Our Brother Beloved: Purpose and Community in Paul's Letter to Philemon

By Stephen E. Young

The Letter to Philemon has been read by generations of interpreters, including towering figures such as John Chrysostom, as having to do with Paul returning the fugitive slave Onesimus to his master. Hence the letter, at best, was made complicit in the institution of slavery and, at worst, was foundational for the view that slavery was God ordained. This oppressive interpretation still holds sway in the academy and church alike.

In his interdisciplinary study, Stephen E. Young sets a new trajectory for understanding this unassuming epistle. Our Brother Beloved: Purpose and Community in Paul’s Letter to Philemon opens with a case study on the use of the Letter to Philemon in the debates surrounding slavery and fugitive slaves in antebellum America. The book then analyzes the major background stories that have been used as keys to interpret the letter, showing that past and present oppressive uses of the Letter to Philemon are due not to the letter’s contents but to the persistence of erroneous readings. Young provides a new interpretation that accounts for every element of the Letter to Philemon while also addressing many shortcomings of previous interpretations. In so doing he pioneers the use of Positioning Theory, from the field of social psychology, as an analytical approach, opening up a new avenue for the study of ancient texts.

That texts shape the identity of readers is widely recognized, but biblical scholars tend to disregard the process by which that influence unfolds. Young demonstrates how the Letter to Philemon sought to shape the identity of its readers within their sociocultural context by molding them into a community of deliverance, one that could receive Onesimus no longer as a slave but as a brother and fellow worker in the gospel. Such a fresh reading carries strong implications for the ongoing cause of social justice.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Baylor University Press
• Release date: Oct 17, 2022
• ISBN: 9781481315333

Book preview

Cover Page for Our Brother Beloved

Our Brother Beloved

Our Brother Beloved

Purpose and Community in Paul’s Letter to Philemon

Stephen E. Young

Baylor University Press

© 2021 by Baylor University Press

Waco, Texas 76798

All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission in writing of Baylor University Press.

Unless otherwise stated, Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Cover and book design by Kasey McBeath

Cover image: Saint Paul Writing. Painting by Jacob Adriaensz Backer (1608–1651) Ec. Hol., 17th century. Rouen, Museum of Fine Arts. Photo © Photo Josse / Bridgeman Images.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Young, Stephen E., 1965- author.

Title: Our brother beloved : purpose and community in Paul’s letter to Philemon / Stephen E. Young.

Description: Waco : Baylor University Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: Draws on Positioning Theory to offer a fresh reading of Philemon and challenge traditional interpretations that argue for a pro-slavery perspective in the letter-- Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021015542 (print) | LCCN 2021015543 (ebook) | ISBN 9781481315319 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781481325011 (pdf) | ISBN 9781481315333 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Bible. Philemon--Social scientific criticism. | Bible. Philemon--Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Classification: LCC BS2765.6.S55 Y68 2021 (print) | LCC BS2765.6.S55 (ebook) | DDC 227/.8606--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021015542

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021015543

References to internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Baylor University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

To

Richard J. Erickson

and

Donald A. Hagner

mentors, colleagues, and friends

Contents

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Introduction: Paul’s Letter to Philemon and Slaveries Past and Present

1 The Need for a New Reading of Paul’s Letter to Philemon

2 Reading in Search of Social Impact

A New Approach to Paul’s Letter to Philemon

3 Rereading Paul’s Letter to Philemon

Positioning Brother Onesimus within the Christian Community

4 Welcoming Brother Onesimus

Becoming a Community of Deliverance

Excursus: Would It Have Been Too Problematic for Philemon to Manumit Onesimus?

