marco wrote:Another question is, if Luke thought Christ was God then why did he not write this astonishing statement in skyscraper capitals?
It's because Luke wasn't writing any of this as straight historical narrative and is for the same reason that Orwell's
Animal Farm didn't write "the pigs are the communists" in skyscraper capitals. I haven't yet grokked the fullness, but the implications for Luke's Christology go beyond "Jesus is God" and "Jesus is not God." If you're looking for a punchline, Jesus isn't God yet in the temptation scene, but has become so by the ascension (or whatever; there are problems with that that involve Acts).
The problem is that what this does to Luke's Christology doesn't really fit either orthodox trinitarian or common heretical views of Christ's divinity. Oversimplifying, the orthodox view is to harmonize everything to the view of John, while the Jehovah's Witnesses harmonize everything to a sort of Paul-Matthew compromise. The author of the article is a Catholic apologist, so he doubles down on the part where Luke seems to say that Jesus is God.
marco wrote:We need to conjugate a harmless Greek verb to get some info on Christ's divinity.
Despite the continued insistence of JW's straw man, the argument has nothing to do with the translation. The apparent reason that JW keeps bringing it up is that the NWT translates the same word differently in Luke 4:7-8 (worship) and 24:52 (offer obeisance). Other translations don't, so it doesn't really matter to anyone but Jehovah's Witnesses.
The reason I find the whole thing exciting is that is helps explain part of the Synoptic problem. Luke seems to select his copied pericopes from either Matthew or Mark almost at random, which is a sticking point in Synoptic studies and part of the reason that Q was proposed in the first place. If Luke had access to Matthew, the argument goes, why would he copy a pericope from Mark if Matthew's was better? Maybe he didn't have
all of Matthew, but only
part of it in the form of another source.
This potentially gives more insight into Luke's selection and redaction process. It certainly isn't the whole answer, but I see a pattern that I didn't see before. If there's a pericope that uses the word "worship" in Matthew, but not Mark (cleansing the leper), Luke chooses Mark. If Mark uses "worship" and Matthew doesn't (the Gadarene demoniac), he copies Matthew. When both do and he has no choice, he picks one and removes the word "worship" (raising Jairus' daughter). It's harder to make an argument out of missing content, but there are also several "worship" pericopes that Luke simply excludes (unwashed hands, the soldiers mock Jesus).
The net effect is that the word "worship" is used exactly three times in Luke. It appears once when Satan suggests that Jesus should worship him, once when Jesus rebukes Satan and says that worship is reserved for God alone, and in the very last line of the Gospel when Jesus himself receives the worship of his disciples.
The question, then, is if this is an intentional literary construction by Luke or an accidental artifact of an unrelated redaction process. For the moment, at least, I strongly suspect it's the former.
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