Abstract: Early Christians described and performed the ritual kiss in ways that helped them create a cohesive, family-like community. The kiss could include certain people in the church, exclude others, and help distinguish Christian behavior. An investigation of the ritual kiss presents an opportunity to illustrate how performance theory's emphasis on embodied action can help us better appreciate how practice, as well as rhetoric, affected early Christian communities.

Among scholars of early Christianity, interest in the Greco-Roman family has reached an unprecedented level. Recent studies from classics have enhanced our understanding of the Greco-Roman family and its use as a metaphor in the politics of empire. 1 At the same time, crossdisciplinary [End Page 151] research in early Christian studies has inherited from anthropology a focus on the family as a primary social and cultural unit. 2 The result is an impressive list of scholarly monographs, articles, and anthologies analyzing the family's place in New Testament and Patristic literature. 3

These works have come to a consensus, of sorts, that early Christian writers used familial rhetoric and fictive kinship terms (e.g., "brothers and sisters in Christ") to strengthen the cohesion of early Christian groups. 4 Several studies have suggested that the Greco-Roman family, especially the figure of the paterfamilias, also provided early Christian writers with a useful metaphor of hierarchy. 5 Although these investigations have yielded important insights regarding the ways Christian writers used models of family, because they center on the question of how early Christians wrote or spoke of their communities, these scholars have limited themselves to [End Page 152] exploring only the verbal and written rhetoric of kinship. Building on this scholarship, I want to examine a slightly different dynamic—how early Christians used a specific ritual, that of ritual kissing, to help perform family.

Recent scholarship in ritual studies, performance studies, and queer theory has emphasized performance as a key factor in identity formation. 6 What links such diverse fields is the belief that a focus on the performative and the language of performativity offers a perspective otherwise lacking in our analysis. Performance theory is partly a reaction against the expansion of the term text to include just about any human activity. 7 Performance theorists often suggest that "texts may obscure what performance tends to reveal," and they try to reclaim the physical and emphasize the kinesthetic. 8 As a metaphor, the very term performance changes our vocabulary and shifts our analytic attention. Audience, script, participation, framing—all become central concerns. Performance also stresses dynamism instead of simple expression. Cultural performances do not just reflect an abstract hidden cultural system (they are not simply texts that describe), they also create, reproduce, or challenge that system. 9 [End Page 153]

My own work employs insights from these fields to investigate how early Christians constructed the ritual kiss not only as a means to talk about being a family but also as a way to act it out. I suggest that the adoption and modification of a typical familial gesture into a decidedly Christian ritual helped early Christians redefine the concept of family. This concentration on the kiss as ritual performance challenges scholars to view early Christian discourse as denser and richer than if we limit ourselves to models that focus solely on the verbal or the written. It looks at action as well as rhetoric, emphasizes the power of participation, raises questions of intended audience, examines the importance of self-representation, and presents rituals as constitutive as well as expressive.

There remains, however, an important distinction between most work in performance studies and my exploration of early Christianity. Scholarship of performance usually focuses on modern rituals where the author witnesses the performance itself. In historical studies, however, we rarely have so thick a description as direct observation. Instead, we are limited to what extant writing and iconography tell us about ancient rituals. Unlike other investigations of the performative, scholarship of early Christianity does not have the luxury to move quite so far away from the text.

In his work on performance and memory, Joseph Roach makes a similar point when he states: "The pursuit of performance does not require historians to abandon the archive, but it does encourage them to spend more time in the streets." 10 The difference, of course, is that the streets I walk down are not those of present-day New Orleans but a reconstruction of ancient Rome. As a result, my own work does not discard texts as much as it moves in and out of them. I analyze texts to approximate Christian and non-Christian kissing practices; I examine how Christians modified these practices in their construction of the Christian ritual kiss; and I explore how Christian kissing praxis (both the kiss's performance and its rhetorical framing—its staging and its scripting) may have affected early Christian communities.

My investigation begins with a short chronological overview of ritual kissing in early Christianity. Next, I briefly examine the kiss's use as a familial gesture among non-Christians. I then explore three ways early Christian leaders combined the widespread familial connotations of kissing with the specifics of Christian ritual performance to influence emerging Christian communities. I focus on: (1) how the act of exchanging a kiss helped early Christians characterize their community as a family; (2) [End Page 154] how the exaltation of individuals who refused to kiss non-Christian relatives modeled the use of religious affiliation instead of biological filiation as the primary kinship marker; and (3) how the restraint shown in the ways Christians kissed reinforced early Christian claims to moral superiority. In each of these cases, the kiss functioned as a performance both of inclusivity and exclusivity; it helped define who was part of a new, familial community and it differentiated these family members from everyone else.

