Spiders Are Bad Kissers: The Kiss of Love and the Holy Kiss in Early Christian Writings

Abstract

This article examines the oft-overlooked New Testament commands to “Greet one another with a kiss of love” (1 Pt 5:14) and a “holy kiss” (Rom 16:16; 1 Cor 16:20; 2 Cor 13:12; 1 Thes 5:26), considering their meaning in the earliest Christian communities and their potential significance for the Church today. For Paul and 1 Peter, the kiss functions as an embodied act of reconciliation, unity, and hospitality that is both risky and transformative. Early Christians received this command with seriousness, developing practices and introducing restrictions and ritual that reinforced communal solidarity while navigating anxieties about intimacy, gender, and reputation. In conversation with early Christian texts, this article explores what today’s church might learn from ancient debates about the apostolic command to kiss one another. The kiss challenges Christian communities to consider how embodied acts of peace and reconciliation can confront divisions, particularly around intimacy and inclusion.

Five New Testament letters close with a simple but profound command that often goes unnoticed—and in most Western contexts, unenacted: ¹ “Greet one another with a kiss of love” (1 Pt 5:14; aspasasthe allēlous en philēmati agapēs; my translation) and “Greet one another with a holy kiss” (Rom 16.16; aspasasthe allēlous en philēmati hagiō, see also 1 Cor 16.20, 2 Cor 13.12, 1 Thes 5.26). ² Modern interpreters often assume the meaning of these commands, describing the kiss as “a sign of welcome or reconciliation,” ³ an act of “mutuality . . . across sexual barriers,” ⁴ or a gesture “inclusive of all within the household of faith.” ⁵ Given that few issues have preoccupied the Anglican Communion in recent decades more than reconciliation, human intimacy, inclusion, and peace, these apostolic exhortations invite renewed reflection. This article asks what the commands to kiss in the letters of 1 Peter and Paul—and their reception in early Christian writings—might contribute to ongoing conversations within the Communion on questions of faith, order, and theology.

Engaging ancient texts with a view to contemporary concerns requires attentiveness to historical distance and context, yet confidence in their ongoing theological vitality. Christopher Beeley argues that early Christian writers model a “theologically centered” practice of leadership whose transformative wisdom remains relevant across ages. ⁶ Similarly, Tina Beattie emphasizes that patristic writings are not static artifacts confined to the past but part of a living tradition with power to “inspire and challenge” the Church today. ⁷ While cautioning against easy equivalences and assumptions of uniformity across texts and contexts, Beattie notes early Christian rootedness in Scripture as they engage themes that continue to shape Christian identity. ⁸ Their diverse perspectives may also benefit contemporary theology by modeling constructive ways of reading Scripture across contexts and differences.

Early Christian writings emerged in a period “when Christianity was exploring its self-identity and formulating its beliefs in engagement with surrounding cultures,” a dynamic that speaks powerfully to churches today in a similar state of exploration. ⁹ Often homiletic, pastoral, or apologetic in form, early Christians write with striking immediacy through their use of metaphor, exhortation, and ethical urgency. As Johan Leemans and Johan Verstraeten observe, “they address not only the intellect but also the heart and the soul.” ¹⁰ Methodologically, then, early Christian writers can function as dynamic interlocutors, whose voices, when approached with care, offer diverse and generative resources for contemporary theological reflection.

Kissing in the ancient world

That five New Testament letters end with exhortations to kiss one another without explanation suggests that Christ-following communities knew what such a kiss was. ¹¹ As early as the 50s CE—the likely date of Paul’s earliest letter, 1 Thessalonians—kissing appears to have been a feature of Christian practice. Michael Penn, in Kissing Christians, notes that “the kiss was one of the most prevalent features of early Christianity” and that at baptisms, funerals, ordinations, the Eucharist, confession, meals, and gatherings—settings sacred and secular—early Christians kissed. ¹²

