchy. Paul was just as radical as Jesus. Remember that the Paul who "be subject to the authorities" is the same Paul who was stoned, exiled, jailed, and beaten for subverting the authorities... Is it possible to submit and to subvert? Paul's life gives a clear yes, as does Jesus' crucifixion" (Jesus For President, 161).


Paul's letter to Philemon was written to urge a former slave owner to illegally welcome back a fugitive slave (Onesimus)—a crime punishable by death—not as a slave but as a brother-Follow Me to Freedom, p. 134 (hear Ken and I interview Shane about this book here)

N.T. Wright video: Why begin with Philemon? It's "pressing your nose against the window to see the landscape"

Philemon:"full of inside jokes.. the most fun anyone ever had writing while incarcerated..Paul's most absurd paradoxes"

Sarah Ruden, in Paul Among the People (Amazon here; 
Christianity Today article and interview here)  spends some time in the preface; as well as most of Chapter 6, on Philemon.  A worthy read! (Sorry about the formatting below, click the links for a cleaner read; see also Philemon: full of humor?
and THESES ON PHILEMON: REDUCTION OF SEDUCTION)


From the preface:

The letter to Philemon...is full of inside jokes and high-as-a-kite invocations of the transcendent...Paul joyfully mocks the notion that any person placing himself in the hands of God can be limited or degraded in any way that matters.  The letter must represent the most fun anyone ever had writing while incarcerated.

The letter to Philemon may the most explicit demonstration of how, more than anyone else, Paul created the western individual human being, unconditionally precious to God and therefore entitled to the consideration of other human beings.  -page xix, preface, read the whole preface here

From Chapter 6:

But bare forgiveness was radical enough, especially in the main territory of Paul's mission

But bare forgiveness was radical enough, especially in the

main territory of Paul’s mission. There, forgiving a runaway

slave (particularly a runaway who had taken goods with him,

as Onesimus may have done), instead of sending him to hard

labor, branding him, crucifying him, or whipping him to

death, was no small matter, when he had so shockingly

betrayed his household (familia in Latin, from which we have

the obvious derivative). Running away and its punishments

are the stuff of black comedy. The ancients treated such

episodes almost the way we treat sex acts: the details are too

shameful for mainstream literature or polite conversation.

For the Romans as for us, a single-word insult—for them

“runaway”—could invoke adequate disgust on its own.

To show the extremity of what Paul faced in having a run-

away slave land in his lap, I will start with a scene in

Petronius. Imagine what the apostle got used to in the estab-

lished Greco-Roman society he experienced, as when he was

staying with a man wealthy enough to have a guest room, as

Philemon did. Petronius’s story of Trimalchio’s dinner party

is exaggerated and absurd, but the narrator Encolpius pro-

vides the voice of cultured common sense among all of the

pretentious uproar. From him we know that it was good form

for the master to order severe punishment for slaves even in

the case of carelessness and accidents that in any way marred

hospitality. It was also apparently polite for the guests to

intervene, in the spirit of “Oh, no, not on my behalf, please!"..

...To be seen and never heard was not the universal rule.

Some slaves gained status in households and entered into

close relationships with their masters. Cicero’s secretary Tiro

is an example. Some masters, like Seneca, vaunted their

humanity toward slaves. But I submit that slaves were like

pets: good treatment of them was about the masters’ enlight-

enment, never about the slaves’ inherent equality. The mas-

ter was absolutely entitled to keep a slave in line, according

to his own convenience.

....The most subhuman slave was the runaway; his only ties

to society had been the uses that real people could make of

him, and he now forfeited these ties. He was a little like a

raped or adulterous woman, but unlike her he bore all of the

loathing and fury, in this case the extreme loathing and fury

that come when absolute privilege is disappointed.