Ritual Kissing and Early Christianity

As attested by the oldest known Christian writings, kissing was one of the most ubiquitous features of early Christianity. It was practiced throughout the ancient world by both so-called orthodox and heretical Christians and became a part of almost every major Christian ritual. In the first five centuries of the common era, Christians kissed each other as part of prayer, Eucharist, baptism, and ordination and in connection with funerals, monastic vows, martyrdom, and penitential practices. Yet despite the hundreds of ancient references to the Christian kiss, most modern scholarship has ignored this important component of early Christian worship. 11

In the New Testament, commandments for Christians to exchange a [End Page 155] kiss appear at the end of 1 Thessalonians, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Romans, and 1 Peter. All occur at the close of an epistle and are virtually identical in their wording: "Greet one another" (or 1 Thessalonians, "Greet all the brethren") "with a holy kiss" (or 1 Peter, "with a kiss of love"). 12 The brevity of these references and their lack of specific details suggest that Paul and the author of 1 Peter assumed that their audiences were already familiar with the kiss.

By the end of the second century, surviving sources witness early Christians ritually kissing each other in Asia Minor, Rome, Athens, and Alexandria. 13 Justin presents the only specific example of the kiss's place in the service order, and he puts the ritual kiss at the end of the common prayer and before the Eucharist. First- and second-century sources do not limit the exchange of the kiss to same-sex participants, and late-second-century works indicate that men and women kissed each other. 14 These works also show that, like most examples of Greco-Roman kissing, 15 the Christian ritual kiss was a kiss on the lips.

Third-century sources further document the ritual kiss's ubiquity and present several important developments in its practice. By C.E. 300, writings from Rome, Athens, Alexandria, Carthage, North Africa, Asia Minor, [End Page 156] and Syria all speak of ritual kissing between Christians. 16 These writings link the kiss with prayer, Eucharist, baptism, ordination, martyrdom, domestic devotions, greeting, and reconciliation. The works also show important variations in how community members exchange the kiss, and show emerging ecclesiastical hierarchy's attempts to regulate ritual kissing. Tertullian and The Apostolic Tradition limit the kiss to baptized Christians; Tertullian states that some heretical Christians do not follow this distinction. 17 Although most early Christian sources indicate that the kiss is on the lips, the Acts of Andrew and the Acts of John modify it to be a kiss of the feet or hands. 18 In contrast to previous texts that allowed women and men to exchange the kiss with each other, The Apostolic Tradition is the first source specifically to prohibit this practice. 19

Fourth-century works speak of the ritual kiss as part of prayer, Eucharist, baptism, ordination, penitence, martyrdom, and epistolary salutations. 20 These sources also hint at geographic variations in the kiss's position in the Eucharist liturgy and whether the bishop kisses the initiate [End Page 157] immediately after baptism. Similar to The Apostolic Tradition, The Apostolic Constitutions limits the kiss to those of the same gender. 21 Like the Apocryphal Acts, the pseudo-Clementine Second Letter on Virginity no longer has opposite-sexed Christians exchange a labial kiss. 22 The Apostolic Constitutions specifies that clergy only kiss other clergy and laity other laity. 23 The Testament of Our Lord also supports this division. 24

Fifth-century sources continue to display an increased diversity in early Christian kissing practices. They indicate shifts in the kiss's position within the Eucharist service, differences between Eastern and Western liturgical practices, and a proliferation of the kiss's connection to other rituals. By the century's end, the kiss appears as a part of the closing of prayers, the Eucharist, baptism, ordination, martyrdom, the cult of martyrs, greetings, monastic vows, home devotions, saluting the altar, epistolary conventions, and death rituals. 25

Although even a brief overview of the ritual kiss raises numerous questions regarding its practice and connections with community identity and social boundaries, this article focuses on only one aspect of these relationships—the kiss's performance as a way to define Christianity as family. Before further exploring the Christian ritual kiss, however, it first is necessary to examine non-Christian use of the kiss as a familial gesture. The adoption and modification of these contemporary kissing customs became a central concern for early Christian leaders. [End Page 158]

Kissing and the Greco-Roman Family

The Greco-Roman world often associated kissing with familial relations. In a survey of almost nine hundred non-Christian Greek and Latin references to kissing, familial kisses constituted the second largest category, surpassed only by kisses between unmarried lovers. 26 These familial kisses included those between parents and children (60 percent), spouses (26 percent), siblings (9 percent), and more extended family (5 percent). Although the surviving sources rarely speak of what body part was kissed, those that do suggest that the familial kiss most often was a kiss on the lips. 27

