Hello, my friends. It's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. And today is a final day on the Book of Philemon. This is the end of season six, episode 80. We got 80 episodes out of Philemon. How did that happen? I know how it happened. We talked about a lot of history. We talked about a lot of slavery. John won't be like that. John is the next season. It starts on Monday. That'll be season seven of this podcast. The Gospel of John is going to be a blast. And we're going to hit the ground running on Monday. Just start with the text and start working through it. If you listen to this whole season, it's going to really benefit you because we're going to lean a lot on the history stuff that we did on the front end of this Philemon season when we get over there into John. That would be a great season to invite people to jump in with, especially people who aren't Christians. I know there's a ton of you who aren't sure what to make of the whole God thing, Jesus thing, Christian thing, Bible thing. But you're here and you find this interesting, and I find that massively commendable. And, you know, look, I'm not going to be shy about it. I hope you become Christians. I think it's true, or I wouldn't be wasting my time on this. I think there's life in it. I think it makes sense of this life, and I think it makes sense of the next. And so, yeah, I commend you for where you're at on your journey with all of that. And I hope you stick with it. And I think you will particularly appreciate what happens in the Gospel of John. So I thank you in advance, all of you, for being here, for considering going with me for another season into John. And even if you decide, nah, nah, I'm going to tap out here. Okay. Well then before we get to the material here on our last day of Philemon, then let me just say thank you. And I hope I see you around the internet, or maybe back here down the road for another season. But thank you for doing this one with me at the very least. Okay. We got some big questions though, hanging out there still on Philemon. We're not done here. Maybe the biggest and most obvious question is well, what the heck happened? We set up this whole Kobayashi Maru problem, right? All the way back to the very beginning. In Star Trek, the Kobayashi Maru is this unsolvable test that can only be fixed by Captain Kirk, who broke the rules and thought completely outside the box. He applied a completely different set of ground rules to this unsolvable test, and in doing so, he broke the code and he solved the unsolvable riddle. Well, has Paul done that here? It's a pretty tough conundrum. What happened with a runaway slave leaving Philemon and ending up with Paul and then becoming a Christian? And Paul's in jail, and Nero kind of wants to kill him, maybe, and Rome isn't sure what to make of him, and Paul really can't appear a brigand, but also Paul loves Onesimus, and Onesimus is a big help to him. But also Paul probably needs to send Onesimus back to Philemon for the sake of the church and for the sake of Philemon. I mean, it's really, really difficult. And Paul has got 25 verses to do something about it. And well, now you and I have carefully gone through all that and seen Paul's Captain Kirk style solution to this metaphorical Kobayashi Maru. And I think he did a great job. But it kills me that we don't get the resolution in the Bible. Now, okay, it sounds like I'm criticizing God for the Bible. I let me just clarify. God, I think you have done a spectacular job on the Bible, and I have no notes, but I do have curiosity. I'm invested in the characters. I want to know what happened. So I did a little bit of digging on it, and this is what we know about the fate of Philemon after the Bible. Nothing. Dang it, I set that all up. You thought it was going to be great, and then it wasn't. Now we got some way later traditions that say that he became the bishop of Colossae. I mean, that seems believable to me for reasons that we'll discuss in a minute, but nah, we got nothing. No early tradition, no hints, no clues about Philemon or his household, nothing. Okay. What about Onesimus? Well, Onesimus is a problem because Onesimus was an incredibly common slave name. Remember, it just means useful. I mean, that's the kind of branding that slave traders would slap on slaves left and right to try to get people to buy them from the hinterlands beyond the boundaries of the Roman Empire. When we see the name Onesimus appear in history around this time, the details of the lives of these people, it doesn't line up. It's almost surely not the same guy. There is one guy, though, who maybe is the Onesimus we're thinking about, and I would say more than maybe. I would say more likely than not, this Onesimus is the Onesimus we have come to know and love this season. And he's a guy who gets mentioned in the early second century in the writings of Saint Ignatius. He writes a letter to the Ephesians in 110 A.D., and in it he greets a bishop named Onesimus. I received, therefore, your whole multitude in the name of God through Onesimus. That's the line. Well, there's a whole bunch of people in the early church, and there's a whole bunch of people now who think that bishop is our Onesimus. That would mean Onesimus was, you know, a pretty young man, like maybe what, late teens, early twenties when he decided to run away. I mean, well, that's an age where one might feel the call of the wild and try such a thing without understanding all of the implications. It's also an age where somebody could be perfectly intellectually developed enough to be really of service to the cause of Paul and the gospel. And if that was the case, that would put him as being born around 50 A.D. So let's say Onesimus was no, it would have to be a little bit earlier. Let's say he was born around 45 A.D. So for him to be greeted in a letter, why did I not crunch these numbers before I turned on the microphone? For him to be greeted in a letter in 110 AD by Saint