The precise meaning of 1 Peter’s “kiss of love” and Paul’s “holy kiss,” however, remains contested ¹³ and the origin of the practice unknown. ¹⁴ Some view these imperatives as a liturgical ritual, perhaps performed after the public reading of an epistle. ¹⁵ Nicholas Perella argues that the kiss “had an important ritualistic and sacramental function from the beginning.” ¹⁶ Others suggest continuity with Jewish and Greco-Roman conventions. David Horrell and Travis Williams observe that the apostolic kiss “derived from the ancient Mediterranean world generally.” ¹⁷ Still others see in these commands a distinctive Christian innovation that only later developed into a regulated liturgical practice. Rianne Voogd argues that New Testament writers borrowed and adapted elements from their wider contexts but transformed “something known into something new.” ¹⁸ As Edward Phillips concludes, requests for a kiss are otherwise absent from Greco-Roman letters before the New Testament and thus the apostolic exhortations are not simply following an epistolary convention but describe a “distinctively Christian act.” ¹⁹ The commands cannot be explained as mere rhetorical custom; they presume physical contact, often in the context of a greeting. ²⁰

Kissing in ancient Greco-Roman and Jewish contexts

A brief examination of the wider ancient context helps situate the New Testament exhortations to kiss. In the Greco-Roman world, kissing practices were diverse and often socially coded. Herodotus describes Persians kissing on the lips when equals, on the cheek when near in rank, and bowing in deference when the difference is great. ²¹ Epictetus also links kisses to hierarchy. ²² In a brief catalog of Greco-Roman practice, Horrell and Williams note that occasions for kissing included as a greeting, a farewell gesture, a symbol of reconciliation, a denotation of respect and honor, and as a reward for games. ²³ Socially, men often kissed male friends in public, while kissing women was largely confined to family. ²⁴ Kissing thus carried multiple layers of meaning in Greco-Roman writings—familial, social, erotic, and political. Latin vocabulary reflected these nuances with types of kisses including: osculum (ceremonial or social), basium (tender), and suavium (erotic), though Roman authors did not always maintain strict distinctions. ²⁵ The Vulgate—the Latin translation of the New Testament—only uses osculum (and osculari) to translate “kiss.” ²⁶

Despite claims that Christianity owes “its earliest kiss symbolism to Judaism,” ²⁷ most scholarship agrees that the kiss commanded in the epistles is not rooted in “any formal cultic or religious rituals in ancient Judaism specifically.” ²⁸ Kissing is mentioned in ancient Jewish sources ²⁹ and some rabbinic homilies interpret God’s breath into Adam as a primordial kiss or portray the giving of the Torah as God kissing Israel through Scripture. ³⁰ Josephus uses philēma only four times, all in the context of the massacre at Masada. ³¹ Horrell and Williams observe that Judas’ kiss of Jesus could suggest that kissing was a familiar practice among early Christ followers. ³² Even so, William Klassen concludes that there is “nothing analogous” to the apostolic kiss of love or holiness in Greco-Roman or Jewish traditions. ³³

Christian kissing

The first mention of kissing in the early Christian movement appears in the New Testament epistles. Within these texts, and the reception of them, the kiss acquires meanings distinct from surrounding Greco-Roman practice: marked as holy and expressive of agapē. Yet, at the same time, the practice was contested. As early Christian writers sought to describe what the command to kiss meant for their communities, concerns about gender, propriety, and human intimacy led to increasing restrictions. Early Christian writing on the kiss, introduced by the letters of Paul and 1 Peter, reveal that the kiss was a theological and ethical site where community, unity, and holiness were negotiated.

In what follows, I focus on early interpretations of the New Testament commands to kiss and especially on the anxieties and concerns such commands raise. For early Christians, a kiss could provoke conflict, and cross boundaries of class and gender. It could fracture, forge, or restore unity. By the second century, the kiss was enfolded into liturgical practice, though, as Horrell and Williams note, “we need not limit the kiss to formal gatherings” and the “liturgical function” of the kiss in later liturgies “must be distinguished from the kiss that was exchanged between members of earlier Christian assemblies” as in 1 Peter and Paul. ³⁴ There is no evidence of the kiss within liturgical practice before Justin Martyr in the second century. ³⁵ Early Christians worry about individual kissing, and the communal implications of individual actions. In ways that anticipate contemporary Anglican disputes, early Christian discussions of human intimacy were often used to create boundaries and in the name of inclusion, exclude. Crucially, the apostolic injunctions to greet with a kiss were more than a social gesture but represented a theological practice through which followers of Christ enacted their identity as reconciled and holy.