According to classical literature, relatives not only were allowed to kiss each other, they were expected to do so. Latin writers often refer to this as the ius osculi. In his elegies, Propertius lists the various people who have the right to kiss his lover, including male and female relatives. 28 The narrator of Ovid's Amores complains that he has to kiss his lover secretly, but her husband can demand these kisses as his right. 29 Ovid later shows this from the opposite perspective, a husband proclaiming that his rights have been infringed when his wife kissed another man. 30 Ovid's Metamorphoses notes that siblings often kiss in public, a custom Byblis uses to conceal an incestuous relationship with her brother. 31 Suetonius states that Agrippina seduced her uncle, "aided by the ius osculi." 32 [End Page 159]

Several writers justify a man's traditional right publicly to kiss female relatives as a "spot breath check": it ensures that women are not stealing the family wine. 33 For example, Athenaeus states:

It is impossible for a women to drink wine unnoticed. For, first, a woman does not have control of [the store] of wine. Next, she must kiss her and her husband's relatives down to the children of second cousins, and do this every day whenever she first sees them. Finally, because it is unclear whom she will meet, she is on her guard for if she only tastes [of the wine] there is no need of further accusation. 34
Gellius and Pliny present similar descriptions of this custom. 35 Tertullian also cites this tradition and laments that in contrast to ancient Rome, in his day "on account of wine, there is no free kiss." 36 Of course it seems unlikely that any of these authors knew the origins of the publicly exchanged familial kiss. Instead, they shape their explanations of a contemporary practice to help forward their own narrative project, whether that project be Athenaeus' discussion of the evils of excessive drink or Tertullian's depiction of declining Roman morals.

Non-Christian sources occasionally use the familial kiss to describe nonfamilial relationships. In Apuleius' The Golden Ass, the narrator "embraced Mithras, the priest and now my father, clinging to his neck and kissing him many times." 37 Unfortunately, the kiss's role in this text is far from clear. Although presented in Apuleius' discussion of the Isis rites, the kiss does not occur during the initiation ritual itself but several days later and in the context of expressing gratitude; most likely it is a kiss of thanksgiving, a well-attested Greco-Roman gesture. 38 The phrase "the priest and now my father" is also vague: Does the narrator interpret his kiss primarily as a familial kiss (Mithras is now his father), a religious kiss [End Page 160] (Mithras is a priest), or as a combination of these? Of course, there also remains the often raised question of how closely Apuleius' descriptions represent actual practices. Nevertheless, Apuleius' narrative implies a connection between kissing and a religious group's use of familial imagery. A less ambiguous example of the kiss's use in discussions of fictive kinship occurs in the Satyricon when Circe calls Encolpius' lover his "brother" and offers herself as his new "sister" (that is, sexual partner). Encolpius must only kiss her to recognize this new relationship, which comes with the same sort of sexual benefits his "brother" currently provides. 39

Kissing in late antiquity was associated with many different circumstances and with many different relationships. This larger cultural context becomes essential for understanding the ritual kiss's various roles in early Christian communities. Because one of its most prominent meanings was a link with kinship (whether biological or fictive), it is not surprising that the ritualized exchange of kisses between group members appeared in a community, like early Christianity, that tried to emphasize a familial structure.

Creating a Christian Family

Although previous scholars have not explored Christianity's employment of familial gestures, many have analyzed early Christians' use of familial nomenclature. Applying kinship terms not to biological relations but to those connected by faith, early Christians tried to redefine family. As exemplified by Matthew 12.46-50, the family of Christian fellowship superseded even biological ties. 40 For the ancient church, such analogies not only described but also prescribed. Comparing the ancient Christian community to the family emphasized the group's strength and unity; such a label could become self-fulfilling.

