The mainstream consensus is that only seven letters of the thirteen attributed to Paul in the New Testament are authentic: 1 and 2 Corinthians, 1 Thessalonians, Romans, Philippians, Galatians…and Philemon; while the rest are either forgeries (Ephesians, Colossians, 1 and 2 Timothy, Titus, and 2 Thessalonians) or misattributions (Hebrews is often listed as a fourteenth Pauline letter, but it does not even claim to be, and in any case also isn’t by Paul). I have long been on the fence about Philemon myself. But since it has no content of relevance to anything I’ve published to date, I’ve not looked further into it; I just cite the consensus for convenience, sometimes footnoting the caveat—as I did in On the Historicity of Jesus:

There is a plausible case to be made that Philemon is a forgery, based in part on the fact that it looks a lot like a letter written by Pliny the Younger almost a century later (Letters 9.21): Robert Price, The Pre-Nicene New Testament: Fifty-Four Formative Texts (Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books, 2006), pp. 467-69 (however, Price’s assumption, in note c on p. 469, that a self-referencing inscription is telltale of forgery, is refuted by the fact that I have seen such things in actual letters recovered from the sands of Egypt, but even with that argument removed, a case for forgery remains, even if not a conclusive one). However that may be, Philemon contains no data relevant to the historicity of Jesus, so it can be disregarded anyway.

OHJ, p. 262, n. 13

Part of the problem is that Philemon is so short and so off-topic compared to the other letters that it can’t be confidently evaluated with any stylometric method. We simply can’t tell whether it adheres to Pauline syntactical, literary, or ideological style.

But now there is a bold undertaking by Christine Hansen, who will soon be publishing a peer-reviewed academic book on the question of Philemon’s authenticity, and she finds in the negative: it probably was not written by Paul. This will be published as The Empty Prison Cell: The Authenticity of Philemon Reconsidered (Wipf & Stock). It was not yet out when I wrote this analysis, so I hadn’t read it [it is available now–ed.], but Hansen did an interview discussing it on History Valley, and I have thoughts.

The General Take

This is likely to be a valuable book on that subject, and one much needed. As Hansen points out herself, the subject tends to be swept under the rug, handwaved away rather than really examined. The consensus today rests mainly on tradition and assumption, with maybe occasionally some weak arguments, but always half-assed. There has not been any serious study done. And skepticism generally is only found in really old works of yore, or in merely brief caveats like mine, where an author will admit the question has not really been settled (already more than will usually be admitted). Hansen has posted a comprehensive bibliography that alone is worth a ticket. The book itself I expect to be even more useful in its survey, if not essential.

Two caveats are warranted going forward.

First of all, for now, I can only evaluate Hansen’s discussion in this interview. It’s entirely possible (and reasonable) that she left things out, or over-simplified some things, and that her book is much more precise or more thoroughly argued. Indeed, that is to be expected. So my remarks here should not be taken as an assessment of her forthcoming book. That will certainly contain an abundance of evidence and citations, and an even broader bibliography. Its survey of arguments and evidence is guaranteed to be of value. Even if it happens to err at any point, its comprehensiveness will still make it essential to interact with. And this interview cannot replace that. So my remarks here should not be used to build any straw man of Hansen’s position.

Secondly, as is my usual approach to reviews, I will be focusing on where we might disagree. But Hansen makes a lot of good points that I have little to challenge. Here I will only list the disagreements I do have, but that should not be mistaken for disagreeing with her position or with anything else she argues on this subject. Likewise, on some points I can’t say either way. For example, in the interview, her position on dating Philemon in respect to the chronology of Marcion and Justin was too confusing for me to assess, so I have no opinion on that, other than to note that it is well established that Marcion included some form of Philemon, including some verbatim material, and that’s decades before Justin, so any theory of its forgery must still explain that. Of which fact Hansen is aware.

