prospherō

At its root this verb simply means to carry something toward someone and set it in front of them. The picture is physical and ordinary: people pick up the sick or the suffering and bring them to Jesus, parents carry their babies to him, a coin is handed over for inspection, a servant brings the money he has earned to his master. In every case one party moves a person or an object into the presence of another.

The Gospels lean on this sense again and again to describe the crowds. They bring the demon-possessed, the paralyzed, the blind, the mute, and all who are ill, laying them before Jesus so he can heal them. The word does not say the bringing is reverent or sacred; it just records the movement of one person delivering another into the right hands.

This everyday meaning is the foundation from which the sacrificial sense below grows. To offer a gift to God is, after all, to bring it and set it before him, so the two senses share a single motion. They are separated here because a reader needs a different English word, present or offer, the moment the thing brought is a sacrifice rather than a sick neighbor.

This is the word's great religious use, and it dominates the New Testament's longest discussion of worship. To offer is to bring a gift and set it before God: an animal on the altar, a grain or money gift at the temple, the prescribed offering for a healed leper, the prayers and pleas a person lifts up. The same verb that carries a sick man to Jesus here carries a sacrifice to God.

The letter to the Hebrews makes this word a centerpiece. Priests offer gifts and sacrifices day after day; the high priest offers blood once a year for himself and the people; Abel offered a better sacrifice than Cain; Abraham, when tested, was ready to offer his son. The point that letter drives home is that those repeated offerings could never finish the job, so Christ offered himself once for all, and no further offering is needed.

What ties this sense to the plain one is the single act of bringing something and placing it before another. The difference is the recipient and the purpose: here the thing is presented to God as worship, atonement, or thanks, and the natural English shifts from bring to offer or present.

In one place the verb turns reflexive and loses the idea of carrying anything at all. Instead of bringing a thing to a person, it describes how one person conducts himself toward another: how God treats his children. This was a recognized turn of phrase in ancient Greek, where to bring oneself to someone meant to deal with them or behave toward them.

The single New Testament instance is in the letter to the Hebrews, where readers are told that God is treating them as sons when he disciplines them, the way a father trains the children he loves. A reader who only knew the offer or bring senses would be misled here, so this counts as a genuinely separate use even though it appears just once.