Philemon in the Old South

Eran Shalev (American Zion) puts the Scriptural debate over slavery in the context of a shift from a predominantly Old Testament orientation to a predominantly New Testament one. 

But the lines were not as neat as one might think: Anti-slavery writers drew on Old Testament laws on slavery, and pro-slavery polemicists found help from Paul’s letter to Philemon.

Shalev writes: “One of the key scriptural texts . . . was the Epistle to Philemon, a canonized letter written by Paul in his prison cell to a church member, asking forgiveness on behalf of his ‘separated,’ probably runaway, slave Onesimus. Slavery advocates repeatedly referred to that Pauline epistle, which provide, if nothing else, that slavery existed at ‘the time when the apostle Paul sent a runaway slave home to his mater, Philemon, and wrote a Christian paternal letter to this slaveholder.’ On the even of the Civil War, John Richter Jones remarked that the biblical justification of slavery in Philemon was so ‘clear and conclusive [that] . . . it is one of the curiosities of ecclesiastical literature that our clerical [abolitionist] friends could pronounce slavery utterly irreconcilable with the spirit and principle of the Gospel of Christ.’ Philemon seemed to prove more than the mere existence of slavery: it demonstrated to numerous Christians who supported the perpetuation of slavery in the United States that Paul, ‘as the Great Head of the church has recognized the relation of master and slave.’ Even southerners such as Bishop George Pierce, who criticized their region for failing to reform its slave system, could confidently assert that ‘the Southern people, with all their faults – vices you please – have never corrupted the gospel of Christ’” (171).