Found on 2026-10-10 by a search the owner asked for: a documented case for the half of CLAIM-061 that CLAIM-053 and CLAIM-229 record as having none, a rendering that changes the proposition and keeps the act.
The case
The source. Paul closes Romans with a directive to the congregation. Rom 16:16, SBLGNT: “Ἀσπάσασθε ἀλλήλους ἐν φιλήματι ἁγίῳ”; KJV: “Salute one another with an holy kiss.” The same directive closes 1 Cor 16:20, 2 Cor 13:12 and 1 Thess 5:26, and, as “a kiss of love”, 1 Pet 5:14.
The rendering. J. B. Phillips, Letters to Young Churches (1947) and The New Testament in Modern English (1958, revised 1972), renders every one as a handshake. Nida (1964, p. 160) quotes the pre-1972 text of Rom 16:16 as “give one another a hearty handshake all around.” The 1972 text, as Bible Gateway gives it (version PHILLIPS, read 2026-10-10):
- Rom 16:16: “Give each other a hearty handshake all round for my sake.”
- 1 Cor 16:20: “I should like you to shake hands all round as a sign of Christian love.”
- 2 Cor 13:12: “A handshake all round, please!”
- 1 Thess 5:26: “Give a handshake all round among the brotherhood.”
- 1 Pet 5:14: “Give each other a handshake all round as a sign of love.”
The mapping is wider than the kiss. Phillips renders the plain greetings of Rom 16:3–7, which have no kiss, the same way: “Shake hands for me with Priscilla and Aquila”, “A handshake too for Andronicus and Junias”. He is translating Paul’s greeting, not his gesture.
What changes. The two directives have different satisfaction conditions. A congregation that shakes hands has not done what the Greek says, and one that kisses has not done what Phillips says. “Holy” is dropped; Rom 16:16 adds “for my sake”; two verses state the function outright (“as a sign of Christian love”).
The judgement that the act survives. Nida, Toward a Science of Translating (LIT-791), pp. 159–60, as transcribed by Marlowe:
- the gloss alternative: “holy kiss” “would be rendered literally, and would probably be supplemented with a footnote explaining that this was a customary method of greeting in New Testament times”;
- the principle: “the relationship between receptor and message should be substantially the same as that which existed between the original receptors and the message”;
- the verdict: Phillips “quite naturally translates” the one as the other.
Munday (2016, p. 70) calls it “a notorious example”, and grants that “some may feel the loss of the source culture term/custom”. Ellingworth and Nida’s UBS handbook on 1 Thessalonians, on 5:26, gives the act-reading (“the ‘holy kiss’ was more like a spontaneous greeting between friends”) and calls Phillips “a brave attempt to find an equivalent custom in a western culture”, while preferring the Good News Translation’s solution. The handbook’s lemma is “A brotherly kiss”, which keeps the kiss; that this was the GNT text of the day is inferred from the lemma, and the GNT now on Bible Gateway reads “the kiss of peace”. Gayle (2013) dissents: Phillips’s handshakes, which he also gives Priscilla and Junias, change who greets whom across the lines of gender and culture, so the relation among the addressees is not kept.
The sufficiency half, from the same handbooks. Ellingworth and Nida: “in many parts of the world kissing is regarded as exclusively an expression of amorous or erotic interest. Under such circumstances one cannot use a literal expression for ‘kiss.’” The UBS note on Rom 16:16 reports, from van Steenbergen, that in Pökoot “kissing in public, certainly between men, is absolutely unacceptable”, and gives “greet warmly”. There the literal rendering keeps the proposition and changes the act. One verse, in one body of documented translation practice, carries both halves of CLAIM-061.
What it can show
That a published, attested rendering changed what a text directs, and that the leading theorist of the move, the handbook tradition that applied it, and the textbook that teaches it all took the communicative act to survive: an apostolic directive in a letter’s closing, telling the addressees to perform their culture’s ordinary warm greeting of fellowship. Measured against the conditions the search set:
| Met? | ||
|---|---|---|
| (a) source and rendering attested | Yes | Greek and the 1972 English directly; the pre-1972 text through Nida and Munday |
| (b) proposition changed, not only wording | Yes | Different compliance conditions; “holy” dropped |
| (c) independent evidence the act was kept | Partly | Expert judgement, divided; no reader evidence |
| (d) interlingual | Yes | Greek to English |
So the necessity half of CLAIM-061 has a documented case, not only A12’s sentence: A without P, in the notation of CLAIM-229, as judged by competent third parties. Nida is a third party to Phillips’s text and to this exchange.
What it cannot show
That the act was in fact kept. Condition (c) is met only by verdicts, and they are divided on the residue. Nida is the advocate of the principle the example illustrates. The UBS handbook calls the rendering brave and prefers one that keeps the kiss. Munday notes the loss of the custom. Gayle denies that the footing among the addressees survives. The holiness or ritual weight, the intimacy, and the gendered footing are each disputed. The case establishes that competent judges took the act to survive a change of proposition. It does not establish how readers took it.
That the defender of necessity is beaten. The defender’s reply: the proposition worth keeping is the coarser “greet one another warmly”, and the handshake keeps it. The handbooks themselves offer that proposition as a rendering (“greet fellow believers affectionately”; “greet warmly”), and Phillips writes the function into two verses (“as a sign of Christian love”).
How far the reply reaches:
- It reaches every necessity case. Any rendering that keeps the act while changing the proposition can be redescribed as keeping some coarser proposition that names the act’s function. Retreating to the coarse proposition is always available.
