StrongerBible

philēma

φίλημα

GreekG5370“kiss”

Appears 7 times · tap a cell to see the verses

Luk 7:45Luk 22:48Rom 16:161Co 16:202Co 13:121Th 5:261Pe 5:14
Root family
Word studyResearch-gradeFEE-lay-mahnoun

What philēma means

a kiss: the act of pressing the lips to someone, a bodily gesture whose meaning depends entirely on the setting.

TranslatabilityDirectCertaintySettled

This is simply the ordinary word for a kiss. The Bible never treats a kiss as a single thing with one fixed meaning. The very same gesture could greet a guest, seal a reunion, show honor to a king, betray a friend, or pass between lovers. A kiss is a thing you do with your body to another person, and what it means is read off the situation, not off the word. So the seven places this noun appears in the New Testament cover a surprisingly wide range, from open devotion to outright treachery.

What makes the word memorable in the New Testament is not the gesture itself but who is being kissed. Five of its seven uses are commands to early Christians to greet one another with a kiss, calling it a holy kiss or a kiss of love. In the surrounding world a public kiss between people who were not family was unusual and could be scandalous, so the instruction was bold: it treated fellow believers, across differences of background, wealth, and gender, as if they were close kin. The two remaining uses, both in Luke, show the gesture at its tenderest and its ugliest: a kiss withheld from Jesus by a cool host, and a kiss used by Judas to hand Jesus over.

Because a kiss takes its meaning from context, the same warm act can be turned into its opposite. That is the point of the betrayal scene, where the customary sign of greeting and affection becomes the signal of arrest.

Nuances

1athe holy kiss: a kiss commanded among early Christians as a greeting that bound them together as a family.
Rom 16:161Co 16:202Co 13:121Th 5:261Pe 5:14
1ba welcoming kiss: the customary greeting a host owed a guest, here the kiss Simon the Pharisee failed to give Jesus.
Luk 7:45
1ca kiss of betrayal: the sign of affection turned into the signal that handed Jesus over.
Luk 22:48

What scholars say about philēma

The noun derives from the verb φιλέω ("to love, to kiss"); the intensive compound καταφιλέω is treated by Stählin (TDNT IX) and Spicq as genuinely intensifying, while BDAG and Louw-Nida regard the prefix as largely faded in Koine and context-driven. Stählin's typology of biblical kisses (greeting, kinship, friendship, erotic, homage, cultic, reconciliation, mourning, and the distinctively Christian liturgical kiss) remains the standard scaffolding, and the categories overlap heavily because the lexicon does not police them. The dominant view of the apostolic φίλημα ἅγιον / φίλημα ἀγάπης is that it was a real, mouth-to-mouth greeting inherited from the wider Mediterranean repertoire but resignified to construct the church as a fictive family across class, ethnic, and gender lines (Penn, Kissing Christians, 2005; Penn, JECS 2002; Jewett, Romans, Hermeneia; Klassen, NTS 39 [1993]). On the Lukan kisses, most commentary (Marshall, Fitzmyer, Green, Bovon) reads Luke 7:45 as a customary homage or greeting kiss the host omitted, set against the woman's intensive καταφιλέω, while the Judas kiss (Luke 22:48, where Luke notably uses the simplex φιλέω rather than the intensive form found in Mark and Matthew) is read as the gesture of intimacy inverted into betrayal, with Old Testament background in Joab's kiss of Amasa (2 Sam 20:9) and Proverbs 27:6. 1 Peter 5:14's φίλημα ἀγάπης (rather than ἅγιον) is read by Horrell-Williams and Jobes as reflecting that letter's love-centered vocabulary.

Where scholars disagree about philēma

Whether the holy kiss Paul and Peter command was already a fixed liturgical rite, or a spontaneous greeting that only later became a formal ritual.

  • majorityIt was a known but not-yet-fixed greeting custom that Paul assumes rather than institutes; its liturgical and eucharistic shaping develops only later, with the first clear evidence of a kiss inside a structured service coming from Justin Martyr around the middle of the second century.; Michael Penn, Kissing Christians (2005); David Horrell and Travis Williams, 1 Peter, ICC (2023), 2:652-653
  • minorityThe kiss had a ritual and even sacramental function from the very beginning, already a set term in Paul, functioning as a way of sharing the Spirit among believers.; L. Edward Phillips, The Ritual Kiss in Early Christian Worship (1996), 6-9; Nicolas Perella, The Kiss Sacred and Profane (1969), 12
  • minorityIt is commanded precisely because it was not yet customary: a new social-boundary marker with no close parallel in the surrounding Jewish or Greco-Roman world.; William Klassen, New Testament Studies 39 (1993): 128, 134
In-depth research

This is a research paper, so it may be hard to read without scholarly background. It is useful if you want to dig even deeper into this word.

Sources

  • Gustav Stählin, "φιλέω, καταφιλέω, φίλημα, φίλος, φίλη, φιλία," Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (TDNT) IX (1973): 113-171dictionary
  • BDAG, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament, 3rd ed., s.v. φίλημα, φιλέω, καταφιλέωlexicon
  • J. P. Louw and E. A. Nida, Greek-English Lexicon Based on Semantic Domains, 34.62lexicon
  • Ceslas Spicq, Theological Lexicon of the New Testament, s.v. φιλέω / φίλημαlexicon
  • Michael Penn, Kissing Christians: Ritual and Community in the Late Ancient Church (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005)monograph
  • Michael Penn, "Performing Family: Ritual Kissing and the Construction of Early Christian Kinship," Journal of Early Christian Studies 10.2 (2002): 151-174article
  • William Klassen, "The Sacred Kiss in the New Testament: An Example of Social Boundary Lines," New Testament Studies 39 (1993): 122-135article
  • Robert Jewett, Romans, Hermeneia (Fortress, 2007), 952, 973-974commentary
  • David Horrell and Travis Williams, 1 Peter, ICC (T&T Clark, 2023), 2:650-653commentary
  • Karen Jobes, 1 Peter, BECNT (Baker Academic, 2005), 251commentary
  • I. Howard Marshall, The Gospel of Luke, NIGTC (Eerdmans, 1978), 312commentary
  • Joseph Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke I-IX, Anchor Bible 28 (1981), 686-692commentary
  • L. Edward Phillips, The Ritual Kiss in Early Christian Worship (Grove, 1996; repr. Gorgias, 2010)monograph

AI-generated word study · claude-opus-4-8

All attested forms of φίλημα

dative n s

φιλήματι

Luk 22:48, Rom 16:16, 1Co 16:20, 2Co 13:12, 1Th 5:26, 1Pe 5:14

accusative n s

φίλημά

Luk 7:45