Pauline and Petrine kissing

Both Paul and 1 Peter end their letters with commands to greet one another with a kiss, and while these kisses are often squeezed together, their descriptions are not identical: Paul commands a “holy kiss,” 1 Peter “a kiss of love.” A number of interpreters treat the two phrases as interchangeable. Klassen, for example, remarks that the holy kiss was “an act meant to express agapē, as 1 Peter saw clearly,” ³⁶ while, Perella writes that Paul and 1 Peter describe “the same kiss and the same custom that is intended. The holy kiss is a kiss of love.” ³⁷ Some ancient manuscripts of 1 Peter even read hagiō rather than agapēs, potentially harmonizing 1 Peter’s words to match those of Paul. ³⁸

Other interpreters, however, stress the distinct emphases in these epistolary phrases. Horrell and Williams argue that the variation is not accidental but expressive of each letter’s theological emphases: Paul in terms of holiness, 1 Peter in terms of love. ³⁹ The act is the same—a kiss—but each writer “conveys a somewhat different nuance.” ⁴⁰ Before turning to the reception of the commands to kiss in early Christian writings, I first pause to examine the apostolic kisses in their epistolary contexts.

Paul’s “holy kiss”

Paul refers to the holy kiss four times: Rom 16:16, 1 Cor 16:20, 2 Cor 13:12, and 1 Thes 5:26. ⁴¹ The commands appear at the close of his letters where scholars argue the letter’s key themes are summarized. ⁴² In this light, the modifier “holy” aligns both with other holy things in Paul’s writings—scriptures (Rom 1:2), people (Rom 1:7; 11:16), Spirit (1 Thes 1:5; 1 Cor 12:3; Rom 5:5), and law (Rom 7:12) ⁴³ —and with his concern for unity and the end of communal division. ⁴⁴ As a holy kiss, this act is distinguished from other types of kisses in the ancient world: it is not tender or erotic. A “holy kiss” thus relates to Paul’s wider understanding of holiness and to the wholeness of the communities to which he writes.

Commentators highlight this communal focus, often assuming that a “holy kiss” exemplifies reconciliation and unity. Robert Jewett sees Paul’s holy kiss as epitomizing Paul’s appeal to mutual welcome which “extends across sexual barriers” and is “an expression of familial intimacy between members of disparate house and tenement churches.” ⁴⁵ Beverly Gaventa describes the kiss as “well attested” as “a sign of welcome or reconciliation” which united scattered groups into a single church. ⁴⁶ Voogd concludes that Paul used the holy kiss “as an instrument to bind these people together in the communities of Christ.” ⁴⁷ Paul transforms an act reserved for biological family to construct a new Christian family, who could share a kiss. ⁴⁸ Paul’s “holy kiss” is also counter-cultural, especially when considering the diverse lists of named persons at the end of Paul’s epistles which include men, women, and enslaved persons (Rom 16:1–16; 1 Cor 16:17–20). Instead of reinforcing social hierarchies, Paul commands all to kiss one another without distinction.

1 Peter’s “kiss of love”

1 Peter 5:14 offers the only other New Testament command to kiss, but with a different modifier: “a kiss of love.” The use of agapē instead of hagios is not incidental. Whereas Paul frames the kiss within the conceptual field of holiness, the Petrine author ⁴⁹ anchors it in the letter’s pervasive theme of love.

Love saturates 1 Peter, where we find love of Jesus (1 Pt 1:8–9), of one another or the family (1:22; 2:17; 3:8–9; 4:8), and of the stranger (4:9). The term philadelphía (1:22; 3:8) and the command to “love the family of believers” (2:17) underscores familial affection, while philoxenía (4:9) presses love outward in acts of risky welcome of strangers. In this context, the kiss of love crystallizes the ethos of the letter where love is enacted and embodied within persecuted communities. ⁵⁰

The context of suffering for the letter’s recipients heightens this emphasis (1 Pt 4:1–5; 4:12–17). This love must be without hypocrisy (1:22) and is one way that believers follow in the footsteps of their exemplar, Christ, and withstand suffering. As Karen Jobes observes, in 1 Peter love is “not a warm, fuzzy feeling, but means treating others in the Christian community in such a way as to promote unity and to avoid or overcome behaviors that destroy relationship.” ⁵¹ The kiss of love is therefore an embodied expression of kinship, solidarity, and perseverance for Christ followers in the face of hostility. ⁵²