Early Christian descriptions of the ritual kiss became part of this larger project of constructing early Christians as kin. Many Christian authors explicitly state that the Christian ritual kiss is like a kiss between relatives. Writing in the second century, Athenagoras warns that, when kissing, "it [End Page 161] is of great importance to us that the bodies of our brothers and sisters and the others called the names of relatives, remain not insulted and undefiled." 41 In the early third century, Tertullian suggests that, unlike the Christian husband who recognizes that kissing fellow Christians is analogous to kissing blood relatives, a pagan husband would misinterpret his wife's attempts "to crawl into prison to kiss the martyr's bonds" or "to meet any of the brethren to [give] the kiss." 42 In the early fifth century, Augustine employs the language of kinship to proclaim, "your lips draw near the lips of your brother in the same way that your heart does not withdraw from his heart." 43

In their alignment of the familial and the ritual kiss, these sources allude to many different types of relationships. Nevertheless, there remains an intriguing silence when they do not mention an integral member of many ancient households—the slave. Among non-Christian sources, there are many allusions to kissing slaves for sexual pleasure, 44 yet a free person and slave kissing for nonsexual reasons was seen as extremely unusual. For example, in the Satyricon, Encolpius is surprised when a slave he helped runs up to kiss him, 45 and in his Epistles, Seneca notes that he purposefully flouts social expectations when he greets other people's slaves with a kiss on the hands. 46 In contrast, Christian sources never place any restriction on exchanging the ritual kiss with a Christian slave, 47 and the Martyrdom of Perpetua claims that, previous to their execution, the martyrs of Carthage kissed each other, an exchange that would have included the slave Felicitas. 48 In other words, both in its performance and its description, the ritual kiss temporarily erased status distinctions that [End Page 162] Christians otherwise maintained in their household arrangements; at least when they exchanged the ritual kiss, slaves, too, became full members of the Christian family.

This difference between everyday kissing practice (free and slaves generally not kissing each other) and Christian ritual practice (Christian slaves being kissable) illustrates a larger tension underlying the ritual kiss. At the same time that Christians drew on cultural analogies to make the kiss an intelligible practice, they also had to distinguish the ritual kiss from its cultural analogs to make it a uniquely Christian ritual. This strain between appropriation and differentiation becomes particularly apparent in the writings of John Chrysostom:

The kiss is given so that it may be the fuel of love, so that we may kindle the disposition, so that we may love each other as brothers [love] brothers, as children [love] parents, as parents [love] children. But also far greater, because those [are] by nature, these by grace. Thus our souls are bound to each other. 49

Chrysostom's choice of analogies is not accidental. Because of the kiss's cultural connection with family relations, Chrysostom's audience would not be surprised by the kinship terms to describe the kiss. Linking the ritual kiss to the familial kiss, Chrysostom also connects the magnitude of its result; the Christian kiss creates a bond as strong as that between the closest family members. His presentation of this analogy also imposes certain parameters on the love. By not comparing the ritual kiss to a kiss between spouses or between sisters and brothers, Chrysostom's statement avoids possible erotic connotations. 50

Although linking the Christian ritual kiss to a common familial gesture is a highly effective rhetorical move, it is also potentially problematic. By relating the Christian ritual kiss to everyday kissing practices, Chrysostom threatens to make the kiss available outside the group's boundaries. If, as his analogy may suggest, the Christian kiss is so similar to a kiss between family members, why would one have to join the Christian community to experience it? To avoid this problem, Chrysostom differentiates the Christian kiss from the same familial kiss with which he earlier identified it. Chrysostom first modifies his statement that the ritual kiss produces a love as strong as that between family members—indeed, it creates a love even stronger than that experienced in a biological family. He then notes [End Page 163] that the disposition created by the familial kiss is expected; nature implants love between relatives, so the emotion is not extraordinary. Grace implants love between nonbiologically related Christians, which signifies the much more remarkable quality of Christian love—it results in a bonding of souls.

According to Catherine Bell, such a discursive strategy becomes key to any ritual action. What defines ritualization is its insistence on distinguishing its actions from that of nonritual activities. 51 In Bell's words, "Ritualization is a way of acting that is designed and orchestrated to distinguish and privilege what is being done in comparison to other [activities] . . . ritualization is a way of acting that specifically establishes a privileged contrast, differentiating itself as more important or powerful." 52 From this perspective, as the analogy breaks down—the ritual kiss no longer seems quite as similar to the familial kiss as initially supposed—Chrysostom no longer simply appropriates a gesture, instead he creates a ritual.

At first glance, it may seem surprising that, while critiquing previous scholars' logocentrism, I, too, focus on the rhetoric of ancient Christian writings to distinguish ritual from gesture. An obvious reason for this analytic strategy is that an investigation of the early Christian kiss, like the investigation of any premodern ritual, does not have access to the ritual itself, only to texts that describe the ritual. Such an approach, however, also keeps us from artificially dividing ritual into separate discursive spheres of interpretation and practice—what leaders tell the community the kiss signifies and how group members kiss. To avoid the mistake of suggesting that ritual action could ever exist without interpretation or that interpretation could be unrelated to practice, we must view the exchange of the ritual kiss as praxis—the combination of interpretation and action. In other words, to understand more fully the kiss's performance, we need to look at the script and the stage directions as well as the acting and the action.

