> no consensus that Jesus is divine, or about the nature of the divinity ascribed to him, even after the declaration in 325 of the Nicene Creed

Which shouldn’t be surprising, because by 325 CE (and really, by 100 CE) Christianity had been around long enough for groups to take it in all kinds of directions, just like some Asian or African peoples have created new religions that are ostensibly Christian but preserve little of the Christianity originally introduced by colonial powers. In my own academic field, I deal a lot with third-century Manichaeism, where it is obvious how popular preachers could repurpose existing monotheistic religions into something that bore little resemblance to them.

> This NPR interview with a former Evangelical…

You really ought to state plainly in your post that this is Bart Ehrman. While he is a prominent scholar, even researchers of early Christianity who are not themselves Christians take issue with some of his claims.