The evidence that devotion to Jesus as divine is strikingly early — and what that does and doesn't prove.
A common assumption is that Jesus' divinity was a late, gradual invention (perhaps imposed at Nicaea in 325). The textual evidence cuts against this. The Philippians 2 hymn and 1 Corinthians 15 creed, embedded in letters from the 50s–60s CE, already speak of Jesus in exalted, divine-shaped terms — within a generation of his death. Larry Hurtado and Richard Bauckham argue this 'early high Christology' erupted suddenly, not as slow pagan drift. Ignatius and Pliny confirm that by ~110 CE Christians sang to Christ 'as to a god.' What this establishes historically is that the *belief* was early and intense. Whether the belief is *true* is a separate, theological question — and labeling that boundary honestly is the whole discipline.
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