other · 61 · Rome
Onesimus ran from Colossae, reached Paul in prison somehow, and was converted there. Paul sends him back carrying the note himself — which means Onesimus hands his owner the document that decides what happens to him. The argument in it is careful and strange: Paul says twice that he could command and will not, offers to pay whatever was stolen and writes the IOU in his own hand, calls the slave his own child and his very heart, asks that he be received no longer as a slave but more than a slave, as a beloved brother — and then adds that he is confident of obedience, knowing Philemon will do even more than he says. He never asks for manumission in so many words and never concedes the institution either. The church kept the letter; what it did about it took a great deal longer. Ignatius, writing to Ephesus fifty years on, greets a bishop named Onesimus and plays on the name as this letter does, and whether it is the same man is unknowable and has been argued since antiquity.
To send a runaway slave back to his owner without asking a court to enforce anything.
A letter the church kept, and an argument it then spent eighteen centuries not finishing.