[Serious] The Trinity

[The Grand Nudger]

Christianity had been plugging along for three centuries before the first trinitarian christians existed.  Jesus wasn't even a god for the first two.

False. The Gospel According to John already had Jesus be some sort of divine figure, and even Paul saw Jesus as divine in some sense.

And I think it's misleading to imply the Trinity came about just like that a few centuries after Christianity first emerged. There was a gradual process occurring during first few centuries of Christianity in which Jesus was sort of vaguely divine and then became more prominently divine to the point of being God ultimately. Similar thing with the Holy Spirit: Spirit of God (so sort of the same thing as God) then becoming God in its own right.

It's neither false, nor is it misleading.  Jesus was worshipped before he was thought of as divine, the explanation given is his exaltation through resurrection.  Trinitarian beliefs did come about three centuries in, and it wasn't gradual.  It was, again, a political compromise.

Ultimately, whether trinitarian beliefs make sense (and what sense they make) isn't a question of apologetics or historic revisionism. It's an idea with a traceable past both within and without the christian movement - and whatever christian apologists wish to be the case when it comes to it's development or believe to be true regarding the doctrine is immaterial. From their end, it literally cant make sense as an article of faith, but in mere reality it makes all the sense in the world as how a group with major schisms pulled two together in order to purge the third and condense societal authority in a crucial period for the merge between the christian religion and the roman state. Had they not arrived at this (or some similar) compromise, there would likely be no christianity today, as christianity is a product of this and many other little movements.

It's not done with it, either. As soon as martin nailed a memo to a door christianity had the same argument again, one effect of that is that today - the vast majority of american christians and christian churches are functionally non trinitarian.