Two sentences close the letter: a command and a blessing. Both are formulaic, and both have been quietly bent toward 1 Peter’s own argument.

The greeting-kiss command is one of five in the New Testament (Rom 16:16; 1 Cor 16:20; 2 Cor 13:12; 1 Thess 5:26; 1 Pet 5:14) and the only one outside Paul. Four of the five call it a φίλημα ἅγιον, a holy kiss; Peter alone calls it a φίλημα ἀγάπης, a kiss of love. That is a deliberate substitution, and it lands where the letter has been aiming: on the ἀγάπη that covers a multitude of sins (4:8) and the ἀδελφότης scattered across the world (5:9; cf. 2:17). The gesture itself is ordinary Mediterranean social currency — kin greet kin with a kiss — and the whole force of the command lies in who is now included in the kin-group.

The peace-wish is likewise formulaic and likewise adjusted. Paul closes with grace (χάρις, Gal 6:18; Phil 4:23); Peter closes with peace, and does so with no verb at all. And he attaches to it a double universal: πᾶσιν and then the defining τοῖς ἐν Χριστῷ. A letter written to people who are πάροικοι and παρεπίδημοι in the provinces (1:1) ends by naming the one place they are not strangers.

The verse is also the letter’s inclusio: εἰρήνη ὑμῖν πληθυνθείη at 1:2, εἰρήνη ὑμῖν πᾶσιν at 5:14.

Proposed — pending reviewPaul J. Achtemeier, 1 Peter, Hermeneia, Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996

ἀσπάσασθε is the aorist middle imperative of the standard Hellenistic letter-closing verb. The documentary papyri are saturated with it: ἄσπασαι τοὺς σοὺς πάντας and the like are the boilerplate of private correspondence. The corpus policy fixes ‘greet’ at every occurrence and warns against ‘salute’ (archaic outside liturgical register) and against hearing religious warmth in the lexeme itself — that warmth is Christian accretion, not lexical content.

What is not boilerplate is the object. Ordinary letters instruct the recipient to greet named third parties on the writer’s behalf. Here the addressees are told to greet ἀλλήλους — each other. The letter’s carrier is not the conduit; the assembly is. Paul does the same thing at Rom 16:16 and 1 Thess 5:26, and the construction turns a courtesy into a corporate act performed when the letter is read aloud.

Note also that Peter writes ἀλλήλους here and ἑαυτούς at 4:8 and 4:10 with no discernible difference in sense — Koine uses the plural reflexive freely for the reciprocal (BDF §287). The corpus renders both ‘one another’ and records the form rather than manufacturing an English distinction.

φίλημα is the plain noun for a kiss (Luke 7:45; 22:48), cognate with φιλέω. In the ancient Mediterranean the kiss on cheek, hand, or lips was the greeting proper to kin, to close friends, and to social superiors and inferiors within a household; it marked belonging, not affection in the modern sentimental sense. That is why the command is not decorative. Slaves and free, women and men, householders and dependants (2:18–3:7) are told to exchange the gesture that says we are of one house.

The genitive ἀγάπης is qualitative — the kiss characterized by love — parallel in construction to the Pauline φίλημα ἅγιον, where the adjective does the same work. Peter’s choice of a noun over an adjective is worth noting: he had ἅγιον available (he uses ἅγιος freely: 1:15, 16; 2:5, 9; 3:5) and did not use it. Instead he reaches for the term he has already made load-bearing at 1:22 (ἀγαπήσατε ἐκτενῶς), 2:17 (τὴν ἀδελφότητα ἀγαπᾶτε), and 4:8 (πρὸ πάντων τὴν εἰς ἑαυτοὺς ἀγάπην ἐκτενῆ ἔχοντες).

Per the corpus ἀγάπη entry, do not over-specify in the main text: ‘kiss of love’ stands, and the context supplies the freight. Renderings such as ‘loving kiss’ or ‘kiss of Christian love’ convert a genitive into an adjective and add a qualifier the Greek withholds.

Proposed — pending reviewJohn H. Elliott, 1 Peter, Anchor Bible 37B, New York: Doubleday, 2000

By the mid-second century the kiss has become a fixed liturgical act. Justin Martyr (First Apology 65) reports that after the prayers the assembly greets one another with a kiss before the bread and cup are brought forward — the earliest description of it as a rite with a place in the order of service. Tertullian (De oratione 18) calls it the osculum pacis, the kiss of peace, and treats abstaining from it as conspicuous. Athenagoras (Legatio 32) shows the practice already needing regulation against scandal.

This matters for translation in two directions, and the corpus rules require both to be kept apart (§9, §11). First, the second-century evidence is genuine cultural context: it shows that the command was not a passing courtesy but was received as constitutive of assembly. Second, it is reception, not lexical evidence: 1 Pet 5:14 does not yet name a rite, does not locate the kiss in a service, and does not call it a kiss of peace. Rendering ‘the kiss of peace’ would import Tertullian’s terminology into Peter’s text — and would additionally collide with the εἰρήνη that follows in the next clause, manufacturing a link the Greek does not make.