As a rule, a runaway was simply a lost cause: a far-out out-

law as long as he could sustain it, and a tortured animal or a

carcass when caught. Here is a rare detailed depiction. In

Petronius, characters masquerade as caught runaways after

they realize they have a choice between being recognized and

killed, and becoming objects whose repulsiveness will bar

any other impression from onlookers’ minds. They shave

their heads as part of the disguise, and even after this act has

been reported to the owner of the ship on which they are sail-

ing—haircutting at sea was considered a bad omen—and

they must stand in the middle of an angry crowd that

includes their longtime enemies, their protector still hopes

that their role of degradation will shield their identity..

...Again, who a runaway was—nobody and nothing—tells

us who a slave was: nobody and nothing aside from his use-

fulness. And Aristotle and others indicate that he is inher-

ently that. This is what makes the debate over the letter to

Philemon, concentrating on the question of legal freedom, so

silly. We are not in the ancient Near East, where the people

who were slaves in Egypt become masters in Canaan. Such a

change was not conceivable in the polytheistic Roman

Empire. Had Philemon freed Onesimus, it would not have

turned Onesimus into a full human being. That is what Paul

wants, so he does not ask for the tool that won’t achieve it..

....But as I wrote above, Paul had a much more ambitious

plan than making Onesimus legally free. He wanted to make

him into a human being, and he had a paradigm. As God

chose and loved and guided the Israelites, he had now chosen

and loved and could guide everyone. The grace of God could

make what was subhuman into what was more than human.

It was just a question of knowing it and letting it happen.

The way Paul makes the point in his letter to Philemon is

beyond ingenious. He equates Onesimus with a son and a

brother. He turns what Greco-Roman society saw as the fun-

damental, insurmountable differences between a slave and

his master into an immense joke.

This chapter and previous ones have given some idea of

who the most and the least replaceable people were in the

eyes of the Greeks and Romans. I just want to stress again

how crucial the relationship was between freeborn fathers

and their legitimate sons, and between full freeborn brothers.

Along with the misconstruing of ancient slavery, a huge bar-

rier to modern readers’ getting Philemon is that we can’t,

just from our own experience, see fatherhood and brother-

hood as sacred—they have not been so for hundreds of years..

...Brothers also played important roles in the Greek and

Roman social systems. They were supposed to have close bondsof trust and affection, which were idealized in myth and his-

tory. The archetypal brothers were the gods Castor and

Pollux. In one version of their story, the immortal brother

refuses to accept the death of the mortal one and extracts

from Zeus permission to sacrifice part of his own godhead so

that the two can remain together: they now spend alternate

days on Olympus and in the underworld. In another ending,

they become a constellation, the Twins, or Gemini.

In Roman thinking, the legendary first king Romulus’s

killing of his brother, Remus, was almost like original sin, a

presage of the heinous “fraternal slaughter” in the civil wars:

Romans, people of the same blood, essentially of the same

clan, tragically echoed Romulus’s crime.

Since there was no rule of primogeniture (by which the

eldest son gets most or all of the inheritance) among either

the Greeks or the Romans, brothers were on a fairly equal

footing and were expected to collaborate constantly for the

good of the family. “Brother” could be a metaphor for other

close and equal relationships, but Greeks and Romans never

used the term to create

a sense of closeness and equality out of

division. Christians did, which at the start would have

seemed bizarre. Imagine the impropriety of calling every-

body at an open religious gathering “husbands and wives.” In

fact, a rumor that did much damage to the early church was

that the meetings of “brothers and sisters” involved incest.

A slave was a son of no one. No man could claim him as a child,

and no slave could make a claim on any man as his father. He

could never be sure who his full biological siblings were—

not that, officially, it mattered. But Paul unites all of these

categories in writing of Onesimus, in the most thoroughgo-

ing, absurd set of paradoxes in all of his letters:

1.

1.

Onesimus, though a slave, is Paul’s acknowledged son.

2.

Onesimus, though an adult, has just been born.

3.

Paul, though a prisoner, has begotten a son.

4.

Paul, though physically helpless, is full of joy and

confidence.

5.

Paul is ecstatic to have begotten a runaway slave.

6.

It is a sacrifice for Paul to send Onesimus back: he self-

ishly wants the services of this runaway slave for him-

self; conversely, he gives away his beloved newborn son.

