Onesimus

Onesimus, whose Greek name Ὀνήσιμος means "useful" or "profitable," is known from the New Testament as a slave of Philemon, a Christian of Colossae in Phrygia in the Roman province of Asia. The principal source for his life is the brief Epistle to Philemon, written by the Apostle Paul during one of Paul's imprisonments in the mid-first century. According to that letter, Onesimus had run away from his master and, in the course of his flight, had come into contact with Paul. Paul converted him to the Christian faith and thereafter spoke of him as his child, begotten in chains. Playing on the meaning of the name, Paul wrote that Onesimus, who had formerly been useless to Philemon, had become useful both to Philemon and to himself. Under Roman law a runaway slave could be punished harshly, even by death, and a person who harbored a fugitive slave could also face legal consequences. Paul therefore sent Onesimus back to Philemon, carrying the letter in which Paul asked Philemon to receive him no longer as a slave but as a beloved brother, to welcome him as he would welcome Paul himself, and to charge any wrong or debt to Paul's own account.

The same man is mentioned in the Epistle to the Colossians, where Paul calls Onesimus "the faithful and beloved brother, who is one of you," and indicates that he was traveling with Tychicus as a messenger to the Colossian church. That notice confirms his origin in the Colossian community and suggests that the two letters were dispatched together. Nothing in the New Testament states what Philemon actually did, whether Onesimus was manumitted, or what became of him afterward. The letter itself, however, was preserved by the church and later included in the New Testament canon, which implies that it was valued and that the appeal it contained was not without effect. Modern interpreters have read the epistle variously as a request for manumission, as a plea for reconciliation without necessarily ending the legal status of slavery, or as a carefully worded intervention in a household crisis; the text itself does not settle these questions.

Later Christian writers and liturgical traditions supplied a much fuller career, though these accounts rest on sources of the second century and after and cannot be confirmed historically. Ignatius of Antioch, in his letter to the Ephesians composed early in the second century, refers to the bishop of Ephesus as Onesimus and praises his charity and leadership; subsequent tradition often identified this bishop with the Onesimus of Philemon, an identification that remains possible but unproven. The Apostolic Constitutions, a fourth-century compilation, name an Onesimus as bishop of Beroea in Macedonia. In the East he has also been numbered among the Seventy Apostles and identified with Onesimus of Byzantium, listed in some catalogues as the third bishop of Byzantium in the mid-first century, after Stachys and before Polycarpus. Western hagiography, as reflected in the Roman Martyrology, holds that he succeeded Timothy as bishop of Ephesus and that he was eventually brought in chains to Rome and there stoned to death for the Christian faith. Other notices speak of beating or stoning at Rome or at Puteoli, and place the martyrdom under Nero, Domitian, or Trajan, yielding proposed dates that range from the late 60s into the early second century.

Because the later biographies disagree with one another and depend on hagiographical rather than contemporary historical testimony, the only securely attested facts remain those of the New Testament: that Onesimus was a Colossian slave who fled, was converted by the imprisoned Paul, and was sent back to Philemon with a letter urging that he be received as a brother. He is venerated as a saint in the Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and some Protestant churches. The Roman Catholic feast day is 16 February; the Eastern Orthodox Church commemorates him on 15 February and again on 22 November together with Philemon, Apphia, and Archippus. His story has long been cited in Christian discussion of slavery, reconciliation, and the transformation of social relationships within the church, even while the details of his later ministry and death remain beyond historical verification.