“And behold, Jesus met them and said, ‘Greetings!’ And they came up and took hold of his feet and worshiped him.”
Matthew 28:9
Any theology which proposes that Jesus’s claim to be God was a later development of the Church (invented by the Disciples) is not only dismissing the veracity of the Scriptures, but also ignores God’s sovereign work in real time and space (history facts).
History shows us:
✔️Jesus was a real Jewish man who claimed to be God,
✔️ Who died on a Roman cross,
✔️ Who produced an empty tomb, and
✔️ Who had followers which were convinced that he had appeared to them bodily after his death.
✔️ Many of these followers were martyred for their testimony about Jesus!
The teaching about Jesus’s divinity was immediate…with days of the resurrection (not a later invention).
📙New Testament Scolar, Peter J. Williams writes:
“The rapid spread of Christianity may have relevance for investigating the reliability of the Gospels. Surely, the more widespread Christianity became, the harder it would have been for anyone to change its message and beliefs. This would have been particularly so if the Christians were paying a high price for their faith. Scholars who argue that core Christian beliefs, such as the idea that Jesus rose from the dead after his crucifixion, were innovations arising as Christianity spread by word of mouth need to suggest when this might have happened. The idea that core beliefs arose decades after Christianity began to spread does not explain why Christianity proved popular in the first place or how people who adhered to a version of Christianity without these beliefs later came to adopt them.
The later agreement of Christians that Jesus Christ was God’s Son, prophesied by the Jewish Scriptures, crucified for sins, and raised from the dead by God is best explained by supposing that these and other central beliefs were established before Christianity began to spread.”
Peter J. Williams. Can We Trust the Gospels? Pages 23-24.
Hold Fast Apologetics 