Overall, I think Hansen has two strong arguments, sufficient to render it more likely than not that Philemon was forged: its emulation of Pliny; and its over-similarity to Colossians (itself a forgery). As Hansen notes, that “could” be explained by Colossians riffing on Philemon (as is the usual theory), but the evidence she references does make less sense on that hypothesis (e.g., “the first five verses of Philemon parallel several passages in Colossians, almost word for word identical, and all in succession,” and such close agreement cannot be found with the authentic Paulines; likewise, Colossians knows an Onesimus and discusses slavery, but does not appear to know anything about the content of Philemon; and in Philemon Paul knows the Colossians personally, but in Colossians he does not; and so on); it is therefore more probable that the author of Philemon either used Colossians as a reference text (or even wrote Colossians, intending Philemon to follow it), and therefore it is more probable that Philemon is itself a forgery.

Likewise, it is well nigh impossible that Pliny even knew of, much less was emulating Paul’s Epistle. The similarities between Philemon and Pliny could be coincidental. It’s just that they are so numerous and particular that this does entail assuming a somewhat improbable coincidence. Or these similarities could be due to both letters belonging to a lost tradition of composing similar tracts (e.g. they could each, on their own, be emulating a pre-Christian letter, pagan or Jewish, or even literary genre of letters), but as we have no evidence of that (it is merely a hypothesis), that again requires assuming something that is not entirely probable, and that improbability commutes to the conclusion. Overall, because these are mere possibilities, I think the similarities with Pliny establish some doubt but not certainty, but when you combine that with the evidence from Colossians, the scales are tipped toward a greater surety that Philemon was forged, albeit still not a certainty. So I consider the case stronger now than when I wrote On the Historicity of Jesus.

Another thing Hansen usefully does is dispel many of the usual apologetics meant to rescue Philemon’s authenticity, such as asking why anyone would forge such a letter. Hansen surveys the many contextually plausible reasons they would, with analogous examples. All of which reminds me of how much her approach resembles mine against historicity, finding many of the same follies: a field over-dependent on assumption and tradition rather than a real study grounding the conclusion; and apologetics meant to “rescue” the conclusion but that are naive or ill-informed or even illogical, yet still require dispelling even though they should never have been credited in the first place. A lot of that consists of faux incredulity (“Please. How could that have happened? Honestly.”), which is educational to correct by actually checking the contextual facts (like how ancient rhetoric and letter forgery actually worked) rather than just making up an objection from the armchair.

So, all that said, I will now isolate the few points on which I disagree with what Hansen said on History Valley. None of which tank her overall case, which I think remains strong, even if these points are removed from it; and many of which might already be corrected or qualified in her book.

How to Tell Weak from Strong Arguments

A weak argument is when some item of evidence looks suspicious, but still has another good explanation. For example, consider the argument that its having an unusual topic and purpose among the other surviving letters of Paul makes Philemon less likely to be authentic. It’s not really that improbable that Paul would write such a letter and later editors like it enough to include it. It’s only a little bit less probable. And that’s weak tea. You can say that this fact slightly reduces the probability that Philemon is authentic, but even after that subtraction, the probability is still quite high. Among arguments Hansen presents that I find weak like this are the letter’s references to Paul’s imprisonment (Phm 9–13, 23–24). I’ll say more about this shortly, but I find that argument weak because all the things Hansen appeals to that are supposed to be very improbable about that, aren’t.

A strong argument is when some item of evidence looks suspicious, and lacks any other good explanation. For example, the particular similarities between Philemon and Colossians and between Philemon and Pliny’s Epistle to Sabinianus, are actually not so probable on any other theory, yet are entirely what we expect if the author of Philemon was using these as sample texts for emulation. Coincidences are almost always inherently improbable (not typical or expected outcomes). And reverse causation (that Pliny used Paul, or Colossians used Philemon) might be more probable than that, but still substantially less probable than the other way around (especially in Pliny’s case; less so, but still substantially, in the Colossians case). Any other theories rest on too many ad hoc suppositions not supported by any direct evidence; so they are all less probable on that account. This leaves a strong case; even if not so strong as to be decisive. You can explain away all this evidence. But it’s hard; it requires leaning on a lot of convenient assumptions (unconfirmed auxiliary hypotheses).