Included within this framework is hospitality and the command to “be hospitable to one another” (4:9), or, literally, to “love the stranger (philoxenía).” While this might sound like a call to universal love, in a context of persecution, it likely refers to loving fellow Christ followers. ⁵³ This argument coheres with the instructions throughout this text where love is directed to fellow believers (philadelphía, adelphótēs, eis heautoùs, eis allēlous). As Horrell and Williams write, a primary strategy of 1 Peter to support group cohesion in a hostile context is through mutual love. The “kiss of love” thus embodies solidarity within the Petrine communities. ⁵⁴ Even so, love of the stranger, even a Christ-following stranger, entails risk. Like a kiss, hospitality involves vulnerability and openness to transformation. Both must be mutually received. To extend hospitality—literally, to love—an unknown person demands vulnerability on the part of the one extending the love and the one receiving it.

As a number of early Christian writings about kissing make clear, this vulnerability could make one susceptible to misunderstanding, temptation, or even manipulation. Hospitality, like kissing, also involves power dynamics between guest and host, between kisser and kissed. Yet both hospitality and kissing carry transformative potential: when love is genuinely exchanged, guest and host, kisser and kissed, are no longer strangers. Once one is genuinely known and loved, neither guest nor host is a stranger to the other to the same extent, and perhaps at all. The kiss of love embodies this dynamic: vulnerable yet familiar, intimate yet communal, and a tangible expression that sustains the Petrine communities. ⁵⁵

Paul and 1 Peter

Examined in their contexts, Paul’s “holy kiss” and 1 Peter’s “kiss of love” share striking similarities yet reveal distinct theological horizons. Both command an embodied greeting and adapt a social practice into a marker of identity, collapsing hierarchies and fostering communities in terms familial. Paul frames this kiss in the language of holiness; 1 Peter in the language of love, kinship, and hospitality.

And yet, as with modern commentaries that conflate the commands, early Christian writings often blur the distinction between these texts. Early Christian writers inherited the apostolic exhortations to kiss which provoked anxiety about both perception and practice—particularly regarding gender, social status, and community cohesion. The kiss became a flash point for negotiating inclusion and exclusion, propriety and witness. Having examined the commands to kiss in 1 Peter and Paul, I turn now to how early Christian writers received and reimagined the apostolic command to kiss in subsequent generations.

Early Christian reception of the command to “kiss one another”

The commands to kiss in the letters of Paul and 1 Peter quickly entered the liturgical and ethical life of early Christian communities. Evidence from the second through the fifth centuries demonstrates both continuity with its New Testament origins and striking transformation. Early Christian writers refer to the Petrine and Pauline commands interchangeably as the scriptural basis for the Christian kiss. The kiss was not simply an affectionate greeting, but marked communal boundaries, provoked suspicion, and increasingly required regulation from within. The reception of the commands to kiss in early Christian writings illustrates how a single practice could hold together intimacy and danger, regulation and community, holiness and love.

Accusations and suspicions

From the earliest period, Christians were suspected of immoral behavior and charges of “Thyestean banquets and Oedipodean intercourse” circulated alongside accusations of atheism. ⁵⁶ Candida Moss cautions, however, that such polemic was not uniquely directed to Christians, though the practice of kissing one another may have sharpened suspicion when coupled with familial language and the “flesh and blood” of the eucharist. ⁵⁷

Early Christian writers acknowledge the tension and reputational risk connected with kissing one another. Writing in the third century, Tertullian recounts the anxiety of a pagan husband who worries about his wife greeting male Christians with a kiss, ⁵⁸ while Clement of Alexandria warns against “the shameless use of a kiss” which gives rise to “foul suspicions and evil reports.” ⁵⁹ The kiss, Clement insists, must be “chaste and with closed mouth” since, he concludes “the apostle calls the kiss holy” and for kisses that are not holy, “that kiss is not love.” ⁶⁰

In these examples, we see the Pauline and Petrine emphases pulling in different directions. Paul’s language of holiness required the kiss be set apart from the sensual and erotic; 1 Peter’s language of love underscored the kiss’s intimacy but made it liable to misinterpretation. Early Christian reception draws on both trajectories.

