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Onesimus: No Longer a Slave - Recovering Philemon as the New Testament's Forgotten Emancipation Text
Paperback
Publisher: Faithful Witness Press
Published: Aug 23 2026
Pages: 122
Weight: 0.38
Height: 0.26 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
A slave named Useful ran from his master's house - and Paul turned his very name into the undoing of slavery itself.
The letter to Philemon is only twenty-five verses. For centuries the church has treated it as a gentle note about a runaway servant - a footnote tucked behind Paul's weightier letters. Onesimus argues it is nothing of the kind. Read closely, Philemon is one of the most radical freedom texts in all of Scripture: the place where the gospel quietly dismantles the entire theological foundation of human bondage without ever once using the word abolish.
With the precision of the academy and the fire of the pulpit, Rev. Dr. Billy J. Hill walks through Paul's letter phrase by phrase - the wordplay on a slave's own name, the handwritten pledge to pay another man's debt, the stunning command to receive a returning slave not now as a servant, but above a servant, a brother beloved. Along the way he clears away the assumptions the tradition smuggled in - that Onesimus was a thief (the text never says so), that his ethnicity is known (Scripture is silent) - and recovers the man himself, not as an illustration, but as a person the gospel set free.
This is a book the church, and the Black church in particular, has too rarely preached - a text that belongs beside Exodus and the prophets in the great biblical witness to freedom. Rigorous enough for the seminary, clear enough for the pew, and honest enough for this present hour, Onesimus invites the whole church to read one short letter again - and to finally do what it asks. A companion volume to Slaveholding Theology: A 21st-Century Reckoning.
Not now as a servant, but above a servant, a brother beloved. - Philemon 16
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