How God Became Jesus: The Real Origins of Belief in Jesus' Divine Nature—A Response To Bart Ehrman

by Michael F. Bird

the more positive side, there are various kinds of reverence offered to Jesus in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Some of these exceed the bounds of esteem for a mere human being, and as we will soon see, such reverence cannot be regarded simply as worship of a secondtier god. This is especially apparent in Luke, because he considers it inappropriate to give reverential prostration to mere human beings. (Other authors may well use the term more liberally than Luke.) The Greek word for this reverential prostration is proskynēsis, a kind of technical term. This was the reverence that in 327 BCE, Alexander the Great imposed on his fellow Greeks as an obligation; some of them refused, denying him what amounted to formal worship as a god.12 Luke narrates a scene in Acts that is almost a mirror image of that, in which Cornelius bowed down to (prosekynēsen) Peter, after which Peter said: “Stand up, for I too am a man” (Acts 10:25 – 26). So when the disciples offer proskynēsis to Jesus at the end of Luke’s gospel, it is clearly worship due uniquely to God that is in view (Luke 24:52).