Furthermore, even with two examples from early Christian writings on the reputational danger of sharing a kiss with one another, Jennifer Knust’s wide-ranging study of sexual slander in early Christianity does not mention the word kiss once in its text, suggesting that kissing was not a central theme in polemical attacks. ⁶¹ Nevertheless, its potential to arouse suspicion shaped how early Christians defended and eventually regulated the practice.

Liturgical embedding

The earliest clear description of a kiss within Christian liturgy appears in the second-century writings of Justin Martyr, who locates the kiss before the eucharistic celebration that follows the baptismal rite. ⁶² Tertullian calls the kiss (osculum) “the seal of prayer,” which binds communal prayers together just as the kiss united believers to one another. Prayer is incomplete when separated from “the holy kiss (sancti osculi).” ⁶³ Cyprian describes the kiss as an act of love and unity, which included the kiss as a sign of reconciliation with those who had lapsed. ⁶⁴ Augustine describes the intimacy of the kiss within the liturgy as an act of peace, writing that “Christians kiss one another with a holy kiss (osculo sancto)” so that “when your lips approach the lips of your brother, so let your heart not withdraw from his heart.” ⁶⁵

The precise placement of the kiss varied across communities, but its liturgical role became firmly established. ⁶⁶ Some scholars have resisted reading the New Testament kiss as a liturgical act, arguing that it derives solely from an epistolary context. ⁶⁷ Yet, Phillips observes that the kiss’s recurring presence in Paul and 1 Peter—unparalleled in Greco-Roman epistolary conventions—suggests that in the first century the kiss was more than a casual salutation. ⁶⁸ It functioned as a distinctively Christian gesture not confined to worship, but which over time became embedded as a formal element of the liturgy. ⁶⁹

Regulation and control

Because of the intimacy of the kiss, which in the wider Greco-Roman context could be understood as erotic or sensual and, in the words of Clement, could lead to “foul suspicions and evil reports,” ⁷⁰ a number of early Christians sought to regulate this practice. This change is especially noticeable in relation to gender. Early reflections on the command to kiss suggest that men and women kissed without restriction. The Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicity depicts soon-to-be martyrs kissing, ⁷¹ and, as already noted, Tertullian recounts anxieties about a Christian wife greeting “one of the brothers with a kiss.” ⁷² Clement of Alexandria, responding to outside criticism of Christians sharing the kiss indiscriminately, is prescriptive but not yet restrictive—advocating that the kiss be “chaste and with closed mouth.” ⁷³

By the third and fourth centuries, however, explicit restrictions emerge in texts such as The Apostolic Tradition and Apostolic Constitutions. The erotic potential of the kiss was not denied: the power of intimacy was recognized, and kissing was assumed amongst early Christians; however, these texts explicitly limit the kiss to those of the same-gender. ⁷⁴ The Apostolic Tradition stipulates that kissing among believers must be “men with men and women with women; a man shall not greet a woman” with a kiss. ⁷⁵ Concerned about the temptations associated with kissing, early Christians limited it to same-gendered kissing.

Such restrictions also extended beyond gender to distinctions between clergy and laity and between the baptized and those who were not. In a liturgical setting, the kiss is often described by scholars as a breaking down of boundaries and an act of transformative inclusion. Nevertheless, catechumens were excluded until baptism, “for their kiss is not yet pure.” ⁷⁶ After baptism, however, the newly baptized were kissed first by the baptizer and then the assembled faithful. ⁷⁷ Baptism was a sacrament which opened up a new group of people who could be kissed by the newly baptized and who, in turn, could now kiss. Baptism thus initiates full participation in Christian kissing, signaling both inclusion and the reinforcement of boundaries. The very act of defining who could be kissed—and who remains excluded—illustrates how even an act of inclusion can function as a mechanism to exclude. ⁷⁸ An expansive act becomes a means of distinguishing insiders from outsiders.

These restrictions and the liturgical embeddedness of the kiss drew on Pauline and Petrine emphases alike. Paul’s emphasis on holiness justified boundaries—a kiss was holy if it avoided passion and impurity—while 1 Peter’s kiss of love made it possible for writers like Clement to warn against hypocrisy or pretension. Both holiness and love offered grounds for regulation: holiness demanded separation, love demanded faithfulness and community.