There can also be arguments measuring in between, that are neither strong nor weak. For example, Hansen notes how the names Philemon and Onesimus look conveniently fake. Philemon just happens to have been a famous poet critical of slavery from centuries earlier, and just happens to mean “Niceguy.” Just the sort of character Paul needed to plead his case to about being lenient on a slave. And Onesimus just happens to mean “Useful,” and in fact with the specific connotations of “beneficial, aiding, succouring,” which is precisely how Paul characterizes Onesimus in Philemon. These facts have other good explanations. These were nevertheless real names in common use; and indeed naming slaves descriptively like that was common; and Paul could have intentionally designed his letter’s rhetoric around the conveniences of their names. So, alone, these would be weak arguments. But to have this happen conveniently twice in one letter, and so fundamentally to its purpose (both the primary subject and the primary object of the letter are conveniently named) is not quite so likely. It’s not unlikely enough to make this a strong argument; but neither is it likely enough to make this a weak argument. It’s somewhere in the middle; and it still weighs. And as we stack weak and middling arguments on top of each other and on top of the strong arguments, the case starts to look yet stronger.

For instance: Chrestus, another common slave name, also meant “Useful,” in a slightly different sense (being similar to the nickname “Handy”). It’s even attested as a name taken by free men or kept by freedmen. The same is true of the name Onesimus. It shows up in papyri and was not limited to slaves; there was once even a famous vase painter by that name (who could well have been a slave). It’s very unlikely the legendary bishop from generations later is the same person, but if he wasn’t fictional (invented based on the letter), then that would be another free man or freedman of the name. (For more examples, see note 72, on page 32, of Ryan Lokkesmoe’s dissertation “Finding Onesimus”.)

Roman cognomens, a citizen’s “nickname,” often functioned like this, much like we imagine for Italian mobsters. Cicero, for example, means “Chickpea,” and referred to an ancestor with a funny nose shaped like the nut—so it essentially meant “Funnynose” or “Pugnose” or even “Bignose.” Porcius Festus was a real guy, a Roman magistrate, yet his name essentially means “Happy the Pig” (or “Merrypiggy”), here the cognomen playing on the ancestral sense of the family name Porcius, which means “Piggish” and thus likely itself originated from an ancient cognomen (originally a reference to their occupation or their family character). As an illustration, we have an inscription attesting to a freed slave receiving the trinomen (the three names of a Roman citizen) and keeping their slave name as their cognomen (Titus Flavius Onesimos). But also, because that was such a stereotypical thing to name a slave, it was often a joke name used for fictional slaves in ancient comedies (such as in the plays of Menander).

So, it’s not that there isn’t a good chance these could be real people in Philemon; it’s that such a peculiar double coincidence lessens that chance at least a bit. Another example of this kind of middle-strength argument is that Acts appears to have no knowledge of this letter. We would expect its author to incorporate a story about this Onesimus, one matching or modding or subverting the letter, just as the author of Acts used 2 Corinthians to build-out a revisionist tale of Paul being rescued from Damascus, and rewrote the chronology of Galatians 1–2 to the same purpose (see How Do We Know the Apostle Paul Wrote in the 50s? and How We Know Acts Is a Fake History). But Philemon and Onesimus, and their conflict, and Paul’s attempt to mediate it, never show up in Acts. This suggests Philemon was forged after Acts. That is not a certainty (maybe the author of Luke didn’t like or care about the letter; maybe it wasn’t in his collection of letters). But it carries some measurable weight. Because the omission is not so improbable as to make this strong evidence; but neither is it so probable as to make it weak evidence. It weighs in the middle there.

Roman “Prisons”

One of the arguments that Hansen gives that is quite weak is the claim that Roman prisons were so grim and isolating that it would be impossible for someone like Paul to have actually written letters from them (as one might erroneously infer from, say, the Wikipedia article on Prisons in Ancient Rome); therefore Philemon, purporting to be such, can’t be authentic. This runs aground on the first problem that Paul also wrote Philippians from “prison” yet that letter is well-confirmed to be authentic by stylometry and other metrics (Paul also references prison experiences in Romans 16:7 and 2 Corinthians 11:23; and Hebrews 10:34 and 13:3 reference prison as a known experience for Christian leaders). One then has to “make that evidence go away” by some device—like now complicating your case with an even more difficult attempt to prove Philippians fake or interpolated, without any good evidence of either, which makes that all improbable. And all just to secure this one weak point about Philemon. That looks futile to me.