- It costs the defender the distinction the claim is about. “Greet one another warmly” is satisfied by a kiss in Corinth and a handshake in 1947 London. Its content is fixed by what counts as a warm greeting where it is received. Its satisfaction conditions are those of the act. A defender who individuates propositions this way keeps the word “proposition” and concedes CLAIM-061’s point: what has to be kept is fixed by function, not by what is literally said.
- It does not reach the fine-grained proposition. The defender who means the proposition as the text’s own satisfaction conditions, a kiss, has no reply. The case refutes necessity for that proposition, on the judges’ verdict.
The case therefore settles nothing between the two individuations. It forces the choice.
Anything about frequency. It bears on the modal claim only, an existence proof with expert support. It does not supply the comparative test CLAIM-115 needs.
What would close the gap. A reader test on these texts. Readers of one population would be shown the literal Rom 16:16 (“greet one another with a holy kiss”), Phillips’s handshake, the coarse “greet one another warmly”, and the kiss in a culture where it reads as amorous. They would judge force, footing, warmth and the relation among the addressees. A separate set of raters would judge propositional sameness, so that the proposition is individuated before the act is measured. That is the independence the defender’s reply exploits. The texts are documented and the test is not run. The verses could serve as items for the discriminating study, CASE-055, which rates its predictors with other raters and has an interlingual arm. Until such a test is run, (c) rests on verdicts.
Unverified. The 1947 and 1958 printed texts were not seen: the Internet Archive scans are lending-only. The pre-1972 wording rests on Nida’s quotation, as transcribed by Marlowe and cited by Munday. Nida’s page is inferred from Marlowe’s page markers and confirmed by Munday’s citation (“1964a: 160”). The UBS handbooks were read only as quoted on the UBS translation-tips site. Phillips’s own aim is stated in the 1955 discussion with Rieu (“I do so agree with this principle of producing equivalent effect”), which does not mention the kiss. Nida’s text dates that discussion 1954.
Sources
Every URL below was retrieved on 2026-10-10.
- Greek and KJV text, Rom 16:16: SBLGNT and KJV on Bible Gateway, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Romans+16:16&version=SBLGNT. Read directly.
- J. B. Phillips, The New Testament in Modern English, revised edition (1972), on Bible Gateway (version PHILLIPS), for Rom 16:3–7, Rom 16:16, 1 Cor 16:20, 2 Cor 13:12, 1 Thess 5:26 and 1 Pet 5:14, e.g. https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Romans+16:16&version=PHILLIPS. Read directly. The 1947 Letters to Young Churches and the 1958 first edition were not seen.
- E. A. Nida, Toward a Science of Translating (Brill, 1964), DOI 10.1163/9789004495746, held as LIT-791 (Deferred, unread). Pages 159–60 were read only in M. Marlowe’s transcription, “Dynamic Equivalence Defined”, Bible Research (2009), https://www.bible-researcher.com/nida1.html.
- J. Munday, Introducing Translation Studies, 4th edn (Routledge, 2016), DOI 10.4324/9781315691862, pp. 62–71. Read directly in a course-reader PDF, https://newuniversityinexileconsortium.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Week-6-Dynamic-equivalence-and-formal-equivalence-Nida-1964-in-Munday-2016.pdf.
- P. Ellingworth and E. A. Nida, A Handbook on Paul’s First Letter to the Thessalonians (UBS, 1976; Open Library also lists a 1975 Translator’s Handbook; the 1994 reissue is ISBN 0826701671). Read only as quoted at https://tips.translation.bible/story/translation-commentary-on-1-thessalonians-526/.
- UBS translation note on Rom 16:16, citing G. van Steenbergen on Pökoot, https://tips.translation.bible/tip_verse/rom-1616/. Read directly. Van Steenbergen’s own text was not seen.
- Good News Translation, 1 Thess 5:26, on Bible Gateway (version GNT). Read directly. Its earlier wording was not seen.
- J. K. Gayle, “On misunderstanding the kiss, the handshake, the warm greeting between a man and a woman”, BLT, 1 May 2013, https://bltnotjustasandwich.com/2013/05/01/on-misunderstanding-the-kiss-the-handshake-the-warm-greeting-between-a-man-and-a-woman/. Read directly. The research report also cites a reply by Peter Kirk in the comments: that in 1940s Britain a man kissing a woman was socially loaded, so a literal rendering would itself have changed the act. That reply was not checked here.
- E. V. Rieu and J. B. Phillips, “Translating the Gospels: A Discussion”, The Bible Translator 6/4 (1955), 150–159, DOI 10.1177/000608445500600403. Read only in the transcript at https://www.bible-researcher.com/rieu.html.
Note of 2026-10-30: Nida’s passages read first-hand
The three passages this case quotes from Marlowe’s transcription appear word for word in the Reader reprint of “Principles of Correspondence” (LIT-1864, NOTE-1451), at pp. 129–130: the gloss alternative, the principle, and the verdict, with Nida’s “all around”. The reprint dates the Rieu–Phillips principle 1954, as the Unverified paragraph says. The reprint is abridged and its cuts are unmarked, so book page 160 is not checked against it. It adds no reader evidence, and condition (c) is unchanged. Nida’s own rule that “correspondence in meaning must have priority over correspondence in style” (p. 134) sits uneasily with his verdict here, since the handshake changes the meaning to keep the response. The chapter does not say which wins.