Library › Latin: Early Christian Writings › Philemon
The Letter to Philemon is the shortest of Paul’s letters, a single chapter written from prison to a Christian householder named Philemon. Paul sends back Onesimus, a slave who had left his master and then become a Christian through Paul, and asks Philemon to receive him ‘no longer as a slave but as a beloved brother’. The Latin text is the Vulgate version, a late fourth-century revision of the Old Latin translation of the Greek.
Though brief and personal, Philemon is one of the undisputed letters of Paul and shows his tact and warmth in a private appeal. It has been read ever since as a test case for early Christian attitudes to slavery, and the Fathers, including Jerome, defended its place in the canon against those who thought so slight a letter unworthy of an apostle. In Latin it offers a compact specimen of the language of the Vulgate epistles.
About this edition. The Latin text comes from the Lasciva Roma collection of additional Latin texts (edition: Jerome's 405 a.d., Latin Vulgate These files were produced following modern scholarship of the available Vulgate mss. The apocryphal books are prefixed with…), licensed CC BY-NC-SA. Every word has been analyzed with LatinCy, a neural language model for Latin — click or tap any word for its dictionary form, part of speech, and complete morphology, together with the full entry from Lewis & Short’s A Latin Dictionary.