My investigation of ancient ritual praxis does not suggest that previous scholars have been wrong in emphasizing the importance of rhetorical strategies in constructing communities, nor do I advocate ignoring the role of the oral and written word in the performance of ritual. Rather, I argue that the lens of praxis provides a more holistic view of ritual. When exploring praxis, analysis of a given ritual may very well begin with tools [End Page 164] from literary and rhetorical criticisms, but we should not stop there. Examining ritual as praxis requires us also to investigate physical aspects of a ritual. It is here that performance theory's emphasis on enactment become particularly useful.

In terms of the early Christian ritual kiss, we must recognize that the kiss was not just an object of discussion, it was also a physical action. By appropriating a gesture common among family members and placing it in the context of a nonbiologically related community, the very act of kissing helped Christians construct a new concept of family. Every time Christians kissed, they engaged in an action routinely associated with a familial context. This connection with kinship relationships became even stronger when kissing a member of the opposite sex, because in the surrounding culture a nonerotic kiss between unrelated members of the opposite sex was extremely rare. 53 The dissonance between cultural norms (kissing primarily restricted to family members) and experienced reality (periodically kissing unrelated persons during Christian rituals) could be resolved in one of two ways. Either the parameters of kissing could be expanded regularly to include nonfamily members, or those whom one kissed during Christian rituals could be redefined as family. As the above sources suggest, early Christian leaders preferred the latter.

In their alignment of the kiss with the production and expression of kinship, Christian leaders emphasized the ritual kiss's performative value. Many modern ritual observers agree that as performance, ritual helps create social reality. For example, in her studies of modern Morocco, M. E. Combs-Schilling states:

Rituals share many qualities of great theatrical performances. . . [but t]hose who sincerely participate in ritual are real performers in real-life dramas. . . . Rituals manufacture public and private experiences rich in sight, smell, sound, taste, touch, and imaginative abstractions. At best, they are not simply experiences, but crystalline experiences so vibrant in meaning and medium that they serve as counterpoint to other experiences built in daily life. When persuasive, rituals are experienced by the participants as life at its most profound, and can cast aspersions on the rest of experience as being less than essential . . . . That is culture's trump card. For rituals are staged cultural expressions that at their best appear neither staged nor [End Page 165] cultural but rather evoke life as it exists in its essence. . . . They are shadow plays in reverse: the performers and the performance become real, while everything else becomes the shadow. 54
Unlike less participatory activities, the ritual kiss elicited the entire community's active involvement. In acting out a particular interpretation of the kiss, participants were audience and actors. When they saw the exchange of the kiss, Christians witnessed a specific scene that their behavior should model—joining together to form a family of Christ. Church members also participated in this performance. Sociologist Joachim Knuf stresses the importance of such ritual participation in the construction of social reality:

From the point of view of the enactor of a ritual, a ritual has a distinctively performative character and serves to bring about changes in the world. . . . Participation in a ritual is tantamount to a subjection of its intent; implementation of the ritual action plan therefore involves participants in behavior that not only symbolizes a certain order of things (or of the world), it executes this order. Many elements of ritualized communication can hence be regarded as signs that create the state they signify. 55
Christian rhetoric aligning the ritual kiss with concepts of kinship augmented an already strong cultural connection between kissing and familial relations. When practiced, the kiss made concrete a particular social ideal; it became the execution of a "ritual action plan." These ritual performances helped early Christianity produce a new kind of family, a community formed not by biological relationship but by a kinship of faith.

All In the Family?

The kiss, however, not only created new families, it also disrupted old ones. Similar to their non-Christian contemporaries, early Christians often [End Page 166] exchanged kisses as a form of greeting. 56 The greeting kiss both reaffirmed membership in the community and functioned as a tool of exclusion. For example, Gregory Nazianzen praised his mother, Nonna, because she allowed "never for her hand to touch [heathen] hands, nor her lips to kiss heathen lips, not even those of a woman most respectable in all other matters, even a member of her house." 57 Before becoming a Christian, a woman unquestionably would kiss her relatives. Yet once joining the Christian community, Gregory's mother intentionally violates the ius osculi and no longer kisses a non-Christian, no matter how closely related.