But a more decisive problem with this argument is that it ignores the reality not only of ancient prisons, but of social class in antiquity. Even today, in our supposedly enlightened times, we do not treat social classes the same in respect to incarceration. The wealthy or connected get things like parole or house arrest, and if incarcerated at all, get to stay in much nicer prisons. In antiquity such social injustice was magnitudes greater. What Hansen describes as the ancient prison experience would mostly only have applied to those classified as humiliores, literally “the lower down,” which essentially meant “the uncultured, the poor,” as opposed to the honestiores, literally “the honorable,” which essentially meant citizens of rank or connection, which could include probably most educated citizens (owing to the increasing inaccessibility of an education to free persons of no rank or connection).

These terms came to designate narrower and more formal categories in Roman law later on, but the concept was already an unofficial reality since days of old, when magistrates had remarkable discretion as to how to classify and treat someone under the law. They didn’t have to follow any strict rule. So an eloquent and educated man of culture would be more able to get the ancient equivalent of “white collar” treatment. Paul was clearly well educated, a skilled rhetor, and probably a Roman citizen. Acts does outright claim this, and though Acts is unreliable, “Paul” is a distinctively Roman name, and this would explain how he kept getting out of scrapes and punishments so easily: citizens could not be executed by non-Roman courts; and had certain rights to call upon even in Roman courts (it’s worth remembering, too, that the author of Acts may have had access to more of Paul’s letters than we do, or letters in their original condition, which would have included Paul’s full name and even dates of composition). When Paul says he is “in chains” or “in prison” it is reasonably possible he means something more like house arrest—like being “the guest” of some aristocrat in their mansion (as indeed depicted in the closing chapters of Acts). This is particularly the case if Paul was in custody only pending an appeal (as is also depicted at the end of Acts), as then his incarceration wasn’t even punitive.

Strictly speaking, punitive incarceration didn’t “officially” exist then anyway; jails were intended for holding people over for trial, while actual punishments were more direct (like fines, beatings, forced labor, enslavement, exile, execution). But this was the Roman Empire, which was basically, if you can imagine it, a multi-continental imperium run almost literally by the mafia. Think of the rough-and-tumble days of the 1970s when even American cops could routinely get away with roughing up suspects and throwing them into horrible cells because their guilt was presumed, or even because they knew they couldn’t convict them but wanted to subject them to some threatening punishment anyway, and exploited the rules of temporary detention to do that. Now imagine the mafia officially ran America, and all progress in principles of social justice since antiquity had never happened.

Needless to say, in that context, your average suspect is not going to be treated well; and the grim jail conditions Hansen describes would be a part of that. But a respectable citizen with a persuasive tongue and whose defense is substantial enough to actually be granted a formal appeal was not going to be seen that way, and so they weren’t going to be treated that way. No grubby jail holes for them. They’d just be confined to a well-appointed room, servants and all. And indeed, they’d have a right to access all the means and materials to write and send letters (even if they were expected to pay for them). They had to make arrangements, after all, if they had to be shipped to another city for the appeal process; and the Roman Empire was almost a Libertarian paradise: individuals were expected to provide for themselves. You were not “appointed” a defense attorney; you had to hire one. You were not simply fed; you had to buy food. You had to write out your own affidavits. And so on.

So when Paul talks about being in prison, using words like desmos (chains, bonds, imprisonment), desmios (one bound or chained, a prisoner), or aichmalôtos (taken prisoner; literally, “captured by spear“), we cannot assume these were meant literally, as if he was continuously held at spearpoint. His being captive under arms was conceptual, just like today. The guards were armed, sure. But they aren’t holding a gun to your neck the whole time. Chains, too, could have been just as conceptual—not literal metal shackles, but “being bound” in the sense of not being able to go anywhere. Maybe there were literal shackles all the same, to hinder any attempt at escape (there’s no way to know; Paul is never that descriptively specific); but they wouldn’t prevent his writing letters, for example.