Bibliography

Index of Authors

Index of Biblical and Other Ancient Sources

Acknowledgments

A project such as this would not have been possible without the assistance of many people, and I am sincerely grateful to each one of them. I thank my friend and colleague David Carr of Northeastern Seminary for many conversations about identity and selfhood in general, and Positioning Theory in particular, at the annual meetings of the Society of Biblical Literature. It was during these conversations that the idea for this book was born. Thanks are also due to many people at Fuller Theological Seminary: to my colleague Joel B. Green, who many years ago opened my eyes to new ways of reading the Letter to Philemon; to all my colleagues and the board of trustees for two sabbatical quarters, during which I was able to carry out the necessary research into Positioning Theory and write the majority of the present book; to Daniell Whittington, director of the library, and her staff, who provided many items necessary for my research; and to the many thoughtful students with whom I discussed the Letter to Philemon in a variety of classroom settings. At Baylor University Press, I warmly thank Assistant Editor Bethany Dickerson and Managing Editor Elias Cade Jarrell, together with the rest of their editorial staff, for accepting this book for publication. Their prompt and thoughtful feedback throughout the editorial process, as well as that of the anonymous reviewers, made it a much stronger book. I wish every writer had as pleasant an experience as I had in working with an editorial team. How can I properly thank my wife, Susan, and my son, Luke? They patiently put up with my quirky working hours that robbed us of time together and shared many conversations on issues of race and social justice that were a source of inspiration. More than anything, though, I thank them for their love, which is priceless. Last but certainly not least, I want to thank Richard J. Erickson and Donald A. Hagner, both of Fuller Theological Seminary, for their unwavering encouragement and support (as exemplified by Rich painstakingly reading through the entire manuscript for this project and giving much invaluable feedback). It is impossible to put into words how much their mentorship and friendship has meant to me down through the years. It is to Don and Rich that I dedicate this book.

Abbreviations

Abbreviations follow those in B. J. Collins et al., The SBL Handbook of Style for Biblical Studies and Related Disciplines, 2nd ed. (Atlanta: SBL, 2014). Given the interdisciplinary nature of the present work, however, many of the abbreviations used are not available in that resource and therefore are provided here for ease of reference:

1 The abbreviation StellTJ for Stellenbosch Theological Journal was chosen over STJ to avoid confusion with the use of STJ to abbreviate Stulos Theological Journal in Collins et al., SBL Handbook of Style.

Introduction

Paul’s Letter to Philemon and Slaveries Past and Present

There is within Christianity a breathtakingly powerful way to imagine and enact the social, to imagine and enact connection and belonging.

Willie James Jennings¹

The motivation to write this book arose from a deeply felt concern over the many centuries during which the Letter to Philemon has been misused as a weapon of oppression. Conducting my research in a North American context, this concern often reached the level of a burning anger as I read through the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century debates over slavery in America, while seeking to identify the place of the Letter to Philemon within them. Black lives matter. Black lives have always mattered, in spite of the direct line of continuity that runs from the horrific atrocities committed against black people who were enslaved from early colonial days through nineteenth-century America;² through the era of Jim Crow legislation enacted after the Civil War and lasting through the civil rights movement of the 1960s,³ which facilitated slavery by another name;⁴ through the targeting of black people via the War on Drugs that began with the Reagan era (the current shape of race-based slavery);⁵ all contributing to and culminating in the current brutal violence experienced by black people at the hands of US authorities. As a biblical scholar, I am both ashamed and angered at how the genesis of all of this, not only the enslavement but also the brutal forms of oppression of black people that came with it, was wrongly justified in part by a gross misuse of the Bible in general and the Letter of Philemon in particular.⁶ With all of the above as background, the present book seeks to address one narrow sliver of the historical tragedy of the misuse of the Bible to oppress black people, together with its continuing effects, by reexamining the Letter to Philemon in relation to social justice.⁷

The above ties into the words by Willie James Jennings chosen as a heading to the present introduction, taken from his book The Christian Imagination: There is within Christianity a breathtakingly powerful way to imagine and enact the social, to imagine and enact connection and belonging.⁸ Jennings goes on to describe actions that communicate a sense of connection and belonging and of a freedom to claim, to embrace, to make familiar one who is not,⁹ and the remainder of his book addresses the possibilities of identities formed and reformed precisely in and through such actions.¹⁰ These thoughts together find an echo in the basic premise of the present book, as narrowly applied to a reading of Paul’s Letter to Philemon: the letter imagines a countercultural way (for its time) to enact the social in relation to the slave Onesimus, who has now become a brother, and charts the way for his reception by the Christian community so that he is claimed and embraced as one who belongs, as one who is family. In this process the Letter to Philemon seeks to shape Christian identity, so that any actions it envisions on the part of its readers are rooted in their own self-understanding as well as their perception of Onesimus’ new identity in Christ. When read in this way, its potential to shape a distinctive Christian identity makes the Letter to Philemon a document with powerful social relevance for today.