Ignatius, that would be well, yeah, that's no, that works. That works. That would put him at just 65 years old at the time of Ignatius's letter that identifies him as uh the bishop of Ephesus. Oh. Okay. Well, that's about a good time in life to be a bishop of a place. You know, you got a few miles on the tires and stuff. Maybe Philemon at that time would have already passed away. If not, I mean, what a crazy thing that would be if those later church traditions about Philemon are true, and both he and Onesimus were bishops at the same time, just a hundred miles apart in Ephesus and Colossae. That'd be pretty cool. It's fun to imagine what those meetings were like, right? If that did happen, you know, they get together, yeah, we'll meet in Laodicea. And they sit down at a pub or something there and talk shop about what's happening in church and both of their towns and laugh about the good old days. Do you remember when I showed up that time with that letter? Oh yeah, oh yeah, yeah, buddy. I I remember as a pretty notable day. Yeah, I think about that a lot. Kind of weird that now we're here. Yeah, kind of weird that now we're here. It's fun to imagine. Who knows? Onesimus as a bishop, uh, addressed by Saint Ignatius. I think there is a better than even chance that that is our Onesimus. Philemon, really, who knows? In terms of Colossae, our favorite town for the purposes of this conversation. Well, more flags have flown over it since ancient times. The Roman flag flew over it for a few hundred more years, and then somewhere in there it kind of morphs into what we call the Byzantine Empire flag. It's still Rome, kind of, but it's Rome after it moved its headquarters from Rome in the early 300s AD to what we call modern-day Istanbul. It's a town with three names. In ancient times, it was Byzantium. That's why they call it the Byzantine Empire. But when Constantine moved the Roman capital there, it became called Constantinople. And then later, when another flag flew over Colossae, that being the flag of the Seljuk Turks, the Ottomans, different Muslim groups that came through. Well, then at that point the town became known as Istanbul, which is what it is still called. Colossae was a minor pawn in all of those moves. It continued on its trajectory into decline, while Hieropolis and Laodicea, the two big towns in the Lycus Valley, the two upstart towns, they did really well for a long time. Hieropolis and Laodicea, there's stuff there that you can still go see. Colossae, not so much. If you go and Google excavations at Colossae today, almost all the search results you're gonna get back are just gonna show a hill in a beautiful mountain y valley. That's the Lycus Valley, once again. It's just a mound. However, if you set the filter on your search engine to very recent, you're gonna see that excavations have begun there, and we're starting to find some cool stuff, even stuff that points to maybe the continuing persistence of a little church community there, all the way up until the ultimate demise of Kalasse. And Kalasse's demise wasn't grand or elaborate, it just went away. There wasn't really a reason for it to be there anymore. And a couple little towns popped up, the Turkish town of Honaz. Don't know if I'm saying that right or not. And then there's a reasonably sized city nearby called Denizli. I don't know how big it actually is, but I mean I was looking at it on a map here. Maybe I should say more than reasonably sized. That's a pretty big town. But moment of truth, we did this with the Galatian cities in our last season in the epilogue. I just like the exercise of going to these towns in the Bible, pulling up Google Maps, setting it to English, and searching the word church right over the top of Colossae. I want to see where the closest Christian church is to this old town where the whole Philemon and Onesimus thing happened. Enter. Show me. Oh, interesting. Yeah, there's actually quite a few Christian churches near Colossae, but guess where they all are? Yeah, you guessed it. Hieropolis and Laodicea. There's still, I'm seeing like 20 churches, and some of these are beautiful. Just down the road here where those two upstart cities were. But Colossae, yeah, bummer, you're just a hill and a field. You got you got nothing. There are no Christian churches anywhere near it. But in fairness, there's nothing anywhere near it. Colossae's cooked. Maybe it'll be uh maybe it'll be an awesome site. When it gets excavated, it'll be the kind of thing that everybody wants to go and see, and it'll give it new life again all these centuries later. Okay. Billion dollar question. What do I think happened after this letter? Maybe the better billion dollar question would be, hey, what do you think happened after this letter? I want to know. I want your assessment based on the data of these 80 conversations that we've had. I really want to know what you think. Like I'm I'm straight up asking. I'm soliciting your feedback. Please tell me via email or better yet, comment section so other people can interact with it. We do our conversations at patreon.com slash the tmbh podcast. You don't have to be a member, you don't have to pay anything. You can just sign up and you're in there. It's a great comment section with wonderful people. I'm very eager to hear your thoughts. I might make an entire thread that is just, what do you think happened to Philemon? But what do I think? Yeah, I'll answer that question, me. Here we go. I don't think there's any way the letter of Colossians makes it into the Bible if Philemon doesn't receive Onesimus back at least as a slave in name only. At least as someone who is on a track toward manumission and who is building up the resources needed to succeed as a free man. So I think the dark cloud over the whole situation would have been too thick and too icky for the book of Colossians to make the rounds and become a beloved, cherished book if the whole Philemon Onesimus thing didn't work out well. But I really don't