Introduction

The Shortest Letter in the Collection

Philemon is the briefest of Paul’s surviving letters, and Theophylact’s commentary on it is correspondingly the shortest in his New Testament work—a single private note, written from prison, asking a slaveholder to receive back a runaway slave. That so slight a letter drew comment from Theophylact at all is worth pausing over, since he wrote no full commentary on every short or occasional piece of early Christian correspondence that survives from the period. What earned Philemon its place beside his commentaries on Paul’s longer epistles is not its length but its substance: in a single page, Paul works out, in miniature and applied to one particular human relationship, the same conviction that runs through his longer letters—that in Christ the old distinctions of the world no longer decide a person’s worth.

A Runaway Received Back as a Brother

The situation is plain from the letter itself. Onesimus, a slave belonging to Philemon, had fled his master—Theophylact does not hesitate to call the flight what it was, an act undertaken with “criminal intent”—and had somehow come into contact with Paul, then a prisoner, who instructed him in the faith and now sends him home with this letter in hand. From the opening line, Theophylact reads Paul’s strategy: rather than open with a command, Paul writes as “a man bound for Jesus Christ”, teaching Philemon by his own example not to be ashamed of a slave who has now, through the Gospel, become a fellow slave of the same Lord. Everything is good, Theophylact observes, for Christ’s sake—even chains, in which Paul himself takes a kind of pride—and the same logic runs through the whole appeal: what looks like loss or disgrace, borne for Christ, becomes something else entirely.

Theophylact draws out Paul’s tact at every turn. Paul does not call Onesimus’s flight a flight, but a “parting”, softening the word so as not to provoke a master already wronged; he even suggests that the parting happened, perhaps, by a providence working toward Philemon’s own good, so that what was lost for an hour might be kept forever. The famous turn of the letter comes when Paul asks Philemon to receive Onesimus back “no longer as a slave, but more than a slave, a beloved brother” (Phlm. 16). Theophylact reads this as the letter’s center of gravity: a single hour’s absence has been repaid, in Christ, with an eternal kinship, and the ordinary categories of master and slave, while not abolished outright, are made to answer to a deeper bond that Paul asks Philemon to recognize and to act on.

Even the letter’s greeting carries this same logic in miniature. Paul addresses it to Philemon and to “the Church in your house”, and Theophylact reads that phrase deliberately: the household church includes, he notes, every believer under Philemon’s roof, slaves not excepted, so that Philemon’s own slaves are called upon to add their voice to the appeal Paul is making on Onesimus’s behalf. And near the letter’s end, when Paul asks Philemon, “let me have benefit of you in the Lord” (Phlm. 20), Theophylact notices the play on Onesimus’s own name—which means, in Greek, “profitable” or “useful”—so that Paul’s request to be given profit answers, almost as a private joke between friends, the runaway slave’s own name and the accusation of uselessness a fugitive might expect to bear.

A Debt Paul Makes His Own

Near the letter’s close, Paul offers, in his own hand, to repay whatever debt or loss Onesimus’s flight had caused: “I, Paul, have written this with my own hand; I will repay it” (Phlm. 19). Theophylact reads real tact even here—Paul does not simply presume on Philemon’s generosity, which might have looked as though he doubted it, but formally offers a bond, and then, in the same breath, reminds Philemon gently that he in fact owes Paul a debt far greater than money: his own self, converted through Paul’s preaching. It is a small, finely made piece of persuasion, and Theophylact reads Paul’s care in composing it as itself a kind of teaching—a model of how to ask a hard thing of a friend without either commanding or demeaning him.

How to Read This Commentary

Philemon rewards a slow reading precisely because it is so short; nearly every clause carries a rhetorical or pastoral point that Theophylact takes the trouble to draw out. The letter’s modesty is genuine rather than merely apparent, and Theophylact does not strain to inflate its importance beyond what it will bear. Read as he reads it, Philemon is proof that the Gospel’s largest claims—about slavery and freedom, about who counts as kin in Christ—can be made, and made persuasively, in the smallest and most personal of settings.