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Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. And thank you for hanging out with me. I know you have a bajillion things that you could be doing with your time, and I know there's a lot of internet out there. Much more than there was when you and I started hanging out, however many years ago it was. And so it just, you know, it means more with every passing year that you would still want to slum it and pal around with me on the internet. It really does mean a lot. Thank you for that. I don't know why I always feel compelled to talk about castaway with Tom Hanks, but when I scan through the movies that have really left a dent in my brain over the last whatever that's been, 25 years, that one always comes to mind. And it's not so much because of the island part of the movie. I'm spoiling this, by the way, it's an old movie. Hopefully, I'm just this is your warning if you don't know how castaway ends and you don't know yet. There you go. I gave you the heads up. I probably should do that every time. At the end of the movie, Tom Hanks finishes everything after he gets off the island and he's no longer a castaway who has been cast away. But now he's a dude who is back on track. He delivered the packages, which were kind of the thing that was keeping him going. And he reconnected with everybody and surprised them by coming back from the dead, basically. And now it's all done. What's left? And the final scene has Tom Hanks at a pair of dirt roads that intersect each other, a crossroads out in the wilds of Texas or something like that. And the movie ends with him thinking about his options. That's a powerful image to me. I mean, crossroads is a you know, it's a metaphor for those moments in life where there are a lot of options in front of you, but you can only pick one. And the one that you pick is gonna be at the expense of all the other directions you could have gone. And crossroads, additionally, are the kind of thing that I think we reflect back on a lot as we age. You constantly can't help but go back to those moments and think about what might have been. What if I'd picked this instead of that and gone this other direction? What would my life look like? Maybe that's a fruitful exercise. Maybe it's not. I certainly have a few crossroads points that involve my own decision making. But I have some crossroads points that involve things that involve other people's decisions that I had nothing to do with. I mean, I don't like I'm not this isn't fishing for sympathy or anything dumb like that, but really the big one for me is what if my brother doesn't die? I really miss him. He was really important to me. He was 18 when he died in that accident. My life is divided between before the accident and after the accident. How different would things look if the timing on that accident had just been a little bit different than how it played out? Yeah, I think about that stuff. Come on, you're sitting there thinking about that stuff, even if you're young. You're sitting there right now thinking about that stuff. What if I'd chosen to join this team instead of that team? What if I'd mustered the courage to ask that girl out? What if I'd said yes when that brave dude finally mustered the courage to ask me out? What if I'd gone to this college instead of that college? What if I'd gone on that trip instead of- I mean, we all think about it, right? Well, today we're thinking about it in the context of somebody else. We're running this exercise that we're very intuitive at and we're very good at on ourselves, on the Apostle Paul across time. So we've done a lot of work to try to put ourselves in the shoes of Paul, to try to put ourselves in the shoes of Philemon, of Onesimus. Heck, we took weeks trying to put ourselves in the shoes of the Colossian mind, just to try to understand how anyone from that town might think about themselves and other people and slavery and culture. We took a whole bunch of time to try to put ourselves in the shoes of how anyone in the ancient world might think about slavery from an elitist perspective, from kind of a normal middle class-ish perspective, from a slave perspective. We've put in a lot of effort on this. So I feel like you and I are pretty qualified to do this little what-if exercise here. So let's just run the thing. Let's say Onesimus shows up in Rome. We're assuming it's Rome. And he says, Paul, you know, here's my situation. I'm not here in the stead of Philemon, who I think, you know, uh you were expecting. I'm here of my own free will, which is probably sounds pretty weird to you, Paul, because I'm a slave. But I've heard your name a whole bunch of times. I heard that you were here as a slave. I don't really have a lot of connections anywhere else. And people I respect speak highly of you. I don't know what came over me. I needed to make a change, I guess. And so I did. Also, I took some stuff on the way out the door to fund the