think the book of Philemon would be in the Bible or would have been circulated or would have mattered if Philemon was like, no. And if you'd just taken the letter and just ripped it from top to bottom, absolutely not. And I'm gonna rip it into like a hundred little pieces, and then I'm gonna fling it back in your face, Onesimus, and I'm gonna do the magic fingers thing as they all twinkle down like it's a snowstorm. Heck no. Not only no, but really, really no. Get out of here, pound sand. I say again, if it had played out negatively, I don't think these books make it into the Bible. The fact that you and I can still read the book to me is some of the strongest evidence that it did work out. Also, the fact that Paul's credibility continued on. Well, I think that is a little bit tethered to this situation. Paul laid it on the line here, and I think it worked out. I also think it worked out because I think there's a better than 50-50 chance that Onesimus did become the bishop of Ephesus. Certainly later Christians on into the late classical age and early Middle Ages, well after Ignatius, surely, I mean, the church very much thought that is the Onesimus of the Bible. I just don't know what evidence they were looking at, whatever they were looking at, other than the letter from Ignatius, I don't have. But church tradition says, oh, heck yeah, they worked it out. And Onesimus did become the bishop of Ephesus. Another reason I think they worked it out is because of what you and I did over the last couple weeks of this season, which was just go verse by verse through the book. It's so good. Let me just ask it this way. Would you be persuaded by that letter? I mean, let's assume. I know not everybody here believes in God, you know, but for those of you who would say, Yeah, I'm a Christian, I follow Jesus. Well, if you got that letter from Paul of Tarsus and just swap out Philemon and put you in there for all of it, would you play ball? Would you feel compelled to soften your heart toward Onesimus and reimagine some long-held social assumptions and kind of reimagine how your future and his future would play out? Come on. I bet you would. I would. That would soften my heart. That would get my attention. I would feel a a little bit scolded, a little bit corrected, but all in a way where I get to save face. I'd also feel really encouraged and propped up, and I'd feel like I'd been given a clear direction without being bossed around. Yeah, I think I would have responded favorably to this letter. So, what was that favorable outcome? All right, well, let's consider the possible favorable outcomes. Number one, Philemon just frees Onesimus on the spot. Here's your manumission papers. Let's go, you know, like we found in those primary sources about how manumission worked. Let's go before the tribunal or the council or whatever on the day that they assemble. Let's do the paperwork, let's manumit, let's get this over with as quickly as possible. To you and me, that seems like the best outcome. However, I mean, Onesimus does have nothing. He doesn't own the clothes on his back. He doesn't have a reputation as a free man. He doesn't have property. I mean, he doesn't have a foot in anything. So another possible good outcome would be that Philemon says, Yes, I'm going to manumit you. But first, we have to legally keep you under the shelter of my household as a slave, but you're going to be a slave on a track to manumission, and you're going to be a slave in name only. So you're going to do this work around the house. We're going to start building these relationships with other people in the community. And when you are manumitted, which I think we could pull off and I'm just making stuff up, like a year, you are going to be ready to walk out into success and influence, and you will be far more useful in society if we do it that way. When you consider how horrible the worst cases of slavery in the American South were, you look at that and you understand why the abolitionists and the Republicans in the Congress and the Senate at the time and the 1860s were like, you're just all free. Just done. You're free. The people who were freed, I mean, many of them couldn't read a word. They did not own the clothes on their back. They had nowhere to go. They had no shelter. They had no ability to get food or provide for themselves. I mean, there were some real logistical concerns that you don't think about when you're a college freshman and you know everything, that eventually you get to be an adult and you go, dang, that that was quite the conundrum. Okay, well, I get why the people who looked at that extreme suffering just went with, forget it. You're just, you're all free. Figure it out. I'm not sure that was the most compassionate off-ramp or the most effective off-ramp, given how things played out there over the next several decades. But I don't know, easy for me to judge people from history about what they should have done or hadn't done. I think good outcome number one would be Onesimus was established enough that he could just be manumitted immediately. Good outcome number two would be Onesimus just did not have the standing and it wouldn't have been good for him. But his status as a slave in reality could shift, and there could be a plan to make this thing work. I mean, if he became a bishop, obviously something like that happened. Third possibility, Onesimus continued to be Philemon's slave in a legal sense, but it effectively functioned like employment, with Philemon having no household of his own. That might have been the more desirable option, and it might have been what Onesimus would have asked for if given the option. I know that seems far-fetched given how we think about slavery in more recent times, but in the ancient world, given what you and I went and looked up, that seems like a possible outcome that could occur and would count as a good outcome. Whatever the case, I deeply believe that reconciliation occurred between these two