Such regulation reveals a trajectory in early Christian writings concerning the command to kiss. What began as a radical and embodied act of equality, transcending social and gender boundaries, was gradually limited under the pressures of reputation, sexual propriety, and ecclesial order. ⁷⁹

Good kissing: unity, reconciliation, and procreation

Even as the kiss was constrained within early Christian writings, its theological significance expanded, especially in the fourth century. Athanasius, who profoundly worried about threats of heresy and disunity in the communities he shepherds, repeatedly closed his Festal Letters with the exhortation drawn from 1 Peter and Paul to “Greet one another with a kiss,” underscoring its enduring sign of unity. ⁸⁰ Ambrosiaster emphasized that the “holy kiss” commanded by the epistles is for “everyone” but, he clarifies, not in “fleshly desire but in the Holy Spirit, so that the kisses are religious.” ⁸¹ Elsewhere he focuses on the unity produced by a kiss, writing that the “holy kiss (osculo sancto)” in Paul’s letters means the removal of discord for those who share it ⁸² and unites “the minds of complex bodies” by the spirit. ⁸³

A number of early Christian writers likened the apostolic commands to kiss to the image of a dove, birds known for their enthusiastic kissing. ⁸⁴ None develop this analogy more fully than Augustine whose imagery draws on Paul’s “holy kiss” as a Spirit-filled act. Writing in the fifth century, Augustine focuses on the “simplicity of doves,” ⁸⁵ as he is keen to avoid kissing as a precursor to something more intimate with the worry that such passion would draw one’s attention from God. Augustine therefore describes doves as essentially asexual and redefines the kiss not as a prelude to sexual intimacy, but as the procreative act of intimacy itself. Doves, he writes “you can imitate without a qualm . . . They fly everywhere together, they feed together, they don’t want to be alone, they enjoy communion. They are deeply in love . . . they beget their young with kisses.” ⁸⁶

In his effort to protect the kiss from any suggestion of promiscuity, Augustine paradoxically invests it with procreative power. The kiss is a much more sexual act than a peck on the lips. Instead of the kiss leading to something more intimate, the kiss becomes the place of intimacy, the place of procreation, creating unity and love. Playing on what he understands the collective noun for a group of doves to be—a quarrel—Augustine concludes that even when in a dispute, doves engage in love and as family. “Just because they quarrel,” he writes, does not “mean they separate.” ⁸⁷

Cyril of Jerusalem, a near contemporary of Augustine, also develops the connection between the kiss, love, and peace, framing the kiss as an act of reconciliation. For Cyril, the kiss carries transformative power which entails vulnerability and engagement with the other. He insists that the kiss shared between Christians is not “of the same kind as those given in the square between ordinary friends,” but rather “this kiss unites souls together, and it seeks from them the absence of all resentment.” ⁸⁸ He explicitly links the Petrine command to share a “kiss of love” with Jesus’ command in Matthew 5 not to approach the altar without first being reconciled with one another (Mt 5:24–7). He therefore calls the kiss of love, “this kiss of reconciliation.” ⁸⁹

For a number of early Christian writers, reconciliation linked to the kiss was not only about restoring relationship but also about the transformation of social and cultural divisions. John Chrysostom writes that greeting one another with a kiss has the power to erase hierarchy. The kiss “intended to cast out . . . any reason for pride. The great were not to despise the small, nor were the small to envy the great, but pride and envy were to be banished by the kiss which made everyone equal.” ⁹⁰ Yet, as Penn observes, “inclusivity became intertwined with exclusivity” and the reconciling kiss could also become “a powerful tool of exclusion.” ⁹¹ Like the hospitality of 1 Peter, the kiss carried with it the power to define who was “other” and determine who could be embraced and who could not.

Early Christian reception of the apostolic commands to kiss one another illustrates the tension between continuity and change across time periods. Early Christian writers inherited from Paul and 1 Peter a gesture that embodied holiness and love, unity and reconciliation. In practice, this kiss became an embodied marker of communal belonging, a liturgical act, and a theological symbol. Yet it was also contested, susceptible to suspicion from those outside the community of faith, vulnerable to misuse within, and subject to increasing regulation. By the third and fourth centuries, the kiss was both a sign of unity and restricted by rules of gender and baptismal status. The “holy kiss” and “kiss of love” together generated a practice in the early Church with creative, peace-making, and community building functions. The apostolic kisses were never trivial. Rather, they crystallized the risks and promises of intimacy in the body of Christ—at once vulnerable and transformative, contested and indispensable. This becomes especially evident when early Christian writers shift their attention from good, creative, reconciliatory kissing to bad kissing.

