Onesimus the Apostle

The slave of Philemon

Onesimus enters history as a slave in the house of Philemon, a Christian of substance in Colossae, a city of the Lycus valley in Phrygia whose house-church the Apostle Paul had gathered through his preaching (Colossians; Philemon 1–2). The tradition, following the plain sense of Paul's letter, holds that Onesimus wronged his master and fled — that he had "been unprofitable" (Philemon 11) and, most readers add, had taken something of Philemon's with him, for Paul offers to make good any debt: "if he hath wronged thee, or oweth thee ought, put that on mine account… I will repay it" (Philemon 18–19). A fugitive slave under Roman law faced branding, the mines, or death; and Onesimus, like so many runaways, made for the anonymity of the capital.

Conversion at Rome and the Epistle to Philemon

At Rome — whether arrested and imprisoned, as one strand of the tradition holds, or seeking out the Apostle he had known in his master's house — Onesimus came to Paul in his bonds, and there the runaway was born again. Paul converted and baptized him, and the slave who had been "unprofitable" became, in the Apostle's own play on his name, "profitable" indeed: "which in time past was to thee unprofitable, but now profitable (εὔχρηστον) to thee and to me… whom I have begotten in my bonds" (Philemon 10–11). The Apostle would gladly have kept him — "whom I would have retained with me, that in thy stead he might have ministered unto me in the bonds of the gospel" (Philemon 13) — but chose instead to send him back to his master carrying the letter that bears Philemon's name, so that Philemon's forgiveness might be freely given and not compelled.

That letter is the New Testament's most sustained meditation on the transformation of a worldly bond into a bond in Christ. Paul does not command, though as an apostle he might; he entreats, "for love's sake" (Philemon 9), asking Philemon to receive the fugitive "not now as a servant, but above a servant, a brother beloved" (Philemon 16), and pledging himself surety for the debt. The runaway is returned not to punishment but to brotherhood; the master is asked to see in his slave a son of the same Father. In sending Onesimus home Paul also sent him into the Church's memory, for the letter was kept, copied, and canonised, and with it the name of the slave who became a brother.

From Colossae to the episcopate

The tradition does not leave Onesimus at Colossae. The Epistle to the Colossians, written from the same Roman captivity and carried by the same hands, names him already as one of Paul's trusted messengers: Tychicus is sent to the Colossians "with Onesimus, a faithful and beloved brother, who is one of you" (Colossians 4:9) — the fugitive of the letter now an honoured fellow-worker of the Apostle. From this the synaxaria conclude that Philemon, receiving him as Paul had asked, set him free and sent him back to serve the Apostle, and that Onesimus spent the rest of Paul's life in his company and in the Gospel's work.

After the martyrdom of Peter and Paul at Rome, Onesimus — like the other disciples of the great Apostle — carried the preaching abroad, and the received tradition makes him at length a bishop, ordained for the shepherding of the Church. The most widespread strand, kept by the Greek and Slavic synaxaria and by the OCA, names him bishop of Ephesus, the successor of Timothy in that great Asian see — an office that binds the Colossian slave to the very heart of the Pauline mission. A support for the tradition is found in the letters of Ignatius of Antioch: writing to the Ephesians on his own road to martyrdom (about 107–110), Ignatius opens by praising their bishop Onesimus, "a man of inexpressible love," and rejoices that the church of Ephesus is "worthy of God" in such a pastor (Ephesians 1). Whether the bishop Ignatius greets is this same apostle of the Seventy — then very aged — or a later Ephesian of the same name is debated among scholars; the Church's tradition reads the two as one, and honours Onesimus as the God-bearer's own contemporary in the Ephesian chair.

Martyrdom at Rome

The end of Onesimus is set in the reign of the emperor Trajan (98–117), under whom Ignatius of Antioch also suffered. The synaxarion account relates that the aged bishop was seized for his preaching and brought to Rome, where he was tried before the city's eparch, Tertyllus (Τέρτυλλος). Interrogated and refusing to renounce Christ, he was cast into prison — the tradition specifies eighteen days — and then sent under guard to Puteoli (Pozzuoli, on the Bay of Naples), where he continued to preach and to gather souls to the faith. Recalled at last before the eparch, and found unshaken and still confessing, he was condemned to death: his legs were crushed — broken with clubs or heavy blows, the manner the synaxarion verses fix upon — and under this torment he gave up his soul, about the year 109. The tradition adds that a distinguished woman of the city took up the martyr's body and buried it with honour, and that his relics became a treasure of the faithful.

The day's synaxarion turns his death into an epigram on the whole of his life: "Onesimus stretched forth his legs to be crushed — the legs that had run the noble courses of Paul." The slave who had once fled his master on those same feet had come, in the end, to run the Apostle's own race, and to be broken for the Name.