A word on method: given that the essential interpretive approach taken in the present work is relatively unknown in the field of biblical studies, it is appropriate to provide a brief introduction to it here (chapter 2 below will take it up in greater detail). The social locations of the many characters that are mentioned in the Letter to Philemon—apostle, prisoner, slave-owner, slave, sister, brother, child, father, coworker, fellow soldier, fellow prisoner, Lord, God—make it an ideal document to view through the lens of Positioning Theory (a resource from a subdiscipline of social identity studies). Positioning Theory equips the interpreter with a tool to examine how the letter portrays the repertoire of available Greco-Roman storylines and how it reenvisions and transforms this repertoire for its readers. This reenvisioning takes place in part through the letter’s construction of an alternative moral context that challenges the moral context of the wider Roman culture, and in part through weaving an alternative storyline that replaces those that had heretofore guided the readers’ relationships in the wider society. To map this reenvisioning and transformation, this book analyzes how people are positioned in relation to each other within the letter according to a certain storyline and in light of a certain moral order built in the letter, and how this serves to challenge the accepted status quo of the wider culture of its time. The assignment of positions in light of particular storylines and moral contexts both within the Letter to Philemon and within the wider society serves in each case to create a web of meanings—the essence of the social world as it is or as it is perceived to be—in keeping with the values and purposes emphasized in each case. The new web of meanings, however, or the new world created by the Letter to Philemon, is only a potential, an open invitation. It remains for readers of the Letter to Philemon past and present to actualize this new world—to bring it from theory to reality—by living it: by agreeing to be bound by its moral context, by accepting the positions it assigns people in relation to each other, and by living out the storyline it lays before them.

A clarification is necessary at this point on the use of Positioning Theory to study an ancient text such as the Letter to Philemon: Positioning Theory is not a rhetorical method, and one will not find a handbook on anything like Positioning Theory among ancient texts comparable to Aristotle’s Art of Rhetoric or Cicero’s many treatises on the subject.¹¹ Rather, Positioning Theory seeks to understand power dynamics within all human communication, written or otherwise, ancient or modern, irrespective of whether this communication follows a rhetorical school of thought or of whether it is even meant to persuade. There are areas in which the interpretation developed in the following pages overlaps with the concerns of rhetorical criticism, especially its focus on the text’s means of persuasion and the response it seeks to elicit from its readers.¹² Its approach to such concerns, however, follows along a different path. Overall, one of the valuable aspects of using Positioning Theory as a lens through which to read the Letter to Philemon is that it provides the interpreter with a new set of questions to ask the text, questions not identical to those used by rhetorical criticism or any other approach.¹³

One final item of clarification remains before moving on, in relation to the terminology used in the following pages to refer to the institution of slavery. Throughout most of the book I use enslaved person or enslaved people and enslavement instead of slave and slavery, to counter the dehumanizing aspect of the latter terms. I also use enslaver rather than master to draw attention to the inherently oppressive role of one who would presume to own another human being. I use the terms slave and master, however, when examining biblical texts that contain these terms, when drawing attention to the social dynamics inherent in these roles as traditionally understood, and when addressing matters of interpretation history (if the writers under review use this terminology). Words are powerful. Language plays a key role not only in establishing and perpetuating social realities, but also in transforming them.¹⁴ Becoming aware of the implications of the language one uses, and modifying it if necessary, is an essential part of the struggle to overcome systemic injustice.

1 Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2010), 4.

2 Anyone who harbors any kind of doubt regarding the horrendous atrocities committed by white slave masters against black people who were enslaved in America would do well to read Theodore Weld’s American Slavery as It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses (New York: American Anti-Slavery Society, 1839).

3 As Catherine M. Lewis and J. Richard Lewis note, it is difficult to define the limits of the era of Jim Crow legislation. Its roots reach back into the mid-1870s, and by the year 1900, as Lewis and Lewis describe, "the near-total disfranchisement of blacks through legal and non-legal means was complete. Access to the legal system was denied or severely restricted. African Americans were separated or denied access on railroads and steamships and in hotels, restaurants, and places of entertainment and restricted to separate unions and working conditions. Housing was restricted, and many were prevented from entering certain cities and towns. Prisons, hospitals, and homes for the indigent were likewise segregated to a degree never before known in the South. Racially motivated violence and brutality was commonplace, most but not all within the borders of the South. Lynchings throughout the nation numbered 2,929 between 1882 and 1918, with no end in sight. Two events in 1915—the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan on Stone Mountain in Georgia and the nationwide acclaim of D. W. Griffith’s film Birth of a Nation—signaled the nearly complete embrace of this racial status quo" (Catherine M. Lewis and J. Richard Lewis, eds., Jim Crow America: A Documentary History [Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2009], xx). The legal end of Jim Crow, though not the end of the racism and prejudice it represented, came with the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (xxviii–xxix). See further the classic study by C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955).