trip. And now I'm here. I don't really know what that means or what happens now, but hi. And then Paul is like, well, like Paul would be about anything. All right, well, let's uh let's explain Jesus to you. And then Paul does. Onesimus becomes a Christian, and now Paul faces this conundrum that we've broken down a lot, which is do I send Onesimus back or do I not? I really don't think it was that much of a conundrum at all. I think Paul had to send Onesimus back. And I think why Paul had to send Onesimus back will come more into focus as we run the exercise. So let's say Paul instead is like, cool, you're a Christian now. We're a long ways from Colossae. I don't think I'll ever be getting back that way again. If we just change your name and you know, maybe get you a haircut and a different outfit, nobody's gonna know you're a runaway slave. And we can kind of protest the system. Just you and me, and you can kind of be my assistant, and you will write and work under this other name. And if anybody from Asia Minor is coming this direction, you know, we'll just send you on a trip and nobody'll know. We're not sending you back. We're not gonna try to reconcile this thing. Slavery is too evil an institution. This is where I, Paul, take my stand. This is my choice. You're not going back, Onesimus. I won't let you. Okay, let's say Paul picked that. Well, what would be the consequence, first of all, for Paul? I don't think much good would come out of that. And here's why. You and I went through all that material from the ancient world about what happens if you harbor a slave. At maximum, I found some evidence, although I now think the evidence is a little bit overstated after having looked into it for myself. I found some evidence suggesting physical punishment, or maybe in some ancient world context, maybe even execution for a person who harbored a slave. That appears to be drastically overstated as an ancient practice. You will see that in a lot of commentaries and writing about Philemon. Like if Paul hadn't sent Philemon back, they could have executed him for slave harboring. Maybe that happened in some other ancient context, but I wasn't able to find any evidence of that happening in a Roman context. So, okay, Paul wouldn't have been executed just for harboring Onesimus as like an automatic punishment, but the law certainly frowned on harboring slaves. You caught that. You caught the whole 20 days to turn a slave around and go and let people know. You caught that there were fines, potential imprisonment if you were to harbor somebody else's slave. If you I didn't read these particular excerpts from you, but there are some Roman laws again from the digest of Ulpian. I think that's where it's from. You know what? Don't quote me on that one. This is why I read you the direct quotes. It's from somewhere in Roman law, but the principle here is that a slave is somebody else's tool that they invest in, and it's kind of like intellectual property. You aren't allowed to profit off of the labor of somebody else's slave. That was a big no-no. So you would have to pay them back. Dang it. I really should have found that quote. That's one that I probably should have read to you. I'll see if I can maybe dig it up later. Maybe I'll forget. I don't know. The point is, that is in there. And think about that from Paul's perspective. If Paul says, I'm not sending Onesimus back, this isn't happening. You're staying with me, pal. We're gonna make a little club, we're gonna call ourselves the OP, or maybe when Peter's here, OPP, and it's gonna be fantastic and everybody's gonna love it. Bros forever. That's not gonna go over very well because as soon as anybody figures out that Onesimus is a freed slave, and I do get the impression from the ancient sources that they would eventually figure it out. I think it was pretty hard to permanently run away and just build a Jean Valjean-like new freedman, escapy, responsible social, civil life. As soon as somebody figured out what was going on here, I think Paul was going to become economically liable for any work that uh they would have imagined that Onesimus would have performed for Paul. So he's gonna be racking up a pretty big debt here, which maybe Philemon would have forgiven under those circumstances. But I mean, if Paul's lying to Philemon, somebody he's in correspondence with, and Paul is never like, oh, by the way, like craziest thing. You remember Onesimus? I ran into him the other day as a Christian now. Like if Paul does just doesn't ever mention that in his correspondence with his friend who he loves, Philemon, I don't think Philemon's gonna feel so forgiving when he finds out that Paul was using Onesimus' labor for himself. And I have a feeling Philemon then would revert to his Colossian programming from ancient attitudes about slavery formed by the Phrygians, the Lydians, the Sumerians, the Persians, and all the different groups that came through there. I think Philemon's gonna