EPISTLE TO PHILEMON.
INTRODUCTION TO THE EPISTLE.
Unique character of the epistle.
The Epistle to Philemon holds a unique place among the Apostle’s writings. It is the only strictly private letter which has been preserved. The Pastoral Epistles indeed are addressed to individuals, but they discuss important matters of Church discipline and government. Evidently they were intended to be read by others besides those to whom they are immediately addressed. On the other hand the letter before us does not once touch upon any question of public interest. It is addressed apparently to a layman. It is wholly occupied with an incident of domestic life. The occasion which called it forth was altogether common-place. It is only one sample of numberless letters which must have been written to his many friends and disciples by one of St Paul’s eager temperament and warm affections, in the course of a long and chequered life. |Its value.|Yet to ourselves this fragment, which has been rescued, we know not how, from the wreck of a large and varied correspondence, is infinitely precious. Nowhere is the social influence of the Gospel more strikingly exerted; nowhere does the nobility of the Apostle’s character receive a more vivid illustration than in this accidental pleading on behalf of a runaway slave.
The persons addressed.
The letter introduces us to an ordinary household in a small town of Phrygia. Four members of it are mentioned by name, the father, the mother, the son, and the slave.
1. Philemon.
1. The head of the family bears a name which, for good or for evil, was not unknown in connexion with Phrygian story. |Occurrence of the name in Phrygia.|The legend of Philemon and Baucis, the aged peasants who entertained not angels but gods unawares, and were rewarded by their divine guests for their homely hospitality and their conjugal love[[662]], is one of the most attractive in Greek mythology, and contrasts favourably with many a revolting tale in which the powers of Olympus are represented as visiting this lower earth. It has a special interest too for the Apostolic history, because it suggests an explanation of the scene at Lystra, when the barbarians would have sacrificed to the Apostles, imagining that the same two gods, Zeus and Hermes, had once again deigned to visit, in the likeness of men, those regions which they had graced of old by their presence[[663]]. Again, in historical times we read of one Philemon who obtained an unenviable notoriety at Athens by assuming the rights of Athenian citizenship, though a Phrygian and apparently a slave[[664]]. Otherwise the name is not distinctively Phrygian. It does not occur with any special frequency in the inscriptions belonging to this country; and though several persons bearing this name rose to eminence in literary history, not one, so far as we know, was a Phrygian.
This Philemon a Colossian