4 A phrase that works well to capture the experience of many thousands of black Americans during part of the Jim Crow era, as aptly chosen by Douglas A. Blackmon as the title for his book Slavery by Another Name: The Re-enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (New York: Anchor, 2009). The renewed enslavement of black people as described in Blackmon’s book was facilitated by vagrancy laws, which allowed whites to arrest blacks on minor to nonexistent charges and lease them into involuntary labor, where they experienced horrors on the par with pre–Civil War slavery, including for many the loss of life.

5 See Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, rev. ed. (New York: New Press, 2012).

6 For a brief treatment of this misuse of the Bible, see Sylvester A. Johnson, The Bible, Slavery, and the Problem of Authority, in Beyond Slavery: Overcoming Its Religious and Sexual Legacies, ed. Bernadette J. Brooten, with the editorial assistance of Jacqueline L. Hazelton, BR/WT/SJ (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 231–48, and literature cited there. On the place of the Letter to Philemon within this see chapter 1 below.

7 The issue of the Letter to Philemon’s stance on slavery remains unresolved today. There are those for whom the trajectory laid out by the Letter to Philemon’s approach to slavery would lead to the dismantling of the institution. E.g., I. Howard Marshall rightly states, More clearly than anywhere else in the NT the application of the gospel to the institution of slavery as such is here [in the Letter to Philemon] made a matter for discussion in a way that points to the need to question the whole institution and replace it by something else. For that reason alone Philemon demands its place in the canon (I. Howard Marshall, The Theology of Philemon, in The Theology of the Shorter Pauline Letters, by K. P. Donfried and I. H. Marshall, NTTh [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993], 191). Others are of the opinion that the letter is completely at home in the world of slavery, not seeking to challenge the status quo of its day in any way. So J. Albert Harrill opines, In the end, the Letter to Philemon reveals no ‘dilemma of Christian slave ownership,’ but a consuming hierarchy of master over slave familiar in wider Greco-Roman literary culture (J. Albert Harrill, Paul and Slavery, in Paul in the Greco-Roman World: A Handbook, ed. J. Paul Sampley, 2nd rev. ed. [London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2016], 2:328).

8 Jennings, Christian Imagination, 4.

9 Jennings, Christian Imagination, 6. Jennings goes on to elaborate, It is precisely the episodic character of this capacity among Christians that indicates something deeply, painfully amiss (6).

10 Jennings, Christian Imagination, 7; his method is to pursue a theological analysis of theology’s social performances (10).

11 Much might be gained by studying ancient rhetorical methods from the perspective of Positioning Theory, but this lies outside the scope of the present work.

12 Interpreters who use rhetorical criticism to study NT texts may base their approach on ancient rhetoric, or modern rhetoric, or a combination of both. For a discussion of these various approaches and a comprehensive bibliography up to the early 1990s see Duane F. Watson, Rhetorical Criticism of the New Testament, in Rhetorical Criticism of the Bible: A Comprehensive Bibliography with Notes on History and Method, by Duane F. Watson and Alan J. Hauser, BibInt 4 (Leiden: Brill, 1994), 99–206.

13 For examples of rhetorical criticism applied to the Letter to Philemon, see F. Forrester Church, Rhetorical Structure and Design in Paul’s Letter to Philemon, HTR 71 (1978): 17–33; Clarice J. Martin, The Rhetorical Function of Commercial Language in Paul’s Letter to Philemon (Verse 18), in Persuasive Artistry: Studies in New Testament Rhetoric in Honor of George A. Kennedy, ed. Duane F. Watson, JSNTSup 50 (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1991), 321–37; Roy R. Jeal, Exploring Philemon: Freedom, Brotherhood, and Partnership in the New Society, SBLRRA 2 (Atlanta: SBL, 2015); Alex Hon Ho Ip, A Socio-rhetorical Interpretation of the Letter to Philemon in Light of the New Institutional Economics: An Exhortation to Transform a Master-Slave Economic Relationship into a Brotherly Loving Relationship, WUNT 2.444 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017). See further also the survey of a variety of rhetorical studies of the Letter to Philemon in D. Francois Tolmie, Tendencies in the Research on the Letter to Philemon since 1980, in Philemon in Perspective: Interpreting a Pauline Letter, ed. D. Francois Tolmie, BZNW 169 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010), 11–16.

