Emperor worship was another factor that had an important bearing on the religious life of the Gentile world. Its chief significance lies in the concept of a human being who, over the course of time, is elevated in the minds of his followers to the status of deity. In other words, a person becomes a god. This way of thinking contrasts that of the Jews. Judaism always made a sharp distinction between the human and the divine. Yahweh, the god of the Jewish religion, was regarded as the creator and, in a sense, the father of all humankind. But he was not a father in any physical or biological sense of the term. Human beings were born of two human parents, not of one human parent and one divine parent. However, among some non-Jews of the world, the concept of an individual who has one human parent and one divine parent was fairly common. To be sure, only the exceptional individual's earthly career could be explained in this way, the most frequent example of which was found in the ruler of a country. One way of accounting for the extraordinary achievements of a head of government was to credit him with supernatural ancestry on the grounds that no ordinary human being born in the usual way could have accomplished so much. Having a divine parent was interpreted to mean that the individual belonged to the race of the gods and was therefore not comparable to ordinary mortals.
The so-called deification of a ruler did not always take place during the ruler's lifetime. After his death, later generations might idealize both his reign and his person, thus giving rise to the belief that he was something more than a mere mortal. For example, this process happened in the case of the Greek ruler who came to be known as Alexander the Great. One of the most revered of the Roman emperors was Augustus Caesar, who, after his death, was declared by the Roman Senate to have been a god. Worship of his image was encouraged in various parts of the empire, and not only was he deified in the minds of his admirers of later generations, but legends indicating his supernatural character evolved and were given wide publicity. A heavenly messenger supposedly had foretold his birth, strange phenomena had been observed in the heavens at the time of his birth, miraculous power had been manifested in many of his earthly activities, and he had even triumphed over death. We have the testimony of one Roman historian who claims that eyewitnesses told of Augustus Caesar's resurrection from the dead and his ascension to heaven.
