Arthur of The Ancient and Illuminated Seers of Bavaria writes:
What exactly is the purpose of the Epistle to Philemon? Or more appropriately, why is included in the New Testament canon?
Obviously the central message of "treat your slaves well" was far more important in the Roman Empire 2000 years ago than it is now, but even that doesn’t seem to be enough to include it in canon.
After all the rest of Paul’s epsitles are quite obviously teaching documents and were meant as such, whereas Philemon comes across more as a personal letter from Paul with some advice to a friend about a sticky household problem.
And the fact that it was simply written by Paul doesn’t strike me as sufficient reason to include it either. A man as prolific and erudite as Paul must have written hundreds of similar short notes to people he had met on his journeys, yet they were not saved let alone considered part of biblical canon.
I think there are at least three ways of answering this question. I’m sure there are more, but here are three:
1) The Patristic Answer: In the age of the Church Fathers, anything written by an apostle came to be regarded as an important document of the faith–as Scripture.
While Paul may have written other notes, his reputation in the apostolic age was not everywhere appreciated. Thus, he had a bunch of critics and opponents, even within the Church in his own lifetime. It also was easier to see him as a man when he was still living so that you could still . . . uh . . . see him as a man. Thus he wrote some documents whose value was not fully appreciated in his own day, and they were lost under the providence of God.
This is analogous to those works mentioned in the Old Testament–including prophetic works, like the History of Nathan the Prophet and the Prophecy of Ahijah the Shilonite and the Visions of Iddo the Seer–that were endorsed in the Hebrew Scriptures but were nevertheless lost in the end (cf. 2 Chron. 9:29).
For some reason, in both Testaments, God allowed apparent Scripture to be written that was not destined to be included in the final canon. Presumably these works had "short term missions" and were not meant to have the long term mission of being in the canon.
Or maybe God just allowed us to misuse our free will by losing stuff that would otherwise have benefitted us. (Though I doubt that when it comes to Scripture.)
In any event, had Paul’s other missives not been lost in his own lifetime, they would have been included in Scripture by the Christians of a generation or two later. Anything that had minimal theological content–anything other than a shopping list, let’s say–would have gone in by the time the canon was finalized. Apostolic authorship (plus minimal theological content) was enough for that.
But why did this missive survive when others didn’t?
2) The Individual Answer: In Philemon Paul is basically ordering-without-ordering Philemon to send Paul a slave named Onesimus, who had apparently run away from Philemon and then encountered Paul and become a Christian. Paul writes the letter to try to reconcile Onesimus with his master, but he also orders-without-ordering Philemon to send Onesimus back to him. He may even be hoping that Philemon will give Onesimus to Paul, who oculd then free him.
According to some of early Church writings, Onesimus later went on to become the bishop of Ephesus, and according to others, Philemon was bishop of Colossae. If either one of those is true then, since the Churches of Ephesus and Colossae were involved in the passing on of Paul’s epistles to other churches such that we have both a Letter to the Ephesians and a Letter to the Colossians in the New Testament, we have a route by which Philemon would have been preserved. It would have been important to the bishop of Ephesus or the bishop of Colossae (or both) and thus been preserved and disseminated along with the letters that were sent to these churches, so we have a route of preservation for this missive on the human level.
That still leaves,
3) The Theological Anwswer: While the overt message of Philemon may seem not-that-relevant to us in the 21st century in the developed world, where slavery has been abolished, we shouldn’t read its immediate relevance to us as a test for how relevant it would have been to others.
Slavery–in one form or another, with or without the name being attached to it–has been much more the norm than the exception in world history. It still exists legally in some parts of the world today, and it still exists illegally in others (including the United States). So its message would resonate for many people historically (and even today) much more than it would for most of us.
It would have especially resonated in the early Christian centuries since slavery was still legal at the time and–in fact–Christianity spread notably among the slave class.
Part of the reason for that was that Christianity carried the message of God’s compassion for the slave, which is the central theme of the book of Philemon.
"Treat your slaves well" may seem to be the obvious message of the book from a master’s point of view, but if you think about it from the slaves’ point of view, you get something else: "God loves you and has compassion on you and has given this letter to the Church to give your master a model for how to treat you with compassion and Christian charity."
This kind of message was in marked contrast to the way the religion of slaves was dealt with outside Christian circles. In Roman households, for example, slaves were often encouraged not to worship the gods directly but to show a kind of religious veneration for their masters (presumably this was to keep the slaves from complaining to the gods about what their masters were doing).
The Christian God, by contrast, wanted slaves to have a direct relationship to him, to become his children, to become "the Lord’s freedmen," and to be equal in the Church to their masters. As Philemon shows, God also wants their masters to show them human compassion and mercy even when they have run away from and (apparently) stolen from their masters.
All of this is a very big deal for anyone who has been a slave–and even for many who aren’t, such as people who, while legally free, are economically locked in to their jobs in a way that they cannot reasonably get out of them and go elsewhere for work.
It’s true that Philemon is not a straightforward book of teaching the way many of Paul’s epistles are, which is why it is classed among the "pastoral" epistles. But it shows how to address a pastoral situation in a way that reveals important principles that are of use not just in this particular situation but in others as well.
In this respect it is like a number of books in the Old Testament that represent wisdom literature–particularly Proverbs–that convey advice that contains important principles but that do not deliver straight law or theology.
It seems to me that, despite its brevity and obliqueness, Philemon is a clearer candidate for inclusion in the canon than certain other works, such as Ecclesiastes and Song of Solomon, both of which are so unusual compared to other books of Scripture that their canonicity was doubted in the ancient world.
Still, they contain elements that are the basis of fruitful reflection, and God apparently wants us to glorify him by using our intellects to wrestle with the questions posed by the material, including the question, "Why is this book here?"
