Though only 25 verses long, Paul's Letter to Philemon has had a profound effect on Christian history and thought. This brief, enigmatic letter focuses on the enslaved figure of Onesimus. Since the U.S. Civil War, biblical scholars have focused on historical-critical investigations of the epistle's first-century context and the reception of this letter in the Antebellum South.
Little work, however, has been done on how Christians imagined Onesimus between the 1st and the 19th centuries or after the Civil War. In this book, Chance E. Bonar offers a reception history of Onesimus from the first century until today. In doing so, he highlights unknown and underexplored aspects of Onesimus's presence in late ancient and medieval Christian memory and storytelling, particularly through the martyrdom tradition that emerged and developed around Onesimus by the seventh century. Onesimus started out as a historical enslaved person in the first century, but quickly became a biblical literary character whom later Christians used as a site for crafting their own discourses about slavery, mastery, and piety. Bonar's argument sheds light on the expansive Christian storytelling about Onesimus that took place in the eastern Mediterranean and the Horn of Africa in late antiquity and the medieval period--stories that were unknown or lost to later Anglophone Bible readers--as well as how Onesimus has continued to be a literary and theological resource for writers well into the 20th century.
In doing so, Bonar demonstrates the value of apocryphal Christian traditions to our modern understanding of a biblical figure. Although Onesimus, as an enslaved person, was marginalized and invisibilized even in Paul's letter to Philemon and in Antebellum biblical interpretation, Bonar's book highlights how later Christians constructed stories about Onesimus as a martyr, saint, bishop, and missionary worth memorializing.
