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Most of us give little attention, other than winks and giggles, to the verses commanding us to "greet one another with a holy kiss." Mount Holyoke religion professor Michael Penn, however, has recently written an entire book on that early church practice: Kissing Christians: Ritual and Community in the Late Ancient Church (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).

Let's first define "ritual kissing." When did early Christians kiss and who kissed who?

Our earliest reference to the kiss is from the apostle Paul in 1 Thessalonians. He doesn't give us very many details, which suggests that it was already a well-established practice.

It's only decades later that other Christians give us more details. We discover that early Christians kissed each other in a variety of different rituals, as part of prayer, baptism, Eucharist, everyday greeting, martyrdom, and so forth. In the first two centuries, at least, not only did men kiss other men and women other women, but men and women kissed one another. And most often this was a kiss on the lips.

What did the kiss mean culturally in the broader Greco-Roman context?

The short answer is that it meant a heck of a lot of different things, just as it does in our own time period. We find everything from a romantic kiss to a familial kiss to a kiss between friends. One difference between us and the ancient world, however, is that then when people kissed, particularly on the lips, it was seen as an exchange of spirit. Sometimes Christians would take the contemporary cultural meaning wholesale, and other times they would modify it.

How did Christians modify the meaning of the kiss from what it was outside the church?

For example, often Paul spoke of Christians being brothers and sisters in Christ. So the kiss as a familial gesture served to redefine the family as the family of God.

Or again, one of the places we find the largest discussion about the exchange of souls through kissing is in the ancient equivalent of Harlequin novels. The church took this exchange of spirit in an erotic sense and made it into an exchange of the Holy Spirit as a way to bind different Christians together.

Did the ancient church have a concern that the kissing would be erotic? Today, that would be a major concern, if we were to have a sudden revival of ritual kissing.

Yes, there was a concern of erotic temptation, and it may be one of the reasons why in later centuries men and women did not ritually kiss each other. But one of the biggest concerns, and one that was actually more prevalent, was the concern that the kiss would be one of betrayal, a kiss of Judas.

Early Christian clergy often warned their congregation that if they kissed while still upset with one another, they were really reenacting this kiss of Judas. And in some ways that possibility is even more frightening than eroticism, because if Joe and Jane are kissing inappropriately, you can tell. But if someone kisses someone else in church and they're thinking the wrong thing, that's hard to know.

Early Christian pastors were saying, "Look, we're about to have the Lord's Supper, you're about to kiss, and this is the time according to Matthew that you have to be at peace with one another. If you're not, you're betraying Christ just as Judas did." The kiss becomes a very powerful moment in early Christian services for Christians to assess whether or not they truly are the body of Christ. Are they reconciled to one another?

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March (Web-only) 2006, Vol. 50