14 See chapter 2 below.

1

The Need for a New Reading of Paul’s Letter to Philemon

This book provides a new reading of Paul’s Letter to Philemon. The need for such a new reading arises from three closely interrelated considerations having to do with the letter’s history of interpretation: first, the oppressive uses to which the letter has been put; second, the mistaken foundations upon which these oppressive uses have been based; and third (resulting from these first two), the stripping of the letter of the power it would otherwise have to speak into today’s social situation. This chapter will look at each of these considerations in turn.

1.1. The History of the Oppressive Use of the Letter to Philemon

The social impact of biblical texts can vary widely, even to the point of contradiction, depending on their interpretation. For example, for decades in the United States proponents on both sides of the debate regarding the ordination of women have appealed to different interpretations of the same texts to support their views.¹ Similarly, in twentieth-century South Africa, differing interpretations of the same texts were used both to support apartheid and to argue for its abolition.²

Paul’s Letter to Philemon provides a case in point, and the social impact of certain of its interpretations has been particularly grievous. Though some interpretations have cast the Letter to Philemon as a tool of liberation (see below), for the most part it has long been read in ways that forged it into a weapon of oppression.³ Its tragic history of misuse in this manner can be dated back to the turn of the fifth century and the earliest extant commentary on the letter by John Chrysostom (ca. 349–407). In this commentary Chrysostom expressed the view that, because Paul was returning a fugitive slave to his owner, we ought not to withdraw slaves from the service of their masters, and then he elaborated, For if the servant is so excellent, he ought by all means to continue in that service, and to acknowledge the authority of his master, that he may be the occasion of benefit to all in that house.⁴ In speaking to the concern that underlay these comments, Chrysostom continued, But now many are reduced to the necessity of blasphemy, and of saying Christianity has been introduced into life for the subversion of everything, masters having their servants taken from them, and it is a matter of violence.⁵ In focusing on the interests of the enslavers rather than those of the people they enslaved (masters having their servants taken from them), Chrysostom set a precedent for the interpretation of the Letter to Philemon that would be followed for many centuries. Chrysostom penned these words as part of a wider anti-monastic and anti-enthusiastic polemic against groups that, among other things, rejected the institution of slavery and worked for its abolition.⁶ For him it was important that Christianity should not threaten the institution of slavery and so be perceived as upsetting the balance of society. In fairness to Chrysostom, in his commentaries on other NT books, he argued that slavery was an oppressive system that resulted from sin and that the apt response to God’s grace should be the manumission of slaves.⁷ With his commentary on the Letter to Philemon, however, the damage had already been done, as his slavery-affirming interpretation of the letter would be echoed and endorsed down through the centuries by the likes of Jerome, Ambrosiaster, Thomas Aquinas, Erasmus, John Calvin, and Martin Luther.⁸ With such a pedigree, perhaps it should come as no surprise that relatively few interpreters have sought to contradict it.

1.1.1 An Extended Case Study: The Letter to Philemon in Antebellum America

To illustrate the social impact of the interpretation of the Letter to Philemon inherited from Chrysostom, in contrast to that of other readings, what follows is an extended case study taken from nineteenth-century America. This period in American history is of general relevance to the present study because of the place of the Bible, and the Letter to Philemon within it, in the debates over slavery that roiled the country in the decades leading up to and including the Civil War. It is also of particular relevance to this study because of the introduction in 1850 of a new law that dealt with the return of enslaved people who had fled their enslavers. This new law brought interpretations of the Letter to Philemon that previously had been relatively peripheral to the wider argument to center stage in the debates.