When in prison in Philippians, Paul mentions needing a replenishment of funds; he thus had means to afford the materials for writing, and it was normal even for the poor to be allowed access to servants and friends to deliver mail and supplies (even if your guards bilked some bribes out of it). Indeed even the grubbiest of lowly prisoners had this much privilege, because it was often only because of family visits that they could even eat when in jail. There was no ordinary condition of solitary. Jails took visitors. They were expected to. That was part of the way the system worked; it’s how prisoners were expected to be fed, how family could help them arrange legal assistance for their case, and how prisoners could continue to manage their outside affairs while awaiting trial.

All the more so for a privileged prisoner of rank (see the discussions of “house arrest” for example in Robinson’s study of Penal Practice and Penal Policy in Ancient Rome; see also Rapske’s study The Book of Acts and Paul in Roman Custody, Keener’s Acts: An Exegetical Commentary, vol. 4, pp. 3425–29, and even the skeptical Pervo’s Acts: A Commentary, pp. 552–53). But even an average prisoner could dictate letters to a slave, friend, or kin (or indeed a hired scribe—there was a whole industry available for the purpose) through the bars or door of their jail, even through a window. No one had to “smuggle” letters past guards, as Hansen incorrectly claims. At worst, they’d have to “unofficially” pay the guards a copper or two. But it would not be usual that sending and receiving mail would be forbidden. Even for the poor; more so the privileged, like Paul. So there isn’t really any case to be made that Paul couldn’t compose and send letters.

The argument one might then advance is to question how Paul could be allowed to write letters to fellow criminals in furtherance of a supposed conspiracy. But this assumes too much about what Paul was even incarcerated for. He never actually says. And Acts gives many examples of the kinds of reasons, all of which are far more sketchy than anything so straightforward, such as Jews making accusations against him that, once he gets an audience with a Roman magistrate, are thrown out as not even having any legal basis. This might not be historical, but it might reflect something that was (see my discussion of possibly even Christians getting each other thrown in jail on specious charges in Interpreting 1 Clement’s Supposed Descriptions of Fabulous Murders, a situation that Paul actually seems to mean in Philippians 1). Similarly, in the final chapters of Acts, Paul is held in house custody by the ruling elite while being tried for charges that were difficult for them even to parse.

One might look to Pliny the Younger’s trials of Christians for a model, where he has no actual clue what he is even supposed to be charging them with, and on his own comes up with “illegal assembly,” and even then only punishes them when their obstinacy against a test he himself improvised leads him to conclude they must be guilty of something nefarious, whereas everyone else he just lets go. He is subsequently even told by the emperor to leave them alone—while the obstinate and thus “guilty” ones who were citizens Pliny shipped to Rome on appeal, just as Acts depicts for Paul. But so much of Pliny’s treatment was invented on the spot by Pliny, that there is not likely to have been any really close parallel. Still, if something like this is what happened to Paul, maybe then one could say any letters written to other Christians would get them rounded up as co-conspirators—assuming Paul’s correspondence was even being that closely monitored (we have no particular reason to think so), and that his captors even cared (Pliny and Trajan didn’t; they were content to let the matter go, Trajan even orders they not be hunted down, and Pliny was only forced, against his expressed will, to address Christians as criminals accused directly to his face).

But we don’t know that this is what Paul was in for anyway. It’s not likely. Unlike Pliny’s case, this is before the Jewish War, when the Jews still had a treaty with Rome guaranteeing them the protection of their own laws, including the rights of assembly and worship (Josephus quotes these treaties; I discuss them in my chapter on the burial of Jesus in The Empty Tomb). So Paul would not be seen as guilty of illegal assembly; the assemblies he was speaking to, associating with, and even assembling, were legal. Jews had a standing license; and Paul’s mission to the Gentiles would at that early stage have been seen as just a sect of Jews. And certainly, they would have, if brought to court, smartly claimed this; and though Jewish opponents might try to deny it on some technicality, you can imagine what a vague and thorny legal question that would raise, which your typical magistrate then would rather make go away than make hay of—particularly when a treaty violation, and thus the attention of the emperor, was at risk. Such a sharp division and distinction between Jewish and Gentile churches as would matter in court would not arise until generations later (as is evident by the time of Pliny, who has no awareness that Christianity even had any connection to Judaism). So, for example, the idea that these letters are impossible makes sense as a charge against the situational authenticity of the letters of Ignatius; but not against that of the letters of Paul.

So I do not see any useful argument against the authenticity of Philemon on this ground.