The strength of contemporary expectations for kissing family members as well as Gregory's decision to emphasize this particular facet of his mother's behavior suggest that contemporaries would have viewed Nonna's actions as extremely significant. In terms of group dynamics, it established a new in-group (a new Christian family whom she kisses) as well as a new out-group (non-Christian relatives whom she formerly kissed but no longer does); the kiss not only could define a new nonbiological family, it also could separate individuals from their biological families.

In depicting his mother's behavior as noteworthy, Gregory suggests that it was atypical. Nevertheless, she presented an ideal. She was an exemplar of the ritual kiss taken to its logical end—if one only kisses kin and if family now is defined by ties of faith, one should not kiss non-Christian relatives because they are no longer family. Even if actual kissing practice rarely was as extreme as that of Nonna, Gregory's rhetoric suggests that Christian authors would not have been upset if it were.

The late-second-century Martyrdom of Andrew presents another example of Christians constructing pagan relatives as unkissable. The Martyrdom of Andrew is, of course, a very different source than Chrysostom's homilies or Gregory Nazianzen's orations. It does not directly witness the ways early Christians actually kissed each other. It does, however, show [End Page 167] that even in fictional narrative, the kiss still provided a performative answer to the question, "as a Christian, who is my family?"

In the Martyrdom of Andrew, Aegeates, husband of the recently converted Maximilla, returns from a long journey. He enters his bedroom, which only moments before housed an entire Christian congregation. The worshipers, made invisible by the apostle Andrew, have just departed, leaving only the praying Maximilla. Aegeates hears Maximilla utter his name, and he expects her enthusiastically to receive his kisses, but he soon discovers that this is not the case:

But Aegeates pressed on to go into the bedroom thinking that Maximilla was still sleeping; for he loved her. But she was praying. And when she saw him, she turned away and looked to the ground. And he said to her, "First, give me your right hand and I will kiss it. Henceforth I will not address you as wife, but as lady, because I am refreshed by your prudence and your love toward me." For, the poor man, when he caught her praying, he thought that she prayed for him; when he heard his own name while she prayed, he was delighted. But, this was what was said by Maximilla, "Save me henceforth from Aegeates' defiled intercourse and keep me pure and chaste serving only you my God." And when, because he wanted to kiss it, [Aegeates] drew near to her mouth, she pushed him away saying, "It is not right Aegeates, for a man's mouth to touch a woman's mouth after prayer." And the proconsul, amazed at the harshness of her countenance, departed from her and stripping off his travel clothes he rested; having finished his long journey, lying down, he slept. 58
Maximilla's refusal to kiss her husband radically challenges cultural expectations. She justifies her actions by implying that Aegeates' kiss would pollute a mouth recently purified by prayer. 59

What makes Aegeates' kiss impure? Maximilla explicitly states one explanation: the gender difference between Aegeates and Maximilla makes kissing each other after prayer polluting ("It is not right, Aegeates, for a [End Page 168] man's mouth to touch a woman's mouth after prayer"). This explanation, however, contradicts every other second-century witness to Christian kissing practice. For example, Tertullian speaks of spouses as well as nonrelated men and women exchanging a ritual kiss both in church and at home. Tertullian sees this kiss as a "seal of prayer" and considers prayer without a kiss to be incomplete. 60 If Maximilla literally means that men and women never should kiss after prayer, the Martyrdom of Andrew is the only second-century source prohibiting this practice.

The ascetic nature of the Apocryphal Acts makes such a restriction plausible. I suggest, however, another possible explanation for Maximilla's concern. Maximilla sees Aegeates' kiss as a purity violation less because of his gender than because of his religion. Although she does not state it in these terms to her husband, such an interpretation is consistent with the Apocryphal Acts' emphasis on how a woman's conversion to Christianity alienates her biological family, but joins her to a larger religious community.

Whether it aims to divide men from women, Christian from non-Christian, or both, the Martyrdom of Andrew shows how kissing can strengthen distinctions and solidify group boundaries. From the perspective of the Apocryphal Acts, the marriage of Christian to non-Christian was particularly threatening, both because of its sexual implications and the concern of divided loyalties. In the Apocryphal Acts, virtually all the protagonists must illustrate their commitment to Christianity by abandoning their closest kin. Maximilla's refusal to kiss her husband was part of a larger strategy to prioritize Christian community over biological ties. Like Gregory's mother, Maximilla's actions help Christianity develop a successionary model of kinship. Joining Christianity does not just form a new family, it also replaces the old.

The Kiss and "Family Values"

The ritual kiss not only raised the question of whom one should kiss but also the question of how one should kiss. Here, too, the analogy of kinship affected the ways Christians exchanged the kiss. I am particularly interested in how at least one early Christian leader could use the motif of family to refashion an act of potentially suspect motivation (unrelated men and women kissing each other) into a performance of Christian virtue.

