I guess but I think it's very progressive for 2000 years ago. Can you imagine the master and slave relationship completely dissolved by Christian love for their fellow man?

@brentan I am not sure that was what Paul was suggesting. I always took it (and I think my religious teachers took it) that he just didn't want Philemon to beat Onesimus, to consider him not JUST a slave but also a brother. But Paul was also returning Philemon's property to him. ("No longer as [just] a bondservant but more than a bondservant". So he was still a slave. Like a bondservant with extra features. Uck.

Now we can still salvage from this that Onesimus' conversion allowed Paul to appeal to his Christian master for clemency / leniency / kindness, but that has less to do with Christianity itself than with the fact that master and slave now had something in common -- their faith. As if the fact that they had their humanity in common already wasn't enough to make Philemon question the morality of what he was engaging in.

So no, I can't see this as a moral advance. Even the NT advises slaves to be good slaves, and masters to be good masters ... the most you can say is that it would create a less inhumane institution of slavery.

But then this would all be familiar to modern liberal centrists / incrementalists, who want to get the "doable" done, not actually fix anything. To think only the thinkable, not move the Overton window.

@mordant That sums up the situation very well, I think. The only thing I would add, and I think it's important, is that Christians believed the end was coming within a generation of Jesus' death. For that reason, I feel Paul was saying make the best of a bad situation while they wait for the Kingdom to come and sort out all the world's problems.

@brentan That is quite plausible. 2000 years and still waiting, eh?

@mordant It is a hell of an extension on what was to be about 40 years. I think the extension has always been based on maths done on prophecies from the book of Daniel.