Was Paul Starving?

Hansen seems to claim that at the end of Philippians 4 Paul reveals he is starving, and she offers this as evidence Paul was in a grim jail. But that is not what Paul says there. As is typical of Paul, he is being coy and rhetorical. I think Hansen is overlooking how rhetoric worked as a mechanism in ancient speeches and correspondence, and particularly under Paul’s pen. When he says “I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want,” he very conspicuously does not say he is hungry now. He is offering a deliberately vague humblebrag, to exaggerate his condition. When he says that he is currently “in need” he is conspicuously vague about what he is exactly in need of. It is not likely he is starving. He has ink and papyrus and friends to attend him. It is more likely he is voicing what we would today deride as “white people’s problems.” He’s tired of stale bread and gruel and he needs more ink and papyrus, and maybe a better pillow. “Can’t I have fresh fruit!? Am I to starve!?”

So I don’t believe this supports any of Hansen’s assumptions.

Was Paul in an Imperial Palace?

Hansen also gets wrong what the “palace guard” means in Philippians 1:13 (see Wikipedia’s summary of Praetorian Guard for some context). Paul is not “sitting currently with a praetorian guard around him” as Hansen claims. That isn’t what Paul says. He writes that “it has become known throughout the whole imperial guard and to all the rest that my imprisonment is for Christ.” There is no mention of these guards being by his side as he writes, or even in the same room. And Paul does not actually state the place (he says nothing of a “palace”), but only the type of guards. We have to infer that he therefore was being held in such a place. But that need not be: “praetorians” just means the soldiers assigned to the praetor, who can be located or serving anywhere (the actual praetor can be a hundreds of miles away). So we can’t actually be sure from this statement that Paul was being held at the praetorium itself.

Still, any praetorium would be (effectively) a palace. And it would have jails in it—as well as guest rooms for “politely held” elite prisoners. It wasn’t “just” a hall where trials were held, as Hansen could be mistaken to imply. And that could be where Paul was. But there is no assurance of it. All we can conclude is that since praetorians were typically assigned as guards for high ranking prisoners and emissaries, that Paul was classed as of high rank. As he writes he could be literally on the road (at an inn or on a ship), en route to Rome or wherever for his appeal (if anything at all of the narrative ending Acts was based on any truth), or held in some magistrate’s residence in a city or town far from any praetorium. Even there his guards would still be praetorians. So we can’t really tell from Philippians what Paul’s physical situation is, other than that he had a Roman bodyguard of some significant size (he says that it was guarding, and thus possibly holding or transporting, more prisoners than him), and of a type suggesting Paul held a privileged status. I do think his location being a praetorium is reasonable to infer, just not with confidence. We should also remember that Philippians is actually a pastiche of several letters. So it is unclear how much of it was even written from the same situation.

So I don’t see anything relevant to the authenticity of Paul’s letters here, other than the fact that Philippians indicates Paul was indeed being treated as an upper class suspect, and being awarded privileges befitting his class even in custody.

Did Bishops and Deacons Not Exist?

Finally, Hansen unfortunately falls for the unbelievable consensus that “deacons and bishops” were offices only invented in the second century, and thus crediting Paul with references to them is indicative of forgery. This has never been a sound argument. Those were generic terms used in all ancient associations (deacon just means “assistant, servant,” e.g. a “doorkeep”; bishop just means “overseer, supervisor,” e.g. a “manager”). These words were not peculiar to Christianity at all. Since you literally cannot run an international organization for decades and never have officers, these offices certainly existed in Paul’s day. With churches spanning Europe, Asia, and Africa, each of which having to function autonomously, there had to be secretaries and doormen (deacons), and therefore there had to be supervisors (bishops) managing them.

This is confirmed by the authentic Paul himself in Romans 16:1, where he says, “I commend to you our sister Phoebe, a deacon of the church in Cenchreae.” Likewise “bishop,” which isn’t a word anywhere in the Bible (that’s a modern English appellation). The Greek word is simply the generic episkopos, “overseer,” “guardian,” “supervisor.” Since there cannot have been “servants” like Phoebe without supervisors to manage them, we have no reason to believe that this office arose any later than that one. Confirming this is 1 Clement 42, who says these offices were prophetically derived from Isaiah 60:17 (quoting the Septuagint almost verbatim). That is certainly no later than the 60s AD, right on the heels of Paul (likewise the Didache, for those who believe that to be at all early). But even apart from all this evidence, it has always been ridiculous of historians to think that an international organization never thought to invent officials for a hundred years.

