When Onesimus left Rome carrying the personal letter to Philemon, in 64 A.D. or thereabouts, he also carried along with one Tychicus the circular letter to the Colossians. These facts can be found in the postscript to the Epistles, which ought rather to be called simply Letters with advice for the guidance of the Christians.
In the Philemon Letter, I have followed the Weymouth translation, rather than the King James Version, or the Revised Version. In fact, I had read Philemon in the old versions many times before I saw its beauty. Then one day, I happened to read it in Spanish, and the old message in a new language of peculiarly graphic imagery shocked me into a visualization of the picture—the old fighter down and out in chains awaiting death, the slave running to him for safety, and the crippled prisoner pleading for, not his own, but the boy’s freedom. Then, I hunted up the best modern translation I could get—which was Weymouth’s; and the picture struck me as one of the most pathetic and beautiful recorded in the New Testament. No longer I saw Paul as the hunter of heretics, the fanatical convert, the tireless preacher of a new creed, but as a little old man in chains waiting for the headsman’s axe and writing to Timothy: “I am now ready to be offered, and the time of my departure is at hand. I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith.” This was before his second trial. Then there follow the sad brave lines, “Demas hath forsaken me . . . only Luke is with me . . . At my first answer no man stood with me, but all men forsook me . . . the Lord stood with me and strengthened me . . . I was delivered out of the mouth of the lion.” In other words, they could not throw Paul to the wild beasts because he claimed his Roman citizenship; so they slew him with the headsman’s axe.
How do we know Onesimus was a mere boy, when with Paul in Rome? This question will be answered fully in the chapter on John and Apollos. Suffice to say, Rome had such a surplus of slaves from conquest—there were more than 30,000 Jews enslaved after the fall of Jerusalem in 70 A.D.—that only those between the ages of eighteen and thirty were considered of the slightest monetary value. Past thirty, they had either won their freedom in war, in gladiatorial combat, by purchase, or had been “worked out” and relegated to the mines, or the farm plantations, or the galley ships, to die. Onesimus would not have been worth passage money back to Philemon, if he had been old. The value of a slave had fallen to $18 of modern money at this time. Human life was the cheapest and least sacred thing in the world market. Slavery was the dry rot eating away the underpinnings of the Roman Empire; for while, of a population of a million and a half in Rome at this time, a tenth of the people rolled in a luxury undreamed before or since, that tenth lived by sapping the life blood of the slave hordes, who numbered in Rome alone, almost a million of the populace.
The theater and judgment hall at Cæsarea, where Paul pleaded his case before the young Herod rulers, are fully described in Josephus, or in such modern works as have already been mentioned, or in Dr. Taylor’s Paul (1881). The city, itself, was reputed to have a population of 200,000; but it was detested by the Jews and chiefly peopled by Greeks, Phœnicians, Romans, and the riff-raff of Rome’s Asiatic world. Jerusalem was to the Jew the Holy City but Cæsarea was the city of the conqueror. Here were held the carnivals, the free feasts, the races where the chariot wheels wore grooves in the stones, the gladiatorial combats, the torture of prisoners, the wild-beast combats, and all the hippodrome exhibitions by which Rome tried to hold the populace loyal. Josephus gives a description of the Herod here who had caused the death of James, the great scene in the judgment hall, when the Herod, who was Bernice’s first husband, appeared in coat of silver mail; how the owl flying in was observed as an omen of ill; and the King fell in a fit of apoplexy either from overeating or intestinal troubles.
By the time Paul and Peter perished in Rome, more than nine Christian bishops had been tortured in the public forums and relegated as broken wrecks to the mines. All these details will be found in the authorities already quoted.
APPENDIX B
OLD DOCUMENTS AND MODERN VIEWS
ON THE HEROD FAMILY
The many disputed points preceding the fall of the Holy City do not enter into this story; but as many students may care to follow up the history for themselves, the facts of the case with the pros and cons may be set forth.
Was the Apollos of Paul’s letters the same as Apollonius the great sage of Asia Minor, variously known as a reformer, a gnostic, a mystic, but refusing to ally himself with any government or any church? The early Fathers’ antagonism to the Gnostics was so bitter that a record of it would fill many volumes.
The New Testament references to Apollos may be counted on one hand. We hear of him first in the Acts, date about 54 A.D., “And a certain Jew named Apollos born at Alexandria, an eloquent man and mighty in the scriptures, came to Ephesus. This man was instructed in the way of the Lord; and being fervent in the spirit, he spoke and taught diligently the things of the Lord, knowing only the baptism of John. And he began to speak boldly in the synagogue; whom when Aquila and Priscilla had heard, they took him unto them and expounded unto him the way of God more perfectly. And when he was disposed to pass into Achaia, the brethren wrote, exhorting the disciples to receive him; who, when he was come, helped them much which had believed through grace: for he mightily convinced the Jews and that publicly, shewing by the scriptures that Jesus was Christ. And it came to pass that while Apollos was at Corinth, Paul, having passed through the upper coasts, came to Ephesus.” These words are written by Luke.
We next find Paul writing to the Corinthians from Philippi about 59 A.D., “Every one of you saith, I am of Paul; and I of Apollos; and I of Cephas; and I of Christ. . . . For while one saith, I am of Paul and another, I am of Apollos; are ye not carnal? Who then is Paul, and who is Apollos, but ministers by whom ye believed? . . . I have planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the increase. . . . Therefore let no man glory in men . . . whether Paul, or Apollos, or Cephas . . . and these things . . . I have transferred to myself and to Apollos for your sakes. . . . As touching our brother Apollos, I greatly desired him to come unto you with the brethren; but his will was not to come at this time; but he will come when he shall have convenient time.” Then in a letter to Titus, now Bishop of Crete, about 65 A.D., Paul begs Titus to bring “Zenas the lawyer and Apollos on their journey diligently, that nothing be wanting unto them.” Titus, it should be added, was a Greek.