The Prison Letters

Philippians, Colossians, Ephesians and Philemon are grouped together because each of them says its author is in custody. Where that custody was is genuinely unknown, and the options change the dating of the letters by a decade.

The traditional answer is Rome, the two years of house arrest with which Acts ends, around AD 60 to 62. It fits Philippians 1:13, where it has become clear throughout the whole palace guard (in Greek, the praitorion) that Paul is in chains, and 4:22, with its greeting from the household of Caesar. Neither phrase is decisive, since a provincial governor's residence could be called a praetorium, and Acts 23:35 uses the word of Herod's praetorium at Caesarea, while imperial staff were posted all over the empire.

Caesarea is the second option, where Acts 23 to 26 places Paul for two years under Felix and Festus. The third, argued by many twentieth-century scholars, is Ephesus. There is no direct record of an imprisonment there, but Paul says he endured more imprisonments than his rivals (2 Corinthians 11:23), that he fought wild beasts in Ephesus (1 Corinthians 15:32), and that he was under a burden in Asia far beyond his ability to endure, so that he despaired even of life (2 Corinthians 1:8). The attraction of Ephesus is distance. Philippians presupposes several journeys back and forth while Paul is in prison, and Philemon presupposes that Onesimus travelled from Colossae to Paul and can be sent back. Ephesus is about a hundred miles from Colossae; Rome is over a thousand.

Say plainly that this is unresolved. The traditional Roman setting remains the majority position for Philippians and has a long pedigree; the Ephesian hypothesis is a genuine contender and would put these letters in the mid fifties, alongside the Corinthian correspondence rather than a decade later. Nothing in the theology of the letters depends on the answer, but the history does.

One further link ties three of the four together. Colossians 4:9 sends Onesimus back with Tychicus and calls him one who 'is one of you', that is, a Colossian; Philemon is about Onesimus; and Colossians 4:10-17 and Philemon 23-24 share a cluster of the same names, Epaphras, Mark, Aristarchus, Demas and Luke. Whatever you conclude about who wrote Colossians, that overlap with the undisputed Philemon is one of the strongest arguments for taking Colossians as Paul's own or as written very close to him.

Philippi was a Roman colony in Macedonia, settled with veterans after the battle fought there in 42 BC and refounded after Actium in 31 BC, largely with Italians dispossessed of their land at home. It was proud of its Roman status in a Greek province. Acts 16 records the founding of the church there: Lydia the dealer in purple, a slave girl with a spirit of divination, and a jailer converted during an earthquake. It was Paul's first congregation on European soil and by every sign his favourite. The letter is warm, full of the word joy, and thanking them for money they had sent by the hand of Epaphroditus, who nearly died on the errand.

It also has an edge. Chapter 3 turns suddenly on those who insist on circumcision, and chapter 4 names two women, Euodia and Syntyche, who have fallen out and who Paul says have contended at his side for the gospel. That is not a small aside. A letter urging one mind is aiming at a real disagreement between two prominent workers.

At the centre stands 2:6-11, one of the most studied passages in the Bible. Its rhythmic structure has led many since Ernst Lohmeyer in 1928 to treat it as a pre-existing hymn or confession that Paul is quoting; Gordon Fee and others argued it is Paul's own exalted prose. Either way, notice first what Paul does with it. He introduces it with 'Let this mind be in you' in the middle of an appeal to a squabbling church to 'consider others more important than yourselves' (2:3). The BSB's 'in you' can be heard individually; the Greek phrase en hymin can also mean 'among you', which is the reading that fits a church-wide appeal. The highest christology in the letter is deployed as an argument about how to behave in a committee.

The disputed word is harpagmos in verse 6, and the question is whether Christ did not seize equality with God that he lacked, or did not cling to equality that he had. Roy Hoover's study in 1971 argued that the idiom, taking something as harpagmos, means regarding it as something to exploit for one's own advantage, which favours the second. A note on the BSB: its 'existing in the form of God' is one translator's choice for a participle (hyparchon) that others render 'being' or 'though he was'; the participle does not by itself settle whether the verse speaks of a state before the incarnation, which is exactly what the Adam reading below disputes. Then the word emptied, kenoo. Nineteenth-century kenotic theologians, including Gottfried Thomasius and later Charles Gore, proposed that the Son laid aside certain divine attributes in the incarnation, and their critics answered that the text names no object for the emptying, only a participle, 'taking the form of a servant'. The grammar supports the critics. Self-emptying here is addition of the servant's form, not subtraction of deity.