revert, and he's gonna be like, no, there are laws for this, you owe me in a civil sense, and the Roman authorities are going to enforce that. Economically, I don't think it would have been a very shrewd move for Paul to try to lock down onesimus and keep him around and try to lie about who he was. Also, Paul is doing this whole transparency thing, right? Like he's doing the I am above your accusations of illegality. The accusations against Paul at the end of Acts are as dumb and weird and vague as the accusations against Jesus at the end of the Gospels. The accusations against Paul are like he defamed the temple. How so? Yeah, we couldn't really say ye, Paul caused disruptions. Oh, really? Did he like riot or stuff? Well, no, we did to prove how disruptive he was. But look what he made us do. I mean, those are the kind of stupid accusations that are floating out there against Paul. He's got the upper hand here. Paul undergoes legal scrutiny many times in his career in Philippi, in Corinth, in Jerusalem itself, then in Caesarea before two Roman governors. And now at the time that he meets Onesimus, he's awaiting trial, I think, in Rome before another authority figure, Nero. But in all of these cases, Paul's been able to be like, hey, one, I didn't do anything. The people who behaved badly and hit others with rocks and had riots and everything else, that wasn't me. That was the people who were accusing me. So I don't know what the problem is here. Two, I'm a Roman citizen and you mistook me for not a Roman citizen. So I am very entitled to certain treatment as a citizen, and my rights have been violated. And three, none of these accusations make any sense. There's no substance to them, there's no clarity, there's no parameters. What are you even accusing me of? Well, if Paul harbors a runaway slave, even if it's his buddy's runaway slave, and even if it's because the runaway slave is a Christian now, so it's totally cool, bro. That's really bad for Paul. Because now you got a charge that'll stick. Now you have a charge that is justified. Now, should the law exist? Well, come on, I'm doing the disclaimer thing again. You know that, in my opinion, slavery is bad. Whew, that's the most profound moral statement of my entire life. It's so stunning and brave on my part to hold such a bold position. I don't like slavery, I'm against it. I think it would be just great if somebody in the ancient world had been like, we are going to just fast forward the economy 2,000 years and suddenly it's going to function in such a way that slavery wouldn't even make sense anymore. And we're just going to abolish it everywhere with one fell swoop. But that didn't happen. And after learning a lot more about how all this worked and after studying the ancient world for a very long time, I don't see how any kind of meaningful empire-wide abolition movement could have possibly taken root, let alone be effective. I don't think there was any shrewdness or any upside here to Paul planting his flag on this point and being like, well, I was an ambassador of the gospel sent to do something that I was uniquely commissioned by Christ to do, but I've decided instead that the thing I want to use my one shot on here is defeating slavery in the ancient world. I don't think that's shrewd. I don't think that would have been a good trade-off for Paul. And yes, I do think as it pertains to that question, he was at a crossroads. I know there are some of you right now are going, come on, Matt, like why why why not both? Why couldn't both things be true? Why couldn't he crusade against slavery in the ancient world from his prison in Rome awaiting trial before Nero? And also advanced the gospel to the Gentiles and found churches. Well, we've talked about it quite a bit. You've got a pretty good sense of how precarious Paul's mission was, how he was always hanging by a thread and just one millimeter from getting hit with rocks or killed or arrested or whatever. Finally, it caught up with him. He gets his head taken by Nero just a few years after Philemon is written. No, I'm pretty familiar with Paul and the situation. I don't think he could fulfill both objectives. I think the one was in conflict with the other. And I think Paul picked the right one. The more we talk about this, the more clear it becomes that this Onesimus thing is not a little footnote story in the account of Paul and everything we find out about the church in the Bible. This is a huge deal. There's a lot at stake here. And going through this exercise is helping that come into clearer focus for me. I don't want to stop, but there are time limits to this thing. So it's going to take one more day to work through fully the question of what if Paul hadn't sent Onesimus back from Paul's perspective. What were the implications for him? So we're just going to pause here and I'm going to pick up right where we left off next time around. I'm Matt, this is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.