Philemon

The Epistle to Philemon is a prison letter from Paul of Tarsus to Philemon, a leader in the Colossian church. It is one of the books of the New Testament of the Christian Bible. The epistle is the most important early Christian writing dealing with forgiveness.It is now generally regarded as one of the undisputed works of Paul. It is the shortest of Paul's extant letters, consisting of only 335 words in the original Greek text, and twenty-five verses in modern English translations.
Paul, who is apparently in prison (probably in either Rome or Ephesus), writes to a fellow Christian named Philemon and two of his associates: a woman named Apphia, sometimes assumed to be his wife, and a minister named Archippus (see Colossians 4:17). If the letter to the Colossians is authentic, then Philemon must live in Colossae. As a slave-owner he would have been wealthy by the standards of the early church and this explains why his house was large enough to accommodate church meetings (v. 2). Paul writes on behalf of Onesimus, Philemon's slave. Beyond that, it is not self-evident as to what has transpired. Onesimus is described as having been "separated" from Philemon, once having been "useless" to him (a pun on Onesimus's name, which means "useful"), and having done him wrong.
The dominant scholarly consensus is that Onesimus is a run-away slave who became a Christian believer. Paul now sends him back to face his aggrieved master, and strives in his letter to effect reconciliation between these two Christians. What is more contentious is how Onesimus came to be with Paul. Various suggestions have been given: Onesimus being imprisoned with Paul; Onesimus being brought to Paul by others; Onesimus coming to Paul by chance (or in the Christian view, by divine providence); or Onesimus deliberately seeking Paul out, as a friend of his master's, in order to be reconciled.
There is no way of knowing what happened to Onesimus after the letter. Ignatius of Antioch mentions an Onesimus as Bishop of Ephesus in the early second century. It was suggested by some Bible scholars in the 1950s that these two Onesimuses are one and the same, and further that Onesimus could have been the first to compile the extant letters of Paul, including the letter that gave him his own freedom as an expression of gratitude. This is a pat explanation for why the oblique letter is included in the New Testament alongside letters of much greater theological import, but presently it is only a conjecture.