7.

Paul has wanted Onesimus to remain with him in place

of Philemon, as if a runaway slave could be as much

use to him, and in the same capacities, as the slave’s

master.

8.

Onesimus’s flight must result not in punishment but in

promotion to brotherhood with his master.

9.

Onesimus (“Profitable”) was perhaps unprofitable when

treated as a slave and certainly unprofitable as a run-

away, but will be profitable when treated as a beloved

brother.

10.

Onesimus will be profitable not only to his master but

even to Paul.

11.

Onesimus, a runaway slave, must be treated as having

the same value as Paul himself.

nobody here but us bondsmen ·

12.

Paul promises emphatically to pay any monetary dam-

ages, but Philemon will (the reader senses) not take

him up on this.

13.

Philemon will acknowledge and act on all of this of

his own free will, not needing any direct command

or explanation from Paul for this rather devastating-

looking set of policies.

14.

Paul is confident that Philemon will do even more

than he asks, but what is he asking? For Philemon to

make Onesimus his brother in practical terms is

impossible; even if Philemon took the dizzying step of

making him an heir, he could not share with him his

own privileges as a freeborn person (assuming he is

one)—laws forbid it. But even as a figure of speech or

an ideal, what does “brother” mean? It is as if Paul were

writing, “I’m thinking of a big,

big

number. Guesswhat it is!”

Paul may also be parodying letters of recommendation.

*

Such letters of Cicero have a similar fulsomeness, and a sim-

ilar confident self-mockery as does the letter to Philemon. A

com mon come-on is along the lines of “I’m ridiculously excited

about this person, but of course you’ll indulge me because of

the valuable relationship between ourselves.” Cicero, like

Paul, takes the whole responsibility and promises wonderful

benefits. But Cicero’s letters of recommendation either ask

for specific things or are about people who will ably figure

out on their own what to do with a new connection. And

Cicero always stresses the personal merits of the subject:

*

(He plays explicitly on the idea of “Letters of recommendation” in

2Corinthians 3:1)

...Imagine, in this tradition, a prisoner writing on behalf of

a runaway slave and perhaps a thief, who may have no per-

sonal merits whatsoever or may just now be starting to show

some, and who could not normally find hope in anything but

pleas for mercy on his behalf from a man of material power

and influence with whom he has taken shelter. “Comic inver-

sion” just doesn’t cover what is going on in this letter. In

worldly terms, it is like a janitor throwing a party for his dog

and inviting a federal judge.

The solution, the punch line of the joke that is the letter

to Philemon, the climax of this farce, is God. God alone has

the power to make a runaway slave a son and brother, and in

fact to make any mess work out for the good—not that any-

one knows how, but it doesn’t matter. Philemon has only to

surrender to the grace, peace, love, and faith the letter urges,

and the miracle will happen. Paul seems to insist that it is

happening even as he prays for it, and he is goofy with joy:

Philemon cannot say no to him, because God cannot say no.
   -pp. 164-167, whole chapter on PDF here

THESES ON PHILEMON: REDUCTION OF SEDUCTION

                     "They carried the word ‘brotherhood’ always in the mouth, while they founded terror regimes."

                                                                          - Hannah Arendt, Uber die Revolution, pp. 21; 318

PHILEMON REVISITED, PART ONE

THESES ON PHILEMON: REDUCTION OF SEDUCTION

“My theme is seduction, resistance, and the cultural consequences of both.”

That provocative opening line (p.1) of Henry Abelove’s monograph on John Wesley, The Evangelist of Desire, has always elicited from me a smile, as well as a healthy respect for its accurate prediction of the flow of his paper.

In a sense, Abelove’s salvo serves just as fittingly for the thematic intent of this current article, and in turn for the topic of the article itself: the biblical book of Philemon.

My working assumption is that Paul’s quietly subversive letter to Philemon--partly because its “theme is seduction, resistance, and the cultural consequences of both” --may well be the interpretive key and even  kerygma-in-microcosm  of the entire Pauline corpus, theology and worldview.

