Sarah Ruden, Paul Among the
People: The Apostle Reinterpreted and Reimagined in His Own Time (New York:
Image Books, 2011) argues that the apostle Paul wants to do more than
emancipate the run-away slave Onesimus because emancipating him may well have
jeopardized the man. (Manumission did not make someone a citizen.)
Paul had a much more ambitious plan than making Onesimus legally free. He wanted to make him into a human being, and he had a paradigm. As God chose and loved and guided the Israelites, he had now chosen and loved and could guide everyone. The grace of God could make what was subhuman into what was more than human. It was just a question of knowing it and letting it happen.The way Paul makes the point in his letter to Philemon is beyond ingenious. He equates Onesimus with a son and a brother. He turns what Greco-Roman society saw as the fundamental, insurmountable differences between a slave and his master into an immense joke (160).
picked up
from Scot
McKnight.