One more thing belongs in the honest column. James Dunn argued that the hymn is Adam christology, contrasting the man who grasped at being like God with the man who did not, without necessarily implying pre-existence. Most scholars, including N. T. Wright, Larry Hurtado and Richard Bauckham, read pre-existence in the passage, and Bauckham points to verses 9 to 11, where Paul applies Isaiah 45:23, a text in which the God of Israel swears that to him alone every knee shall bow, to Jesus. Doing that to that text is a remarkable act, and it was done within about thirty years of the crucifixion.

Colossae was a declining town in the Lycus valley that Paul had apparently never visited (2:1); the church had been founded by Epaphras. Something was being taught there that the letter calls 'philosophy and empty deception', involving 'the spiritual forces of the world', rules about food and drink and a feast, a New Moon or a Sabbath, false humility, visions and the worship of angels (2:8-23). What exactly it was is unknown. Proposals include Jewish mysticism, a syncretism of local folk religion with Jewish practice, a Middle Platonic scheme, and, in Clinton Arnold's reconstruction, the magical and protective practices well attested in that region. Every reconstruction is mirror-read from Paul's answer, so hold all of them loosely.

The answer Paul gives is not a rebuttal point by point but an enlargement of Christ. Colossians 1:15-20 declares him the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation (a choice the Greek genitive leaves open, as the inquiry above notes), the one in whom all things were created including thrones and dominions and rulers and authorities, the one in whom all things hold together, the head of the body, the church, in whom God was pleased to have all His fullness dwell and through whom God reconciled all things to Himself 'by making peace through the blood of His cross'. Then 2:9: 'in Christ all the fullness of the Deity dwells in bodily form.' If Christ is that, then intermediary powers and dietary safeguards are not wrong so much as beside the point, which is the letter's argument at 2:16-23.

Ephesians is the same music in a different key, and it raises its own questions. It has no personal greetings, which is odd for a city where Acts 20:31 says Paul spent three years. The words 'in Ephesus' at 1:1 are absent from our earliest witness, the papyrus P46 from around AD 200, and from the original hands of Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus, and Marcion appears to have known the letter as addressed to the Laodiceans. The most common explanation is that it was a circular letter with the destination left blank or filled in locally. Its style, with sentences of extraordinary length, and its overlap with Colossians are the main grounds for the authorship question set out in lesson 1.

Its theme is the one new humanity. Ephesians 2 says Gentiles who were far away have been brought near through the blood of Christ (2:13), and that 'He Himself is our peace, who has made the two one and has torn down the dividing wall of hostility' (2:14). First-century readers would very likely have heard in that image the barrier in the Jerusalem temple beyond which Gentiles could not pass; two of its warning inscriptions, threatening death to any foreigner who entered, have actually been recovered, one of them complete. The letter's ethical half then asks what a community made of both looks like, and it is there that the household code appears.

Colossians 3:18 to 4:1 and Ephesians 5:21 to 6:9 address three pairs in the same order: wives and husbands, children and fathers, slaves and masters. Scholars call them Haustafeln, house tables, and similar codes appear in 1 Peter 2:18 to 3:7 and, in a different form, in Titus 2. Reading them honestly means doing two things at once: refusing to excuse what they do not say, and refusing to judge them by a question nobody was asking.

Start with the setting, because without it the passages cannot be assessed at all. Discussion of household order was a standard genre. Aristotle, in Book I of the 'Politics', treats the household as the foundation of the city and analyses it as three relations of rule: master over slave, husband over wife, father over children. Stoic writers produced lists of duties. Josephus, defending Judaism to a Greek audience in 'Against Apion', summarises the law's household provisions in similar terms. In these texts the head of the household is the audience. The wife, the child and the slave are the subject matter, discussed in the third person, as parts of an estate to be managed well.

Against that, four features of the New Testament codes stand out, and each is a real observation rather than an apologetic one. First, the subordinate members are addressed directly, in the second person, as moral agents who are being asked rather than managed. Second, every instruction is reciprocal: the husband is commanded to love his wife just as Christ loved the church and gave Himself up for her, the father is told not to provoke his children (in Colossians 3:21, 'so they will not become discouraged'), and the master is addressed at all, which is the surprising part. Third, Ephesians opens the code with 5:21, 'Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ', which on most readings governs what follows and has no parallel in the classical material. A note on the BSB: it prints 5:21 as a sentence of its own, but in the Greek it is a participle (hypotassomenoi) hanging on the commands of 5:18-20, and interpreters differ on whether it concludes that earlier section or heads the household code; the BSB's punctuation should not decide that for you. Fourth, the motive given is never nature or the good of the city, which are the classical grounds, but the Lord.