Bad kissing

While a range of early Christian writers encourage the practice of greeting one another with a kiss, they often include a warning: not all kisses are good. Sometimes, what appears outwardly as a “holy kiss” is “unholy, full of poison.” ⁹² Bad kissing is not necessarily about kissing with passion, nor is it kissing the wrong person; rather, bad kissing often concerns intent. A kiss becomes bad when it is deceptive, malicious, corruptive, or divisive—when it undermines the love and holiness that the kiss is meant to signify. Filled with hate, this kiss leads astray and threatens the unity that a kiss represents.

Writing in the fourth century, Didymus the Blind distinguishes between good and bad kissing as part of his interpretation of Ecclesiastes 3:8 that “there is a time to love and a time to hate.” In setting up his argument that loving someone is not compatible with hate and that loving and kissing go together, he comments that kissing and hating can go together, as well. ⁹³ His chief example of a kiss of hate is the kiss between Judas and Jesus, where an act of betrayal is masked as a kiss of love. Judas, he argues, missed “the time of love” when Christ was present and instead, as a companion with the Devil, embraced a “time to hate.” ⁹⁴ For Didymus, Judas’ kiss is the archetype of a bad kiss: a kiss that destroys rather than heals and is given without love. ⁹⁵

Judas’ kiss becomes a powerful negative model for a number of early Christian writers. Jerome, for instance, contrasts Judas’ treachery with the “beautiful” kisses of Jesus, which lead to healing and forgiveness. ⁹⁶ Those who do not follow the example of Jesus are bad kissers; they, like Judas, share a kiss of love with a “malicious mouth.” ⁹⁷ A kiss, Jerome argues, should be of peace, and thus when offered in anger and malice like Judas, a person chooses “to beget war from that kiss.” ⁹⁸ Similarly, Chrysostom juxtaposes the apostolic kisses with the kiss of Judas and condemns kisses that are “hypocritical like the kiss of Judas.” He urges that instead, a kiss should be a “fuel of love, to instil the right attitude in us towards each other.” ⁹⁹ Ambrose also laments that Judas turned “this sign of charity into a sign of treachery and unbelief” using “this pledge of peace for the duty of cruelty.” ¹⁰⁰ In all of these examples, a kiss with corrupted intentions not only fails to unite, reconcile, and heal but it actively divides, destroys, and wounds. The consequences of bad kissing extend beyond individuals; they fracture the Christian community as well.

Clement of Alexandria offers perhaps the most graphic description of a bad kiss. He rebukes those who “make the church resound with the kiss while not having love within themselves,” ¹⁰¹ comparing them to spiders. Like venomous arachnids, those who offer loveless kisses disguised as kisses of love inject poison with their mouth and “afflict humans with pain” when they “kiss.” ¹⁰² Spiders are very bad kissers. Clement’s analogy suggests that bad kissing by one individual could poison a community, spreading slander, gossip, and immorality under the guise of love. Christians, he argues, are called to kiss with “the love of God,” and when “this kiss is not love” it “injects the poison of licentiousness.” ¹⁰³ Clement’s insistence that kisses be given with a closed mouth underscores this concern. Bad kissing concerned intent more than technique. This is not merely about restraining passion, it is about guarding the tongue from spreading poisonous gossip and slander. A kiss devoid of love was a corrupting force.

Ultimately, early Christian reflections on bad kissing serve to emphasize the intentionality behind the apostolic command to kiss. A true kiss must be sincere, not offered in hypocrisy, anger, hatred, or malice. Otherwise, it becomes a site of corruption rather than communion.

Learning from early Christians

With some imaginative elaborations involving promiscuous doves and poisonous spiders, early Christian reflections on the kiss of love and holy kiss within their communities return again and again to the Pauline and Petrine themes with which this article began. While Paul’s emphasis focused on holiness, reconciliation, and crossing cultural boundaries, and 1 Peter’s fell on love and familial belonging, early Christian writers tended to receive both commands together, interpreting the apostolic kisses as a real kiss which united believers, restored relationships, and signaled identity in Christ. What for those outside the church might have seemed scandalous was for the early church, love and holiness embodied in a simple but risky gesture. The kiss carried danger as well as promise: like Judas’ kiss, it could betray; like Clement’s spider, it could inject poison into the community. But when rightly enacted, it reconciled, healed, and transformed. Kissing is not to be undertaken unadvisedly or lightly, but prayerfully and with full awareness that individual actions can shape the communal whole.