I do not view this claim as hyperbolic  hubris; though I certainly concede that it is quite a supposition for a book that  for most Christians is barely acknowledged and rarely read; and per many scholars is not  sufficiently lengthy, meaty, or  “theological’ (!)  to merit such a distinguished and distinctive role in the canon.

 If churchgoers have heard anything about this shortest letter of the New Testament, it is likely the “radio orthodoxy” (Brian McLaren’s delightful phrase) view that it is “about” Philemon’s runaway slave, and Paul’s encouragement that Philemon forgive said slave.

That party line may be partly right…and in the end, largely wrong. 

If congregants have seriously studied the text beyond downloaded sermons and popular literature, they may have even run into Callahan’s alternative view (Callahan, 1997) that Philemon’s supposed slave Onesimus was not a slave at all, but literal brother to Philemon.

That take may be half-right; perhaps even dead wrong.

Philemon:  Key and Keynote

Though it sounds counterintuitive to proffer that this tiny epistle holds the veritable key to all of Paul (among the more “obvious” candidates are the majestic narrative of Romans or the comprehensive compendium that is Ephesians), I am at least in good company:  F.F. Bruce (1983), Marcus Bath (2000), and N.T. Wright (2013), to varying degrees and from differing angles, unashamedly assert the same.

Philemon : A Tale of Two Brothers

Though it may appear contrarian and contrary to accepted logic to offer that this letter is actually about a call for two brothers-by-blood to reconcile,   there is no more obvious way to read verse 17 with grammatical and contextual integrity.  Some (Callahan et al) are convinced that in Philemon, the slavery is metaphorical (not the brotherhood, as almost universally assumed), and the brotherhood is literal (not the slavery, as usually assumed).  A surprisingly compelling case for this interpretation can be made; but more likely is the scenario that Philemon and Onesimus are both master/slave and brother/brother. Exegetes as astute as F.F .Bruce (not convinced) and Timothy Gombis (convinced) have weighed in here.

Philemon: Call to Manumission

Though it may feel a stretch for the historical milieu for Paul to be advocating release from slavery (manumission) for Onesimus, I make the case that Paul was prescient and prophetic enough to do just that…albeit between the lines… yet in a way clear and clamant for Philemon to decode and decide upon.

“Forgiveness, Radford Reuther suggests (in Pinnock, p, 205) “is not simply a transaction between God and the individual soul that has come to recognize its sinfulness. Politically interpreted, forgiveness means concrete acts of repentance expressed through social struggle to overcome oppression and to create a more just world.” 

As for the “seduction, resistance, cultural consequences of both”?

Paul’s cruciform-shaped approach to leadership, status and power issues necessitates that any correspondence by him inevitably both incarnates (especially in a delightfully intentional choice of literary style  and rhetorical genre) and advocates (via a surprisingly subtle-sneaky  narrative arc) a radically Christocentric and stubbornly kenotic refusal to submit to the seduction of seeing a brother or sister in Christ (let alone sister or brother “in the flesh”) as “the other” or  in any way less important than self.    The cultural consequences--not just for ecclesiology, but for sociological issues such as slavery—are thus significant and sweeping.  “History,” as Walter Wink would have it, “belongs to the intercessors.” 

Bottom line, then?  What is Philemon “about”?

 Paul is writing to Philemon, about Philemon’s fugitive slave Onesimus, who is also  Philemon’s half brother;  he is arguing for unconditional restoration of Onesimus , which includes the “even more than I ask”  release from slavery.  This is all embedded with profound implications for subversion of empire and dismantling of ecclesiological hierarchy. 

In this series of articles, we shall eventually weave all these theses into a tapestry and “contexture” with we believe is faithful to an informed hermeneutic.  We begin with the initially confounding issue of Paul’s literary approach.

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THE LITERARY APPROACH OF PAUL:  Humor, Holy Fool, Prosopeion, and ‘Paradigmatic I”

“I could command you, but I appeal to you ought of love”? 

“Any decision you make will be spontaneous and not forced”? 