Despite general scholarly neglect of early Christian kissing, one aspect of the ritual kiss has attracted some attention. Several scholars argue that [End Page 169] the ritual kiss was a major factor contributing to pagan accusations of Christian immorality. 61 Either the kiss frequently became an excuse for inappropriate sexual expression (which led to widespread reports of Christian impropriety) or, despite Christian restraint, non-Christian observers misinterpreted the ritual kiss as sexual and used this to slander early Christian communities.

Surprisingly little evidence, however, supports a link between the ritual kiss and widespread rumors. Only a single sentence from Christian writings mentions that the kiss could lead to slanderous reports, and no surviving non-Christian sources ever make this connection. 62 In fact, a close read of a work most often used to support the "rumor hypothesis" suggests that, especially when placed in the context of familial gesture, the ritual kiss could become a performance not of licentiousness but of sexual control.

Two chapters into defending Christians against charges of "godless banquets and sexual unions," 63 the second-century Athenagoras writes:

According to age, we call some sons and daughters and others we hold brothers and sisters and to the aged assign the honor of fathers and mothers. Therefore, it is of great importance to us that the bodies of our brothers and sisters and the others called the names of relatives remain not insulted and undefiled. Again the word says to us: "If someone should kiss twice because it pleased him . . ." and it adds: "therefore it is necessary to be careful of the kiss, or the salutation, because if our thoughts are the least bit stirred by it, it places us outside eternal life." 64
Proponents of the "rumor hypothesis" use this passage to argue that widespread slanders of Christian kissing abuse forced Athenagoras to defend Christian kissing practices. Athenagoras' Plea for Christians, however, never states this; the only rumors the author cites are slanders of sexual unions and cannibalism. The passage's context, in fact, suggests just the opposite. Athenagoras is not reacting to widespread gossip of the ritual kiss's link to promiscuity. Rather, Athenagoras uses the kiss as an example of Christian restraint to disprove the more general rumors of sexual impropriety.

In the previous chapter of his apology, Athenagoras claims that because Christians believe that God continually looks into believers' hearts, they [End Page 170] are particularly virtuous in thought, as well as deed. 65 Chapter 32 includes Athenagoras' paraphrase of Matthew 5.28—merely looking at a woman lustfully becomes an act of adultery. When speaking of the kiss, Athenagoras' citation of an otherwise unattested logion makes the same point. The quotation begins with a clear behavioral transgression—it condemns people who enjoy kissing so much that they return for seconds. Like the Matthew passage, the latter half of the saying moves from outward action to inner emotions. Even if Christians' apparent behavior seems proper (kissing only once), the participants must control the thoughts about which only they and God know. Just as a wandering eye commits adultery, when Christians kiss each other, a wandering mind can lead to damnation. According to Athenagoras, because the stakes are so high, whenever they kiss, Christians regulate both their outward behavior and their inward thought. By his very emphasis of the kiss's inherent danger, Athenagoras constructs the chaste exchange of a ritual kiss as a dramatic performance of how faithful Christians keep their sexual desires under control even in the most tempting of circumstances.

What immediately follows this passage also suggests that Athenagoras is not defending against allegations of kissing impropriety, but rather himself brings up the matter of the kiss to illustrate Christian virtue. Chapter 33 presents several extended examples of Christian sexual restraint: married Christians have sex only for procreation, many Christians remain lifelong virgins, and Christian widows and widowers never remarry. 66 No commentator has ever suggested that these are reactions to widespread rumors of Christian remarriage. Instead, modern scholars view them as part of Athenagoras' larger argument that because Christians follow such strict sexual ethics, any claims of Christian orgiastic practices are completely unfounded. I contend that, like the passages before and after it, Athenagoras' reference to Christian kissing is another example of Christian self-imposed sexual control.

Because Athenagoras sets his Plea as an oral delivery to the Roman emperor, many scholars have argued that he designed it for a non-Christian audience. 67 Athenagoras directs his reference to the kiss toward outsiders [End Page 171] either to defend Christians against external accusations of improper kissing or, as I have argued, to illustrate Christian self-restraint. Whenever they heard or read this work, non-Christians would remain a level removed from the actual practice and thus dependent on Athenagoras' report; they had no way of verifying how (or how often) Christian men and women kissed each other. From this perspective, Athenagoras' passage becomes a carefully constructed textual portrait.

