Athenagoras, Plea for the Christians 32

The pagans tell no remarkable stories about us comparable to what they tell about their own gods; indeed, their myths expose the gods' passions as mysteries. If they were going to judge us for mixing freely and indiscriminately, they ought either to hate Zeus — begotten from his mother Rhea and his daughter Kore, and taking his own sister as a wife — or to hate Orpheus, Zeus's maker, because Orpheus also made Zeus more unholy than Thyestes and defiled; for Zeus too lay with his daughter by an oracle's command, wanting to reign and take revenge. We, however, stand so far from such indifference that we are not even permitted to look with desire. For, he says, whoever looks at a woman to desire her has already committed adultery in his heart (Matthew 5:28). To those to whom nothing more is allowed to be seen than what God created the eyes for — so that we may be light — and to those for whom seeing adulteries is a pleasure, because their eyes have become something other than what they were made for, until their thoughts are judged, how could these people be trusted to be self‑controlled? For our standard is not human laws, which anyone who becomes wicked can evade (indeed, from the beginning I testified to you, rulers, that the teaching among us is God‑taught), but we have a law that established a measure of righteousness for them and for those around them. Therefore we regard as sons and daughters those of like age, we have brothers and sisters, and we render to our elders the honor due fathers and mothers. Because we count as brothers and sisters and by the other family names those whom we so regard, it matters greatly to us that their bodies remain unviolated and incorrupt, for the Word again tells us: if anyone kisses a second time because it pleased him, and adding, 'Thus one must be precise about the kiss, or rather the greeting, so that, if the mind is slightly darkened, it does not put us outside eternal life.'