An Atheist Explores the Bible Part 232: Just what is it with Paul and bowels? Plus: My Boy Onesimus? (Philemon 1)

Philemon 1
Just what is it with Paul and bowels? Plus: My Boy Onesimus?

Welcome to another instalment of An Atheist Explores Sacred Texts (Bible version).
In this series I work my way chapter-by-chapter through the King James Bible, commenting on it from the point of view of the text as literature and mythology.

For more detail, see the introductory post http://bit.ly/2F8f9JT
For the online KJV I use, see here http://bit.ly/2m0zVUP

And now:

Philemon 1
“For we have great joy and consolation in thy love, because the bowels of the saints are refreshed by thee, brother.”

Again with the bowels. And the bowels get mentioned again in this chapter as well. I wonder if there was some Greek word that got mistranslated? I think “heart” would make a more effective internal organ as a metaphor, but maybe it’s meant to impart the idea of a “gut feeling”. Bowels are more fundamental and (literally) visceral, so the good feelings imparted by fellow Christians in Paul are more like, I don’t know, maybe butterflies in his tummy or something like that?

Anyway, this is a short and strange little inclusion. It’s a letter by Paul, a “prisoner in Christ”, to Philemon, asking him to look after one Onesimus. We don’t know where Philemon is based, but he’s got a little church going there by the sounds of it. Paul is in Rome, so we can perhaps surmise from it, and the general tone of the letter, that he is imprisoned.

Onesimus is referred to as “my son Onesimus, whom I have begotten in my bonds”. The “begotten” suggests a biological son rather than a spiritual one. And, that’s really about it. There’s not anything specific about instruction, it’s really just various roundabout ways of Paul saying “if it’s not too much trouble”. There’s mention at the end in the salutations of Marcus and Lucas, and I wonder if this is a reference to the gospel writers, although neither are particularly uncommon forenames in the Roman world.

There’s really very little else to say here, apart from I wonder what the compilers thought they were trying to impart by including this particular epistle because, of all of them, it seems the most every-day and functional. What is going to be next? Paul’s letter to the grocer?

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