“Oh, by the way, you owe me your would” 

Paul’s language and literary approach have been much maligned, yet little understood.  He has been read as being (at best) disingenuous and passive-aggressive, or (at worst) sycophantic and manipulative to a degree that borders on messianic complex.   I believe a third way unpacks the dilemma and makes salient sense of the intuitive embarrassment and discomfort we feel overhearing Paul’s appeal.   In a word: humor.   In several words: a mosaic (and not at all prosaic) humor based loosely (?) on the “holy fool”  tradition and rhetorical device of prosopeion; a holy humor laced liberally with a playful but profound twist of (almost) irony and mimetic self-reference.   All of this is of course at great risk, and presupposes a deep, abiding and adamantine trust between sender and recipient.

Is Paul being authoritarian to a fault, all the while claiming the opposite?   No, St. Paul is smarter…and not smarmier… than that.  He is more humble than he has been given credit for; and decidedly not proud of his own humility.  Per McLuhan, his medium masterfully matches—even equals and incarnates—his message.

On humor in Philemon, consider Marcus Barth:

In contrast to the doctrinal style of Romans;  the irony and sarcasm found in Galatians; to the apologetic, wailing, and aggressive passages of Second Corinthians; and to other idiosyncrasies of other letters, in Philemon the use of contrasts is a sign and means of underlying good humor. Humor is, according to Wilhelm Busch, where one laughs, “in spite of it," even in the face of grave situations.

 The mighty apostle of the omnipotent Lord Christ is a prisoner in Roman hands (w. 1, 9-10) and chooses the role of a beggar before Philemon (vv. 8-9). The child Onesimus was created by a father in chains (v. 10), who was, according to some versions of verse 9, an old man! A pun is made on the name Onesimus ("Useful") in verse 11. God's purpose in permitting separation was to establish eternal union (v. 15). Paul and Philemon are business partners, and Onesimus can substitute for Paul by being the third man in the association (v.17) Philemon is much deeper in debt to Paul than the apostle eventually is to the slave  owner (vv 18-19). Paul hopes confidentially that he will benefit from Philemon — not only materially but by finding rest for his troubled heart (v 20)..... Overflowing obedience is the sum of complete voluntariness (v. 21.) A man whose chances for quick release from prison were less than certain invites himself to a private home for the near future (v. 22).  All or at least a part of these elements can be considered, or are, humorous.

It is not certain whether Paul intended this impression, and whether Philemon was capable and willing to appreciate jokes pertaining to his relationship to Onesimus and to Paul. But together with other earliest hearers and readers of PHM, modern readers are by no means prevented from responding with a smile or a chuckle. The dreadfully serious issue of the slave Onesimus's future is treated  lightly — a fact that reminds of the role of slaves in Greek and Latin comedies. Obviously bitterness is neither the only nor the best way of reacting to grave issues. Indeed, Philemon has a hard choice to make, but the decision-making process is sweetened as much as possible — by humor. (Barth and Blanke, 2000, pp. 118-19)

Paul is acting (literally) oddly, but not obsequiously.  He is flirting with a not-quite full-blown  prosopeion, a technique which is definitely in his repertoire and arsenal (see especially Romans 7); it is deployed here even more covertly than the infamous “I know a man..” of 2 Corinthians 13.

His persuasive approach seems   inspired in part by the prophetic tradition’s use of “holy fool, “which Paul directly affirms in   1 Corinthians 4:10.  Later Christian history finds Eastern Orthodoxy creatively adopting this approach, in  yurodivy , "which is caused neither by mistake nor by feeble-mindedness, but is deliberate, irritating, even provocative.” (Ivanov, 2006, p. 211)  St. Francis was clearly another practitioner, as are Malamattiya Sufis.    I make the case that in postmodern pop culture, persons (and personas) such a Stephen Colbert (“Is he a conservative playing a liberal playing a conservative?)” and U2’s Bono (as Screwtape/MacPhisto) have taken up this torch in ways that are in fact helpful in confirming Paul’s modus in Philemon.  These may be all too easily be discounted as leitmotif-lite, but the remarkable theological sentience and skill of both Colbert and Bono betray a wise and profoundly Christian (hence Pauline) mechanism of adapting “holy foolishness.” 