But did Athenagoras really write the work primarily for non-Christians? It is difficult to imagine Marcus Aurelius, Lucius Commodus, or any other nonsympathetic outsider either listening to or reading a forty-page treatise delivered by a member of a highly suspicious religious cult. It seems particularly unlikely that Athenagoras directed his references to Christian kissing toward a non-Christian audience. Athenagoras never provides any context for the kiss, and to understand his arguments the Plea's recipients must have been surprisingly familiar with Christian ritual practices. Instead of viewing the passage's primary audience as the Roman emperors themselves, I suggest that the passage is more esoteric than exoteric; Athenagoras aimed his warnings against impure kissing primarily toward other Christians to whom his threat of exclusion from eternal life had real currency.

If Athenagoras' account of the kiss is mainly for internal consumption, this substantially blurs the boundaries between text and ritual. For early Christians, Athenagoras' work does not remain an apologetic description but becomes a ritual script. By following his instructions, participants could perform Christian righteousness. Although Athenagoras stages this performance before non-Christians, this implied viewership is almost certainly never present. Instead, Christians become true participant-observers and the kiss becomes a form of double self-representation; Christians perform the ritual kiss by themselves and for themselves. 68 By chastely exchanging the kiss, they show other Christians their self-restraint, they show God the purity of their thoughts, and they show each other the virtue of their community.

The kiss's connection to kinship becomes central to Athenagoras' project. By emphasizing the link between Christianity, family, and kissing, he [End Page 172] suggests that an improper exchange of the ritual kiss is not just overly sexual or adulterous, it also is incestuous. Although Athenagoras is not the first Greco-Roman writer to correlate kissing with incest, 69 emphasizing this potential connection allows Athenagoras to construct the ritual kiss as a way to distinguish Christians from non-Christians.

Athenagoras explicitly discusses incest in the beginning of chapter 32, in which he speaks of Zeus' incestuous relations with his own mother, daughter, and sister and Thyestes' relationship with his daughter. Athenagoras uses these familiar mythological stories as foils for Christians' relations with each other. Unlike non-Christian gods who have sex with their biological relatives, Christians are careful not even to have lustful thoughts regarding their fictive kin.

Athenagoras implies that if Christians should kiss each other "with the least defilement of thought," this distinction between Christian and non-Christian behavior would break down. They, like the pagan gods, would be guilty of incest. In the context of Christian ritual, what makes such a boundary violation particularly disturbing is the fine line it crosses. As an act of inclusion, the kiss brings Christians closer to each other—they should be as intimate as the most immediate of family. In response to the possibility of participants using the kiss to become a bit too close, Athenagoras employs the same fictive kinship structure that initially decreased the social distance between Christians to put parameters on appropriate kissing behavior; the ritual kiss is a kiss shared by siblings, not lovers.

Athenagoras' construction of the kiss is not so much an act of apology as an act of self-definition. His reference to ritual kissing does not support the idea of the ritual kiss resulting in slander. Rather, it shows how Christian leaders can emphasize the kiss's link to kinship to illustrate distinctiveness. In the context of the Christian family, the kiss foregrounds the difference between Christian restraint and non-Christian licentiousness while simultaneously marking a boundary between communal closeness and inappropriately erotic attraction. When properly performed, the ritual kiss illustrates and reinforces Christian "family values" in contrast to pagan immorality. [End Page 173]

Conclusion

Despite thousands of ancient references to kissing, scholars rarely have explored the kiss either as a common Greco-Roman practice or specifically as a Christian ritual. Given the growing interest in the late antique family, this neglect becomes particularly surprising. Why have so many works on the ancient family ignored one of the most widespread familial practices in the Greco-Roman world?

After the linguistic turn, numerous scholars have focused on the role of language in creating perceived reality. I suspect that this emphasis on rhetoric occasionally has led to the neglect of an equally important facet of poststructuralist thought—the body's role in systems of power and identity. In terms of early Christian studies, although previous scholars have investigated how Christians write or speak of family, they have not yet asked how ritual plays a role in constructions of kinship.

I argue that including ritual in our explorations of early Christians and the family gives us a much richer appreciation for the dynamics of early Christianity. Such an approach emphasizes how the ritual kiss's performance both illustrated and enacted a new model of community. It shows how a ritual could function not only as an act of inclusion but also as a tool to create a supercessionary vision of family. It notes that Christians could stage the ritual kiss as a display of Christian virtue and a reinforcement of Christian distinctiveness. The ritual kiss helped early Christians perform family. I suggest it also can help modern scholars better appreciate the importance of ritual as we perform our own analyses of early Christian communities.