Philemon, Archippus, Onesimus and Apphia

The household at Colossae

Philemon (Greek Φιλήμων) was a man of substance in Colossae, a city of the Lycus valley in Phrygia, converted with his wife Apphia (Ἀπφία) through the preaching of the Apostle Paul. The New Testament preserves their memory in a single document of extraordinary intimacy: the Epistle to Philemon, addressed by Paul "to Philemon our dearly beloved and fellow labourer, and to our beloved Apphia, and to Archippus our fellow soldier, and to the church in thy house" (Philemon 1–2). That last phrase fixes the character of the household — like many of the earliest Christian communities, the Colossian believers gathered for prayer and the breaking of bread in Philemon's own house, which the tradition remembers as made over wholly to the service of the Church and to the care of the sick and the destitute.

Archippus, named third in the letter's greeting and charged in the sister Epistle to the Colossians to "take heed to the ministry which thou hast received in the Lord, that thou fulfil it" (Colossians 4:17), is held by the Byzantine tradition to have been the son of Philemon and Apphia. The commission laid on him — and Paul's soldierly epithet — mark him out as an active minister of the Colossian church, and he is numbered, with his father, among the Seventy Apostles sent out by Christ (Luke 10).

Onesimus, the runaway slave

The occasion of the Epistle to Philemon is Onesimus (Ὀνήσιμος, "useful"), Philemon's slave, who had run away — the tradition and most readers of the letter add, after some theft — and made his way to Paul, then a prisoner. Paul converted and baptized him, and sent him back to his master carrying the letter, in which the Apostle asks Philemon to receive the fugitive "not now as a servant, but above a servant, a brother beloved" (Philemon 16), playing tenderly on the slave's name: "which in time past was to thee unprofitable, but now profitable to thee and to me" (Philemon 11). The letter is the New Testament's most sustained meditation on the transformation of a worldly bond into a bond in Christ.

Onesimus went on to a long life in the Church. The tradition, supported by the mention of "Onesimus, a faithful and beloved brother" in Colossians 4:9 and by a notice in the letters of Ignatius of Antioch, makes him afterward bishop of Ephesus, and he ended his life a martyr under Trajan. Because his veneration is distinct and his repose falls later, Onesimus keeps his own principal commemoration on February 15, where his full life is authored; he is remembered with Philemon's company here and named in the day's kontakion.

Apostolic labours and the see of Gaza

Beyond the Scriptural record the synaxaria relate that Philemon and Archippus, with Apphia, gave themselves to the spread of the Gospel through Phrygia after Paul's departure. A widespread strand of the tradition, followed by the OCA, makes Philemon bishop of Gaza — a memory that sits awkwardly beside his firm attachment to Colossae and is best understood as recording a wider apostolic ministry rather than a settled Palestinian see. The whole Colossian household is presented as a single missionary enterprise: preaching, catechising, and maintaining the house-church that was the community's centre.

Martyrdom

The martyrdom is placed under Nero (54–68). The account relates that during a pagan festival — the feast of Artemis in the Menaion tradition — an enraged crowd burst into the house-church while the Christians were at prayer. Most fled; Philemon, Archippus and Apphia stood their ground and were seized and dragged before the prefect of the city. Archippus was beaten and stabbed with knives by the mob and died of his wounds on the way to judgment; Philemon and Apphia were stoned to death by the prefect's sentence. The Byzantine hymnography for Archippus, however, sings of his own death by stoning ("thou didst receive the stoning as a precious adornment"), a small divergence from the prose synaxarion that is noted here rather than resolved.