Brian J. Dodd, at length:

Paul uses large blocks of material containing self-portrayal to ground or add weight to his argument (e.g. 1 Corinthians 9; Gal. 1-2; Phil 3)…Occasionally, Paul’s self-portrayal verges on self-praise, creating a social need to employ accepted literary techniques to mitigate the odium and offence of his self-discussion…While Paul often portrays himself as a technique of argumentation, it is striking that he nowhere transgresses the stigma against self-praise except where he also offsets its offence…

 Against the backdrop of Philemon’s watching community, Paul develops a distinction between commanding and appealing, a feature that is not distinctive to Philemon.  He exploits his right ‘in Christ’ to command (8) only in order to contrast it with his loving appeal (9-10), while crediting Philemon with the sense to  do what is good and right  (14) .

How then do we understand the ambivalence of Paul’s request, since he repeatedly appeals to Philemon’s volition so he may freely choose the right thing (8-9, 14, 17, 20), all the while allowing the undercurrent of his authority to flow freely (21-22)?  The answer may lie in his implied paradigmatic strategy in the letter.  That is, Paul’s ambivalence itself may exemplify the attitude he wants Philemon to adopt in his reshaped relationship with his slave: as Paul refuses to assert the authority he clearly possesses, Philemon is coached in the responsibilities of his newly reformed relationship with Onesimus.  Paul wants to gain Philemon’s consent so that he will freely do what is good, not by compulsion (v.14). By this example, the seed is sown for a new phase of the master’s relationship with his slave. Paul does not compel Philemon to act, thus patterning for him a new style of interaction with his slave-become-brother Onesimus…

...In Philemon, Paul exhibits self-restraint of his authority by explicitly refusing to command as he appeals to Philemon to forgo freely his grievance with Onesimus.  This display of Paul’s self-limitation of his authority is combined with an example of love and generosity to demonstrate paradigmatically the manner in which Philemon is to treat his slave-who-has-become-a-brother.  Though Philemon has the legal right to be harsh with Onesimus, Paul asks Philemon to grant Onesimus the same loving and generous treatment that he would extend to this elder missionary….Paul’s status as an elder and as Christ’s metaphorical prisoner affirms Paul’s authority in the community in the strongest terms, and his repeated emphasis on his imprisonment creates an emotional receptivity to his appeal as a captatio benevolentiae.  Whether or not Philemon would have or should have taken the letter as a suggestion he manumit Onesimus cannot be ascertained, but it may be implies by v. 21: ‘I am confident of your obedience to the things I write, knowing that you will do more than the things I  have asked.’

Thus, by the time of Philemon Paul’s rhetorical use of self-portrayal has blossomed into a full and intricate flower, and the paradigmatic aspects are difficult to extract from their intrinsic relationship with the other aspects of his nuanced epistolary persuasion.  Philemon is the apex of a literary style that is already evident on Paul’s earliest letter.  (Dodd,

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Partial Bibliography

Abelove, Henry.   The Evangelist of Desire: John Wesley and the Methodists.  Palo Alto: Stanford, 1992.

Barth, Markus and Blanke, Helmut.  The Letter to Philemon (Eerdmans Critical Commentary).  Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000.

Bruce, F.F. The Epistles to the Colossians, to Philemon, and to the Ephesians (New International Commentary on the New Testament).  Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1984.

Callahan, Allen Dwight. Embassy of Onesimus: The Letter of Paul to Philemon (Nt in Context Commentaries) .  Bloomsbury: T and T Clark, 1997

Dodd , Brian J.  Paul's Paradigmatic "I": Personal Example as Literary Strategy (Library of New Testament Studies)   Sheffield: Sheffield Acadmic Press, 1999.

Pinnock, Sarah K., ed. The Theology of Dorothee Soelle.  Harrisburg: Trinity Press, 2003.