Notes:
The simple answer is, from the beginning. The earliest disciples, as Paul shows,
believed and taught that Jesus was a man, born from a human mother (Galatians 4:4).
But in the same verse he called Jesus God's Son in the absolute sense of having a
divine nature. Add to these two texts from the earliest days of the church the mature statements
of Paul about the divinity of Jesus—texts such as Romans 1:3 ("his [God's] Son"),
1 Corinthians 8:6 ("one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came"),
and Colossians 1:15-16 ("He [Christ] is the image of the invisible God ... by
him all things were created"), and it is clear that the fourth century did not
invent the divinity of Jesus. The church in its earliest days held strongly to
the belief that Jesus was completely and wholly divine in nature.
fourth century did not "invent" the divinity of Jesus.