"I Rather Appeal to Auctoritas": Roman Conceptualizations of Power and Paul's Appeal to Philemon

Whether Paul meant to exert his "apostolic authority" in writing to Philemon has been widely debated. Though Phlm 8-9 seems to indicate that he intended to set aside his apostolic authority, many interpreters find that same authority being exerted in the letter in more implicit ways. Does Paul then assert his apostolic authority while simultaneously pretending to renounce it? In this article, I argue that a distinction between auctoritas and potestas, two conceptualizations of power that are well attested in Roman sources, provides a way forward. Paul repudiates what the Romans called potestas, an institutionally based power that emanated from "rights," and falls back instead on auctoritas, a soft kind of power, voluntarily ascribed, and relying more on "influence" than on legal or institutional right. Paul's appeal to auctoritas is shown to have indirect bearing on the question of Onesimus's manumission: Paul never makes this request explicit, because this request is not necessarily being made. Rather, Paul, while trusting in his auctoritas to carry his vision of a "new age" forward, invites Philemon and the church to join in his efforts to bring that vision to realization and to be actively involved in (re) shaping its social institutions, as they interpreted his vision and saw fit to extend it in their various spheres of social existence.