Now the masters, since the brief for this lesson asks for it and most treatments hurry past it. Colossians 4:1 tells masters, 'supply your slaves with what is right and fair, since you know that you also have a Master in heaven.' Ephesians 6:9 goes further: 'And masters, do the same for your slaves. Give up your use of threats, because you know that He who is both their Master and yours is in heaven, and there is no favoritism with Him.' Read that in a Roman setting. Threat was the ordinary instrument of household discipline, and Roman law permitted a master to have a slave beaten, and permitted a slave's testimony in court to be taken under torture. To tell a master to stop threatening is to remove the mechanism. To tell him he stands under the same Master, with no favoritism, is to deny the legal fiction that a slave is property rather than a person. Slaves in the same code are told their reward comes from the Lord (Ephesians 6:8) and that 'Whoever does wrong will be repaid for his wrong, and there is no favoritism' (Colossians 3:25), which in context threatens the master as much as it warns the slave.

And now what must not be softened. These passages do not abolish slavery, do not instruct masters to free anyone, and do tell slaves to obey. They were quoted in defence of slavery for centuries, at length and by learned men, and that use was not simply a misreading of words that plainly said the opposite. The most that can be said with integrity is this: the codes locate everyone in the household under a single Lord who is not impartial toward the powerful, and they do so within the structures of their own world rather than by attacking those structures. Whether that was prudence, accommodation, a seed planted, or a failure of nerve is a judgment the New Testament does not make for you. David Balch argued in 1981 that the codes served an apologetic function, showing suspicious outsiders that this new movement did not dissolve the household. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza argued that they represent a later settling of an originally more disruptive movement into respectable patriarchal order. Both are serious readings by serious scholars, and they cannot both be the whole story.

The shortest letter Paul wrote is addressed to a man named Philemon, to Apphia and Archippus, and to the church that meets in his house. That last detail matters: this is a private matter read aloud to a congregation.

Onesimus, whose name means useful, is a slave belonging to Philemon who has come to Paul in prison and become a Christian there. Paul makes a pun on the name in verse 11: 'Formerly he was useless to you, but now he has become useful both to you and to me.' Paul sends him back, carrying the letter, and writes that though in Christ he is bold enough to order Philemon to do what is proper, he prefers to appeal on the basis of love (vv. 8-9). He asks Philemon to receive Onesimus as he would receive Paul himself, offers to repay anything owed, and says in verse 16 that Philemon is to have him back 'no longer as a slave, but better than a slave, as a beloved brother'.

Why Onesimus was with Paul is disputed. The traditional reading is that he was a runaway, a fugitivus, who would face severe punishment on return. Peter Lampe argued in 1985 that the letter better fits a recognised Roman practice in which a slave in trouble with his master sought out a friend of the master to intercede, which is documented in the Roman legal writers and which would explain why Paul sends him back openly and why no crime is named. A minority, including Allen Callahan, have argued that Onesimus was not a slave at all but Philemon's estranged brother, reading verse 16 literally. The first two are both live; the third is a genuine proposal and has not persuaded many.

What Paul does not write is as important as what he does. He never uses the Greek vocabulary of manumission. He does not command Philemon to free Onesimus, though verse 21 says he is confident of Philemon's obedience and knows that he will do even more than Paul asks, which is either a broad hint at freedom or a broad hint at sending Onesimus back to help Paul, and the Greek will carry either. The letter dismantles the relationship from inside, by making the two men brothers in a household where the church meets, and then stops short of the word that would settle it.

Then the reception history, which is part of the honest account. In the American debate over slavery, this letter was one of the most quoted texts on both sides. Defenders of slavery pointed out that the apostle returned a slave to his owner and did not condemn the institution. Opponents pointed to brother, and to the impossibility of holding as property someone you must receive as you would receive Paul. Both were reading the same three hundred and some words. What that history should teach is not that the text is empty but that a reader under pressure will take from a text what he already needs, and that the only defence is the discipline of saying what the text does not say as carefully as what it does.

Judge the ancient material without anachronism and without excuse. Roman slavery was not the race-based chattel slavery of the Atlantic world: manumission was common, freedmen could prosper, and slaves included physicians and estate managers. It was also brutal, coercive and sexually exploitative, and no ancient defence of it is worth rescuing. Paul did not abolish it and no first-century letter-writer could have. He did do something whose consequences he may not have calculated: he put a slave and a master in the same room, under the same Lord, and called them brothers, and then he had the letter read out to the congregation that knew them both. Early Christian tradition tells us nothing certain about what Philemon did. It is worth noting, as speculation and no more, that Ignatius of Antioch writing around AD 110 greets a bishop of Ephesus named Onesimus, and that John Knox built an elaborate theory on the coincidence. Nobody can confirm it.