This Hand is Validation: Philemon as a Pauline Holograph

Abstract

AbstractOn five occasions in Pauline literature, the author claims to write in their own hand. In three of the five instances, the autograph is reserved for the final greeting and the greeting alone. In Galatians 6.11 and Philemon 19, however, Paul writes more than the letter's greeting in his own hand, as the comment about his autograph appears well before the closing salutations. This article engages one of these texts, Philemon, and argues that it was written entirely in Paul's hand. The letter was a Pauline holograph. To make this argument, the article first assesses the ‘cheirographic rhetoric’ of Philemon 19. Paul alludes to a type of documentary writing, the cheirograph, that recorded various sorts of financial proceedings. Paul's autographic guarantee recalls validation statements that were integral to this genre of text. Comparanda from the non-literary papyri show that when an author of a cheirograph called specific attention to their own handwriting, the entire document was customarily written in their own hand. The article then turns to the personal nature of Philemon and the abundance of second-person singular forms, arguing that there was a strong preference that personal letters like Philemon be handwritten in Paul's context. Taken together, these two arguments demonstrate that Paul's short letter to Philemon was more likely to be handwritten than dictated.