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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadCambridge Greek Testament for Schools and Colleges - Philemon 1:19 - 1:19
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This Chapter Verse Commentaries:
19. ἐγὼ Παῦλος. For these two words see Col 1:23, note.
It is very precarious to argue that this verse makes it probable that the whole Epistle was written by St Paul himself, for although the position of the autograph is certainly unique (cf. Col 4:18 and note), yet he would hardly have said τῇ ἐμῇ χειρί so emphatically in reference to repaying if in fact the whole epistle had been written by him. It is at least as likely that he took up the pen for a minute and wrote this verse only.
ἔγραψα. Epistolary, Phm 1:21. Cf. also ἀνέπεμψα Phm 1:12.
“The aorist is the tense commonly used in signatures; e.g. ὑπέγραψα to the conciliar decrees” (Lightfoot).
τῇ ἐμῇ χειρί, ἐλὼ. The repetition of the ἐγὼ is very fine, both in argument and in proof of love.
ἀποτίσω. Here only in the N.T. but often in LXX. For the meaning “pay back,” as doubtless here, see Exo 21:19; Exo 21:34; 2Sa 12:6; Psalms 36(37):21.
If it be asked whence St Paul would pay back the debt, the answer may lie either in his having some property of his own (cf. Ramsay on his imprisonment at Caesarea St Paul the Traveller, c. XIII.), or in the gifts of the Philippian Christians (Php 4:10-18), or in the possibility of his asking friends to help him.
ἵνα μὴ λέγω σοι ὅτι κ.τ.λ., “not to say to thee that.” The figure of speech known as paraleipsis or praeteritio, in which the speaker pretends to pass over something which in reality he mentions (see Blass Gram. § 82. 9), cf. 2Co 9:4.
A perversely ingenious interpretation takes ἐγὼ Παῦλος … ἀποτίσω as a parenthesis, and contrasts σοί with ἐμοὶ ἐλλόγα. “Put it down to me … not to say thee (as I might fairly say, i.e. to work off part of the debt to me), because” thou owest me much more. But St Paul would surely not have wrecked his sentence by putting his autograph between the two contrasted words.
καὶ σεαυτόν μοι προσοφείλεις. προσοφείλειν here only in Biblical Greek. Thou owest me already as much as Onesimus’ debt, and in addition even thyself. For through St Paul’s means (evidently) he had passed out of the state of spiritual death into full existence, and full ownership of himself.