And the angel answered and said to her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Highest will overshadow you; therefore, also, that Holy One who is to be born will be called the Son of God.” Luke 1:35
In Luke’s gospel account, the “beloved physician” introduces the Greek world to Jesus. Luke presents Jesus as the perfect man, the ideal so widely sought in Greek culture. Their ideal was the demigod––a cross between man and deity––often depicted in their mythical tales. Jesus was the realization of these Greek myths in that He was the son of a woman, but also the Son of the one true God! Luke’s gospel must have helped his Greek contemporaries who had heard much of the Christ, but understood so little.
Jesus was born like any other man, but not like any other man. The demigods of Greek mythology were also born on earth, but not like Jesus. Achilles (hero of Homer’s Iliad) was said to be the son of the nymph Thetis and of the king of the Myrmidons. Aeneas, the Trojan hero, was the son of the prince Anchises and of Aphrodite, goddess of love. When “the power of the Highest overshadowed” Mary (Luke 1:35), it was not a carnal union, and it was not a wealthy woman, but rather a young peasant. When Jesus was born, he was not laid in a cradle of gold, but in a feeding trough in lowly Bethlehem (2:7). Although the Greeks might see similarities between Jesus and their mythical demigods, they could clearly see differences which must have made Him even more appealing.
Jesus was tempted like any other man, but unlike any other, He did not surrender. In the wilderness Satan tried to get Jesus to use His deity in a way that would exalt Him above humanity. In the first temptation in Eden, Satan dared man to be like God; now He dared God to be like man. Jesus made it clear that He would not use His deity as an “unfair” advantage: He would bear the difficulties of humanity as every other human does. As the Greeks told it, the mother of Achilles tried to make him immortal by holding him by the heel and dipping him in the river Styx, but she didn’t realize that he was still vulnerable around the heel by which she held him. In the well-known story, Achilles was mortally wounded in this single vulnerable spot at the close of the Trojan War (hence the term “Achilles Heel”). When Jesus came to earth, He made Himself vulnerable in every way that we are, but never stumbled (Heb. 4:15).
Unlike the immortals of Greek fame, Jesus’ life drained from Him when subjected to the brutality of mortal men (23:46), but then He rose again (Luke 24:5–7). The Greeks tell the story of Castor and Pollux, the Gemini (twins), whose names appeared on either side of the boat on which Paul sailed toward Rome (Acts 28:11). Both sons of a mortal woman named Leda, one was fathered by the king of Sparta, the other by Zeus. The boys loved one another deeply, and when Castor fell in battle, Pollux begged Zeus for his life to be restored or to be allowed to die with him. Because Pollux was immortal, he could not die, but Zeus gave him the option to share his immortality with his brother. Thus Pollux appears with his brother in the night sky eternally only to sink below the horizon at dawn. In the story, Pollux gives up a part of his immortality to share it with his brother; Jesus surrendered His mortal life while preserving His immortality and thus imparted immortality to every man willing to receive it! No one––even in the stories of Homer or Sophocles––ever lived or died like this man.
As long as the Greeks spent perfecting their tales and their vision of the perfect man, they had never been able to invent a man like Jesus.