Philemon 1:17

Philemon 1:17. If thou count me therefore a partner. It has been usually accepted that the apostle uses ‘partner' here in the same way in which (2 Corinthians 8:23) he speaks of Titus as his partner and fellow-labourer in the mission to the Corinthians: a sharer in the same Christian privileges, and a helper in the same Christian work. But there occur in this passage so many words which savour of mercantile language, that it seems not unlikely that St. Paul, who was at one time a partner with Aquila and Priscilla, had held some business relation towards Philemon, and that there were money dealings between them, a debtor and creditor account. If this were so, he could with greater confidence add the remainder of the sentence.

receive him as myself. The verb in classical Greek is not uncommonly used of the acceptance of any one as a colleague or partner, and so St. Paul would be asking that Onesimus should be put on the same footing as himself, having previously been taken by the apostle as a ‘child' of his own. The child might fitly be a sharer in the same matters as his lather. To take this as the sense, seems more appropriate to the context than to suppose the apostle merely to say, ‘If thou holdest me as a fellow-labourer in Christ, take him back into the same fellowship.'