Acts 10:25
Acts 10:2525As Peter was about to enter, Cornelius met him and fell at his feet to worship him.
The rs book cites — Cornelius prostrating before Peter, Peter refusing — as part of its blanket ban on religious imagery. On this reading, if Peter would not allow a living man to kneel before him, Christians today cannot own or display any religious depiction: no cross on a wall, no nativity scene, no painting of Jesus, no stained glass. The rs argument treats Cornelius's prostration as analogous to all honour directed toward Christian symbols and artefacts.
Read what Cornelius is actually doing. He is not prostrating before an image of Peter. He is prostrating before Peter himself, a living person. Peter refuses personal worship — "Stand up; I am only a man myself." The prohibition in view is worshipping a creature, which is exactly the Protestant reading of the second commandment. The parallel passages are (Paul and Barnabas refusing worship at Lystra) and (John told not to worship the angel). In every case the prohibition is on worshipping a creature — a human, an angel — not on representing one in art.
The passage has nothing to say about a cross on a wall or a nativity scene in December. If anything, Acts 10 supports the Protestant position: the sin is worship of the creature, and that is exactly what the second commandment forbids. The rs reading collapses the distinction between personal worship of a creature (forbidden) and representation of a creature for teaching or memorial (permitted, as in the cherubim on the ark, the bronze serpent of Numbers 21, and — by the Watchtower's own operating principle — the illustrated Jesus of My Book of Bible Stories). The text cuts against the rs move, not for it.
NWT renders prosekynēsen (proskuneō) as "did obeisance" rather than "worshipped." The same verb becomes "worship" when directed toward Jehovah or toward demons and idols (, Rev 9:20) but "obeisance" when directed toward humans, angels, or — pre-1970 — Jesus. In other translations, Peter's refusal reads as a striking refusal of worship that parallels ; "obeisance" softens it into etiquette.