Five-minute study · Day 176 · Romans 16
Romans 16:16
A word worth stopping on: kiss φίλημα philema
At the end of a letter dense with theology, after fourteen chapters of argument about justification and sanctification and the future of Israel, Paul writes a single instruction that probably caused more practical disruption in the Roman house churches than anything else in the letter: 'Salute one another with an holy kiss.' A kiss. In a room where slaves sat next to their owners, where Jews reclined beside Gentiles, where freedwomen worshiped alongside patrician men. The word is philema.
Word study: kiss
- Greek
- φίλημα
- Pronounced
- philema
- Strong's
- G5370
- Definition
- A kiss. From phileo, to love, to show affection. In the New Testament, used both for the greeting kiss among believers and for Judas' kiss of betrayal.
Philema appears seven times in the New Testament. Five of those are the 'holy kiss' instruction (Romans 16:16, 1 Corinthians 16:20, 2 Corinthians 13:12, 1 Thessalonians 5:26, 1 Peter 5:14). The remaining two are Luke 7:45 (the kiss the Pharisee withheld from Jesus) and Luke 22:48 (Judas' kiss of betrayal). The word carries the full range: genuine affection, social ritual, and devastating treachery.
TDNT traces the practice of the greeting kiss across ancient Mediterranean cultures. In Roman society, the kiss was carefully regulated by social status. Equals kissed on the lips. A superior might allow an inferior to kiss their hand or cheek. A slave could not presume to kiss a free person. The kiss communicated precise information about where each person stood in the social hierarchy.
Paul takes this stratified practice and detonates the hierarchy inside it. The 'holy kiss' (philema hagion) crossed every boundary the Roman kiss enforced. A slave kissing a senator. A Jewish leather-worker greeting a Gentile merchant. A woman and a man exchanging the same gesture of affection without the sexual overtones Roman culture would have assumed. Klassen's study 'The Sacred Kiss' argues that the early Christian kiss was the most physically radical expression of the equality Paul described theologically in Galatians 3:28: 'There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female.'
The adjective hagion (holy) is the modifier that changed everything. The kiss is set apart, consecrated, given a different meaning than the culture assigned to it. The holiness of the kiss protected it from misinterpretation and marked it as an act of worship, a physical confession that the person in front of you belongs to the same body you do.
Historical context · Mid-first century AD, Roman Empire
When a Greeting Scandalized an Empire
Roman society in the mid-first century operated on a rigid system of social classification. The census divided citizens into senatorial, equestrian, and plebeian orders. Below the citizens stood freedmen (former slaves with limited rights) and slaves (property with no rights). Every social interaction, from seating at dinner to greetings on the street, reinforced these divisions.
The salutatio was the morning ritual in which clients visited their patron's home to pay respects. The patron received each visitor according to rank. Close friends (amici) received a kiss. Lesser clients received a handshake. The lowest ranking visitors were acknowledged with a nod from across the room. The kiss was a calibrated instrument of social hierarchy.
Paul's letter to the Romans addressed a community that included all of these categories. Romans 16 lists at least 26 individuals by name. Among them: Prisca and Aquila (Jewish tentmakers), Epaenetus (a Greek convert from Asia), Andronicus and Junia (Jewish Christians who were in Christ before Paul), Ampliatus (a common slave name found in the catacombs beneath the Domitilla estate, suggesting he was a slave or freedman in an aristocratic household), and 'those in the household of Aristobulus' (likely slaves of the grandson of Herod the Great).
When Paul instructs these people to greet each other with a holy kiss, he is telling Ampliatus the slave to kiss Prisca the free woman. He is telling the members of Aristobulus' household, Herodian slaves, to exchange the same greeting with Andronicus the Jewish apostle. The instruction was a physical enactment of Paul's theology. The body of Christ did not observe Roman social rankings. The kiss proved it in the most visible, public, unavoidable way possible.
For reflection
The holy kiss forced people to physically acknowledge the equal dignity of someone the culture told them to look down on. No theory. No abstraction. Skin to skin. Who in your community occupies a different social category than you? What would it cost you to treat them as if the category did not exist?
Paul did not write 'think kind thoughts about one another.' He wrote 'kiss.'
Sources: TDNT; Klassen, 'The Sacred Kiss'; BDAG; Jewett, 'Romans' (Hermeneia)