What Does Philemon 1:5 Mean?

(5) **Thy love and faith, which thou hast toward the Lord Jesus, and toward all saints.**—This description of a faith directed not only to the Lord Jesus, but to all the saints, has perplexed commentators, and called out various explanations. (1) One is that “faith” here (as in Romans 3:3; Galatians 5:22) is simply fidelity; but this can hardly be accepted as an explanation of so well-known and almost technical a phrase as “faith toward the Lord Jesus Christ.” (2) Another, noting the distinction in the original between the two prepositions here—the former (*pros*) signifying direction towards, and the latter (*eis*) actual contact with, its object—explains the phrase as signifying “the faith which has as its object the Lord Jesus Christ, but which shows itself practically towards all saints.” But this, even if the word “hast” will bear this gloss, seems too artificial for such a Letter as this. (3) The comparison with the contemporaneous Letter to the Colossians—where we read, “your faith in the Lord Jesus, and your love toward all the saints” (Colossians 1:4)—seems to clear up the matter. We have here an equivalent phrase, in which, however (by what the grammarians called *chiasmus*)*, *the extremes and means correspond to each other. The idea which runs through the Letter is Philemon’s “love to the saints.” In writing of that love St. Paul cannot refrain from (4) referring it to its true origin—the faith towards the Lord Jesus Christ. Hence the broken phrase. The sense seems therefore to be that which in some MSS. has been brought out by a natural correction, “thy faith towards the Lord Jesus, and thy love to all the saints.”