In the debates of the 1820s–1840s on the biblical teaching on slavery, the Letter to Philemon played an important, though relatively minor role.⁹ Within arguments over the broader biblical perspective on slavery, the letter was used to support such widely diverging views as the Northern claim that it called for, or at least pointed toward, the full emancipation of enslaved people,¹⁰ and the (predominantly)¹¹ Southern stance inherited from Chrysostom that it did not interfere in any way with the enslaver-enslaved arrangement but rather taught the enslaved how to be better slaves and the enslavers how to be better masters.¹² Then in the years leading up to and following the passing of the Fugitive Slave Act by the US Congress, as part of the Compromise of 1850 between slave states and free states, interpretations of the Letter to Philemon became crucial in the biblical debate over the rights of enslaved people who had fled to the North versus the rights of slaveholders in the South.¹³

To provide a little historical context, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was intended to make enforceable the fugitive slave clause (or fugitive labor clause) in the US Constitution, which reads:

No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due.¹⁴

The Constitution had remained ambiguous as to who was to enforce this delivering up and regarding any procedures to be followed. To remedy this, the law of 1850 authorized the slave owner to enlist the help of federal authorities and even force ordinary Northern citizens to aid in an enslaved person’s capture¹⁵ in areas in which local laws had previously protected them; those captured then faced only summary proceedings with no opportunity for appeal prior to being removed.¹⁶

So in January 1856, because of cruel treatment at the hands of their enslavers, a woman by the name of Margaret Garner fled with her husband, Simon Jr., and their four children (Samuel, Thomas, and Silla, the name of the fourth child is unknown), together with Simon’s parents, Simon and Mary, from Richwood Station, Kentucky, to Cincinnati, Ohio.¹⁷ Her enslaver was able to track them down, however, and aided by a US deputy marshal and a considerable number of assistants, broke open the doors of the home of the black man with whom she and her family had sought refuge. Upon entering, and following a struggle with pistols and cudgels, the pursuers found that one of the children lay dead from knife wounds, and Margaret was attempting to kill two of the others in like manner—a fate she said she preferred for them rather than their being returned to slavery.¹⁸ During the trial that followed, when Margaret and the adult members of her family were informed that they were being indicted for murder, they replied that they would go dancing to the gallows rather than to be sent back into slavery. The requirements of the Fugitive Slave Act were given precedence, however, so that Margaret and her family members were turned over to their enslavers and were taken by steamboat to be sold in Kentucky. On the way, tragedy struck again, in that one of the children was among twenty-five people who drowned when their steamboat collided with another craft; to this Margaret is said to have replied with nothing but joy.¹⁹ Margaret’s ultimate fate is unknown. She was taken to Covington Jail in Kentucky following the collision but apparently was released from prison into the hands of someone who claimed to represent her enslaver. Further attempts by the Ohio authorities to locate her proved fruitless, and she was assumed taken to the slave market in New Orleans. Margaret’s tragic story provides a brief, sobering glimpse into the realities experienced by those who were most affected by the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act, the men, women, and children who were seeking to flee the horrors of slavery.²⁰

In the face of growing Northern Christian outrage at the prospect of being forced to aid a practice they found abhorrent, advocates of the law of 1850 turned increasingly to the Letter to Philemon for biblical support. Their basic argument was that if Paul the apostle had sent back a fugitive slave to his master, then this was what God saw as a right and fitting practice for all Christians of all times.²¹ As noted above, this was not a new argument, but given the new circumstances, this reading of the Letter to Philemon became a newly prized cornerstone in the defense of the proslavery view, as well captured in the words of one of its proponents:

Before the writing of this letter [the Letter to Philemon], no Scripture furnished the information which is now needed—that is, in a form that cannot be misunderstood. In the progress of human events, this information was not needed until the nineteenth century. But the precise information which this letter furnishes is now wanting. It is wanting to show the sin which men are now committing against God and men—not only in opposing slavery, but in refusing to deliver up fugitive slaves.²²

In other words, for this writer the Letter to Philemon had been included in the New Testament canon for precisely this time and this purpose: to show that it was God’s will for Northerners to return fugitive slaves to the South. Northern writers in turn countered with interpretations of the Letter to Philemon that sought to show that all this amounted to a misreading of the letter. A common argument was that Paul would never have sent Onesimus back to his master unless he expected Philemon to manumit him.²³

At this juncture it is crucial to note that much of the ambiguity in this reception history of the Letter to Philemon stemmed not from the contents of the text itself but from the presuppositions readers brought to it regarding the basic story behind the text. If one were to change a key element within that basic (and hypothetical) story, then the entire contents of