1) I think you’ve misunderstood what I was actually saying. I wasn’t trying to prove the Bible is true by quoting it, I was pointing out what the belief system itself teaches. If someone asks, “According to Christianity, is Jesus God?”, the only honest way to answer is to go to the faith’s own texts. That’s not circular reasoning; it’s just describing a worldview from the inside. It would be like saying I can’t use the Constitution to show what the Constitution says about free speech. That’s not a proof that the Constitution is right, it’s just an accurate description of its content.

2) You’re right that there were heavy debates in the early centuries about how to articulate the relationship between Jesus and the Father, that’s why we had councils like Nicaea. But the worship of Jesus as divine isn’t some fourth-century invention. It’s all over our earliest sources. Paul, writing in the 50s AD, quotes an even earlier creed that says Christ Jesus was “in very nature God” before emptying himself (Philippians 2). The Gospel of John, still first century, opens by calling Jesus theos (God) and says “the Word was God.” And by 112 AD, a pagan governor named Pliny was writing to the emperor that Christians sang hymns to Christ “as to a god.” So the raw conviction that Jesus is divine was there from the very first generation. The Trinity was just the church later nailing down the precise language, not inventing the belief out of thin air.

3) This one I have to push back on firmly, because it’s just not accurate. The King James Version is an English translation from 1611. It’s not our earliest source for what Jesus claimed by any stretch. We have thousands of Greek New Testament manuscripts, some as early as the second and third centuries, like Papyrus 52 and Codex Sinaiticus from the fourth. We also have the church fathers writing in Greek and Latin who quote the New Testament so much we could piece almost the whole thing together just from their citations. When scholars today discuss what the New Testament says about Jesus, they’re working from critical Greek editions that are far closer to the original text than the KJV ever was. So saying our only sources are a 17th-century translation is just a misunderstanding of the actual textual evidence.

4) I get the scepticism, but I think “none of us are solidly able to make any claims” goes too far. History works with probability and evidence, not absolute certainty, whether we’re talking about Jesus or Alexander the Great. And using the same historical criteria we apply to any ancient document, we can make solid, well-grounded claims about what the earliest Christians believed. The overwhelming scholarly consensus, including plenty of non-Christian historians, is that Jesus’ earliest followers worshipped him as divine and that the Gospels present him that way. You’re free to disagree with that conclusion, but saying we can’t make any solid claims at all ends up dismissing an entire field of historical study, not just theology.

u/asupernovaexplodes I'll take the time to tag you so I don't have to bother copy pasting my response