Proposed — pending reviewJustin Martyr, First Apology 65, in Ante-Nicene Fathers vol. 1 · Tertullian, De oratione 18, in Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 1

The clause has no verb. Greek benedictions characteristically omit the copula, and both the indicative (‘peace is yours’) and the volitive (‘peace be to you’) supplements are live. The corpus policy, fixed at χάρις ὑμῖν καὶ εἰρήνη (Phil 1:2) and at the closing benediction (Phil 4:23; Gal 6:18), is to bracket the supplied verb in the literal tier and use English ‘be’ in the reading text — ‘be’ in this slot is the residual English subjunctive of blessing and does not assert as flatly as ‘is’.

On εἰρήνη itself, per the standing entry: the LXX equivalent of שָׁלוֹם, positive wholeness and right ordering, not the Greek negative sense of cessation of hostility. The Hebraic breadth is footnoted, not glossed into the text.

Two features distinguish this closing from Paul’s. First, Paul closes with χάρις (the fixed formula ἡ χάρις τοῦ κυρίου ἡμῶν Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ μετὰ …); Peter closes with εἰρήνη, and the choice is his own. Second, it forms an inclusio with 1:2 (χάρις ὑμῖν καὶ εἰρήνη πληθυνθείη) — the letter opens with grace and peace multiplied and closes with peace to all. Since Peter has just called the assembly’s own testimony ‘the true grace of God’ (5:12, ἀληθῆ χάριν τοῦ θεοῦ), the grace-term has already been discharged and peace is what remains to be given.

The closest formal parallel is not Pauline but the Hebrew greeting standing behind LXX שָׁלוֹם לְךָ (Judg 6:23; 1 Kgdms 25:6) and the risen Christ’s εἰρήνη ὑμῖν (Luke 24:36; John 20:19, 21, 26).

πᾶσιν stands in apposition to ὑμῖν and is not filler. 1 Peter addresses a scattered readership across five provinces (1:1) with visible internal stratification — elders and younger (5:5), masters and household slaves (2:18), husbands and wives (3:1–7). The final word to that assembly is all. The corpus policy on πᾶς (never dropped as redundant; keep it early in the English clause) applies directly.

τοῖς ἐν Χριστῷ is the article substantivizing a prepositional phrase into an attributive modifier — the construction already fixed at οἱ σὺν ἐμοὶ ἀδελφοί (Phil 4:21). It is restrictive, not a non-restrictive aside: the peace is wished on all of you who are in Christ, not on all of you, who incidentally are in Christ. English resolves it with a relative clause; the literal tier keeps the bracketed ‘the [ones] in Christ’ so the construction stays visible.

On ἐν Χριστῷ the corpus is explicit: preserve the bare prepositional phrase, do not expand to ‘in union with Christ’ or ‘as Christians.’ The formula is usually incorporative but not invariably, and the reader must be able to see the ambiguity. Peter has used it once already at 5:10 (ἐν Χριστῷ), and it is more characteristically Pauline than Petrine — one of the several points of contact between this letter and the Pauline corpus.

Note finally that Peter writes Χριστῷ bare, without Ἰησοῦ. That is the reading of the earliest witnesses and should not be filled out.

Proposed — pending reviewJ. Ramsey Michaels, 1 Peter, Word Biblical Commentary 49, Waco: Word, 1988

The verse attracted the two kinds of scribal expansion one would expect at the end of a letter read in worship.

Ἰησοῦ after Χριστῷ. Numerous later witnesses read ἐν Χριστῷ Ἰησοῦ, assimilating to the commoner full form. The shorter reading is supported by the earliest and best witnesses and is intrinsically preferable: scribes expand divine names, they do not contract them.

A closing ἀμήν. Many witnesses append ἀμήν, exactly as at the end of Galatians and Philippians. The corpus already records that a final ἀμήν is among the least stable elements of a letter-closing, for the plain reason that a word spoken aloud by the congregation at the end of a public reading migrates easily into the text being read. The NA28 text prints the letter ending at Χριστῷ.

A scattering of witnesses also read ἀμήν preceded by a fuller benediction, and a few substitute or add material drawn from Pauline closings. All of these run in the same direction — toward liturgical fullness — which is precisely why the shortest reading is to be preferred here.

None of this touches doctrine, and it is a clean illustration of how the abundance of witnesses lets the direction of change be traced rather than guessed at.

The Fathers read the two halves of the verse together and read the kiss as the enactment of the peace.

Chrysostom, commenting on the parallel command at Rom 16:16, treats the kiss as the sign that the assembly is one body and that the members owe each other a recognition of kinship prior to any distinction of rank — precisely the pressure of 1 Peter 2:18–3:7 and 5:5. Augustine (Sermo 227) explains the kiss placed before the offering as the making-visible of the peace the lips profess: the sign is empty if the heart does not answer to it.

The patristic instinct here is sound as reading, and the material belongs in a note rather than in the rendering. What Peter’s text supplies is a command, a characterization (ἀγάπης), and a blessing juxtaposed to it. What the Fathers supply is the observation that the second is performed by the first.

Proposed — pending reviewJohn Chrysostom, Homilies on Romans, Homily 30 (on Rom 16:16), in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers ser. 1 vol. 11 · Augustine, Sermo 227 (on the Easter liturgy), in Patrologia Latina 38