Paul’s “holy kiss” and 1 Peter’s “kiss of love” remind Christians today that embodied gestures were not peripheral to Christian practice but central to how communities imagined holiness, love, and unity. As noted in the introduction to this article, in many places, modern Anglican practice rarely involves physical kissing and in most liturgies, the “peace” has been reduced to a handshake, nod, or is omitted altogether. But even if the form has changed, the underlying concerns remain. Then, as now, Christians—and I write as one with substantial experience in the Church of England, the Episcopal Church (USA), and the wider Anglican Communion—wrestled with how to embody reconciliation, how to signal genuine love without hypocrisy, and how to maintain boundaries without undermining hospitality. While Paul Bradshaw rightly notes that when it comes to the kiss, “the modern action quite different from the one adopted in the early Church” and “the meaning is not the same as it was for the earliest Christians,” he nevertheless concludes that “just because it is different does not mean that it should be abandoned.” ¹⁰⁴ The apostolic kiss therefore can function not as a prescription to revive ancient kissing practices uncritically, but a provocation to ask what our embodied signs of unity and reconciliation could look like.

In this way, this article is not advocating a replication of the form (a literal, physical kiss) but a discernment of the issues raised by the command to kiss in the letters of Paul and 1 Peter and its reception in the early Church: intimacy, vulnerability, reconciliation, and inclusion. In antiquity, the Christian kiss was radical precisely because it was public, embodied, and extended beyond familial ties. What embodied practices today would be equally radical, risky, and capable of enacting reconciliation in our fractured communities? What would it mean if our greetings and gestures signaled that “the stranger is family” and that “unity in Christ” is not lip service?

Of course, danger remains in such questions. Just as early Christians knew that a kiss could betray, our own gestures of love and reconciliation can be hollow, performative, or exclusionary. Gestures of love or of reconciliation that exclude, greetings that mask hostility, hospitality that hides power are no less poisonous today than Judas’ kiss in Gethsemane.

Yet, when rightly practiced, gestures of love and reconciliation, gestures that recognize the sanctity of another, can reshape communities. They remind us that love is not an abstract sentiment but enacted risk. They insist that reconciliation is not a one-time achievement but a repeated, ritual practice—at times sloppy, demanding, and transformative. Early Christians renewed the kiss again and again, not because it was easy, but because unity in Christ required constant maintenance. So today, the Church’s rituals of greeting and peace must be constantly reimagined and re-enacted. Early Christian understandings of sharing a kiss with one another changed as the needs and concerns of their communities changed, perhaps lending support to and serving as an example of how the church today might engage with modern questions about inclusion and intimacy. We do not need to return to kissing one another to heed the call to love and unity in the midst of suffering. But we do need to recover the seriousness with which early Christians took the task of embodying reconciliation.

1 Peter, like many early Christian texts, ends with a plea for love and a call to reconciliation: to remain in relationship, to stand in solidarity with the suffering. And yet, many in the Church today let the language of human intimacy become the battleground for deciding who is in and who is out. We are good at loving those within our theological or cultural comfort zones—those who we assume think, pray, and believe like we do—but we are far less practiced in extending love to the stranger, the marginalized, the suffering, and the “other.” The Anglican Communion when gathered together is a community who no longer share the peace or gather around the same altar together. Whether through a handshake, a hug, shared communion, or another gesture, what matters is that our bodies testify to our unity in Christ, our welcome of the stranger, and our calling to be a reconciled and reconciling people.

The apostolic kiss—the holy kiss and the kiss of love—reminds us that love, reconciliation, and respecting the dignity of every human being cannot remain invisible, disembodied ideals. They require physical, risky, communal enactment. Like the early Christian communities working out their identity in Christ, such actions push us beyond comfort zones and cultural conventions. Early Christians, anxious and accused as they were, dared to embody reconciliation with their lips. We, who live in a culture similarly anxious about intimacy and boundaries, must dare to find gestures that risk as much, that speak as boldly, and that embody as concretely the love of Christ for all. Anything short of this is little more than lip service.