Twenty-five verses about one man, one slave, and a favour asked without being demanded. It is the shortest thing Paul wrote and the one that has done the most work in arguments about slavery, in both directions.
What the book is
Philemon is a personal letter asking a slave-owner to receive back a slave named Onesimus, who has been with Paul in custody. Paul says he is sending him back, asks that he be received as a brother, offers to pay anything owed, and remarks that he could command but prefers to ask.
It is the only surviving private letter in the Pauline collection, and its inclusion in the canon is itself notable: a note about one household’s domestic problem was kept and copied.
How it is put together
Greeting, thanksgiving, the request, the offer to cover losses, a closing expectation of a visit, greetings from named companions. The rhetorical construction is careful throughout — Paul repeatedly declines to give an order while making the desired outcome unmistakable.
The greetings overlap closely with those in Colossians, and both letters name Onesimus, Archippus, Epaphras, Aristarchus, Demas and Luke. Whatever one concludes about the authorship of Colossians, the two letters are tied to the same situation.
The dating question
Pauline authorship is not disputed by anyone. The letter is too short, too specific and too unhelpful for any doctrinal programme to be a plausible forgery.
It was written from custody, so it shares the location problem of Philippians and Colossians: Ephesus in the mid-fifties CE or Rome in the early sixties. Ephesus has an additional argument here, since a runaway slave travelling roughly a hundred miles from Colossae is a more ordinary event than one crossing the Mediterranean.
What it does and does not say
The letter does not condemn slavery, does not ask for manumission in explicit terms, and does not state a principle. It asks for one man to be received as a brother, and it hints — the phrase about doing more than is asked is the hinge — without specifying.
That silence is why the letter has been cited on both sides of the abolition argument, at length and in earnest, for three centuries. Anyone who reports the letter as settling the question in either direction is reporting something the text does not contain, and this site says so rather than picking a side and calling it exegesis.
The traditional reconstruction — Onesimus as a runaway who happened upon Paul — is not stated in the letter either. Alternatives have been proposed: that he was sent by the household to assist Paul, or that he sought Paul out as a mediator in an existing dispute, a recognised procedure in Roman practice.
Where the external record touches it
Roman law and documentary papyri give a detailed picture of slavery in the period, including the legal position of fugitives, the obligations of those who sheltered them, and the mechanics of manumission. That material is what makes the alternative reconstructions arguable, and it is the main external contribution to reading the letter.
Colossae itself has never been excavated. A letter of Ignatius, from the early second century, names an Onesimus as bishop of Ephesus; whether that is the same man is unknowable and has been argued since antiquity.
Related: Colossians, addressed to the same town and naming the same people.