I think historians have been (as always) blinded by traditional Christian beliefs “about” deacons and bishops, anachronistically assuming they were uniquely Christian or had uniquely Christian roles (like running an entire church or having authority over multiple churches and even doctrine), rather than considering that these offices developed over time into those Christian roles, but began as ordinary offices common to all associations. In Paul’s day, bishops would not have had any doctrinal role at all, and likely did not run their churches, but were subordinated to the elders who did—collectively. 1 Clement indicates churches then did not have single leaders but were run by committees, which were supposed to be made up of the eldest members. The letter was written to oppose a coup at Corinth where the elders were deposed by a committee of younger members. But that letter never says anything about a single bishop being in charge to which they must defer. It lists bishops only as middle-management; when authorities are appealed to, Clement only names apostles and elders.

With all this evidence together, it seems clear to me that bishops and deacons, so named, would not have been unknown to Paul. This is why in Philippians 1:1 Paul says there are bishops (plural) at Philippi: he does not know of the modern Bishop as the head of a church or diocese, but of ordinary Christians who were merely assigned various management roles. His singling out of bishops and deacons to address in this letter may have to do with the fact that, as officials, they handled the money, and Philippians is principally a letter begging for cash.

So this point I also find to be inconclusive.

The Roman Slave System

In this video Hansen’s account of the intersection of slavery, economics, and Christianity is a bit off. Trying to extract improbabilities from what is recounted in Philemon, she neglects the fact that slaves were not literally chained to the radiator. They actually had considerable freedom to go about town, even travel. In result, many Christians in congregations could be slaves of masters who had no relationship with Christianity; and congregations could arise even within slave households (e.g. a rich person could have, say, forty slaves, enough for, say, ten of them to set up a chapel and start a faith-group). And since the rich could have many slaves, a single rich person in one Christian congregation could bring with them several slaves who also join up.

As Paul attests, “not many” Christians are rich; but that entails “a few” are, and that’s more than one (on the presence of wealthy members in Paul’s churches, see Dale Martin’s The Corinthian Body). Indeed, Paul attests to Christians offering their homes for congregation meetings, which entails households of means, which would include slaves. Similarly, Paul’s letter to the Romans ends with what appears to reference a whole slew of Christians who were slaves (see my discussion in No, Paul Was Not a Relative of the Herods). There was also a middle class (a fact often denied or neglected in the field, but demonstrably a fact nevertheless: I discuss the evidence, and the importance of this social stratum, in The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire). And there would be more of them than “the rich.” And these would be the kind of people who would have, perhaps, only one or two slaves. So slaves (and slaveowners) being involved in Paul’s movement is not even remotely improbable. Likewise freedmen (a fundamental institution under the Romans).

Still, although Hansen is wrong to claim that Paul never mentions slaves, she is nevertheless right that the real Paul had little interest in slavery as an issue. He mentions slavery in Galatians 3:28, for example, which is not about abolition, or political or even social equality, but only equality of access to salvation; as you can tell from his other discussions of slavery, in 1 Corinthians 7:21-24 and 12:13. Likewise Paul appears in company with slaves (as at the end of Romans). In all his authentic letters, slavery is just taken for granted (such as in analogies in Galatians and Romans). All the specific moralizing about slavery comes only in the forgeries (Titus 2:9, 1 Timothy, Colossians, and Ephesians), and it’s all pro-slavery. But even Paul himself is flippant about it, and has no big social plans for the institution. And Philemon is the same. It says nothing about the institution. It’s just one dude proffering a rhetorical speech to persuade one owner to let him keep one slave for his own personal use. This aligns quite well with what we know of Paul. It is therefore not improbable coming from him.

Conclusion

Apart from those quibbles, though, as I noted first off, I think Hansen is assembling a good case to now doubt the authenticity of Philemon. I look forward to her book [which is available now–ed.].