parties. I deeply believe that both of these men went on to have more Christian influence as a result, and more good things came out of it as a result. And I think it's even reasonable to assume that Onesimus went on to do very big things, including succeeding Timothy, quite possibly as the bishop of Ephesus. Last question. What do we do with a book like Philemon? You know, you get done with Colossians or Galatians, and it's like, okay, I kind of think I understand what the take-home point is here. Like some of it's intellectual. You used to think this, but here's the truth about God, think this instead. Some of it is soul-level, heart-level behavior stuff. Like, hey, you used to do crap like this. That doesn't make sense in light of Jesus. Don't do that anymore. Instead, part ways with that dark stuff and walk with the spirit and see the fruit of the spirit manifest in your life. You know, some of it's just very applicable and obvious. But what's the deal with Philemon? Okay, again, none of us, our lives are probably very few of us have had our lives touched by slavery, but all of us have had our lives touched by fallings out that have massive ripple effects. When things go south in a relationship for us, that doesn't happen in a bubble. It always happens in a community, sometimes significantly in a community. It does damage, it sets things askew. And anytime that happens, there is an opportunity. There's a fork in the road. Things can go further down the path of division, or things can get turned around, patched up, accounts squared, and it can do an about face and go down the path of reconciliation. As we talked about yesterday, I think reconciliation is always the ideal. Even Paul, who wrote Finleaman, acknowledges that it isn't always going to happen, though, as much as it's up to you, be at peace with all people. No, I think what we can take from this letter is that, you know, of course, in keeping with the rest of the Bible, forgiveness is automatic. We gotta do it. We don't work on it, we just gotta do it. It's hard, but Christ forgave us. How much more so ought we to forgive each other? I think the much harder thing is the careful, challenging work of reconciliation. And in Philemon, we get a pathway for what that looks like. Whether the role you're playing in a reconciliation is a mediator of a reconciliation, well, here's a great playbook for that. Or someone who, by modern social standards, is the offender in a reconciliation. Well, here's a playbook for how to respond to that. Or whether you are the person in modern considerations who is the offended, well, here's a playbook for how to deal with that. Or maybe you thought you were the offended, but you realize you were the offender. Well, here's a playbook in light of the values of the kingdom of Christ for how to deal with that. Relationship stuff is a big part of where the rubber meets the road of faith. And you look at what Jesus taught, you look at all this stuff in the New Testament. I mean, a lot of it's between us and God, but so much of how our relationship with God plays out is actually manifest in our relationship with others. They are not always going to go perfectly. Mine have not always gone perfectly, and I really care about that kind of thing. My heart is squishy for getting things wrong with people. I don't like to be in that state. I care tremendously about doing right by people and not having people be mad at me. I get kind of easily embarrassed when I feel like I've wronged someone. I get really embarrassed when I don't know what I did, but I know I'm I'm just socially bumbled. That stuff eats at me. And yet, despite it being really on my radar, and despite me having the Bible in front of me every day, and great parents and great friends and a great wife and a great family, I still have damaged relationships that have happened in my life. The ones where I've been able to figure it out are some of the most cherished spiritual faith wins of my entire life, and the ones that are still outstanding burden me. Those are the barnacles that stick to the hole, that slow us down, that hurt, that are there. And I hope for some of those to get patched up, and I hope that for you too. If we walk this world, Christian or not, theist or not, we're gonna have things that go well relationally. We're gonna take the risk of knowing people, loving people, having them love us back, opening up our lives and our hearts to people. We are also going to experience hurt. We're also going to experience breakage. And how much better is it? How blessed is it to experience that in the context of faith in Christ, because Jesus knew it was coming. There's no surprise that from time to time we would get sideways with each other, even really sideways with each other. And it is spoken to in the Bible. It is anticipated and it is spoken to. And Philemon is a really interesting little corner of the Bible that helps to address and tackle those things that gives us this little snapshot into a situation that reminds us that the kingdom is the biggest thing. It's bigger than all the other things. It's bigger than our hurt feelings, it's bigger than our social status, it's bigger than our relational falling outs. It's bigger than our previous assumptions from all the cultures that have come and gone and influenced our lives. The Jesus thing, the kingdom thing, the values of the kingdom, the gospel, that is the big thing over all of it. Even bigger than this seemingly impossible situation we encounter in Philemon. And the bigness of the kingdom, the bigness of Christ is the thing I take from me most of all from Philemon. And with that, I close my desk Bible, and that is the end of our season on Philemon. I hope to see you Monday for the beginning of our new season on John. Thanks for considering giving it a shot. Thanks for doing this with me. I value you so greatly and value this thing we get to do together so much. I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.