Philemon would be astonished and quite possibly angry to see him return; he would also realize the delicate balance both of what Paul had said and of what he was being asked to do. As a policy statement about slavery, the letter falls short of what we would want. As an experiment in a one-off, down-to-earth pastoral strategy, it is brilliant. And it seems to have worked. Fifty years later the bishop of Ephesus is a man called Onesimus. The young slave, now an elderly Christian leader? Or a name already respected within the early community?
