Paul's letter to Philemon: who made the first copy?
How bringing the epistles to life onscreen gets me thinking about the way those epistles were transmitted in the first place.
One of the things I love about Bible films is how they can make you think about aspects of a story that you never thought about before, just by bringing that story to life.
Case in point: ten years ago I discovered Life of St. Paul (1938), a series of British short films that dramatize, well, the life of St. Paul, and one of the things that jumped out at me—which I noted at the time—was the scene in which Paul dictates his letter to Philemon. In this scene, Paul is preparing to send a runaway slave named Onesimus back to his former master (i.e. Philemon)—and because both slave and master are converts to Christianity, Paul is asking Philemon to receive Onesimus “no longer as a slave, but better than a slave, as a dear brother.” Along the way, Paul drops strong hints that he will be checking on Philemon to make sure that Philemon has treated Onesimus well (“And one thing more: Prepare a guest room for me…”), but it wasn’t until I saw this film that I really registered the significance of the fact that the letter ends with five of Paul’s colleagues sending Philemon their greetings.
Framed as they are in the shot above, you really get the impression that Paul is letting Philemon know that there are witnesses to this letter, and that fellow leaders in the faith will be holding Philemon accountable for his treatment of Onesimus. In the past, I had never really noticed the greetings at the end of Philemon, because there are greetings like this in most of Paul’s letters—but in this case, the greetings take on a whole other dimension, and it was this film that made me aware of that.
I mention this today because I just finished writing a short encyclopedia entry on the few films I’m aware of that have handled the Philemon story, and I found myself thinking about something else this time: Specifically, I began to look at images from at least two of these films of Philemon holding his letter from Paul, and I began to wonder who made the first copy of that letter.
Think about it: The rest of the New Testament was written to be published. The gospels were written to spread the good news about Jesus. Paul wrote the bulk of his letters to entire church communities, and the advice he gave them was, of course, applicable to other communities too. Even the pastoral letters, while addressed to specific individuals, were share-able in the sense that their advice was applicable to other church leaders. But the letter to Philemon is purely personal.
And that means someone, at some point, decided to take Paul’s personal letter to Philemon and make a copy of it, and then another copy, and then another copy—and those copies were then shared with other people, and other people, and other people besides that, until finally one copy ended up in our New Testament canon.
This fascinates me. I see those images of Philemon holding his letter, and I wonder how long Philemon kept that letter. I wonder if he stashed it somewhere. I wonder if it was his idea to make those copies. I wonder if it was tucked away in his library somewhere and it was found after he died. I wonder if he gave it to Onesimus as a keepsake of sorts. I wonder if the church in Colossae passed out copies of that letter to celebrate the role Paul played in reconciling two of its members.
We see lots of films in which characters write the books of the Bible. But have we ever seen a film in which someone made the first copy of a book from the Bible? Have we ever seen a film where someone copied one of the passages in which Paul talks about writing in his own hand (I Corinthians 16:21, Galatians 6:11, Colossians 4:18, II Thessalonians 3:17, Philemon 19), and the copyist was conscious of the fact that the passage would now be in his own—not Paul’s—handwriting? (I would so, so hate to have been the person who lost the original copy signed by Paul…)
Anyway. That’s what I happen to be thinking about today. More later, maybe.
P.S.: Regarding the two films I mention above:
Life of St. Paul—the five-part 1938 British production, not to be confused with the twelve-part 1949 American production!—is currently on YouTube and can be watched below; the segments are out of order, but the one about Philemon and Onesimus, which is called ‘Grace of Forgiveness’, begins at the 1:24:22 mark.
The Runaway is a 2006 Arabic film that was also released as an expanded 12-part series called Onesimus: From Slavery to Freedom. I only just learned about it from Larry J. Kreitzer’s Philemon (Sheffield, 2008)—which is where I got the image above—and I do not know how easy it would be to find a copy of the film, but the miniseries version is included on the second-to-last page of this Arab Vision catalogue from 2019.