Good morning, I hope you are doing good and that we have a good clean and over-all amazing debate while having fun. I hold the position that Jesus is God mainly because of the proof presented that He is God. To begin, in John 8:58 Jesus explicitlyuses "I AM" rather than "I was", showing that he still does identify as being God, echoing Exedous 3:14. Another example of this is in John 10: 30-33. These two verses are further made true by the way Jesus showed that He was God. To begin with, Matthew 8:5-13 clearly shows that Jesus was the healer He claimed to be. Luke 7:1-10 serves the same purpose and shows the same thing. But I didn't join the faith only because of the evidence presented before me. I also joined because of the personal impact Jesus has had on my life. Everytime I've called upon the name of Jesus I've felt all my sin and shame wash away in the blink of an eye. That's not mere coincidence, that's Jesus at work as the Second part of the Trinity. Jesus is also still at work as God the Son even today in an era where people think that He's not at work.

Jesus was not praying to Himself, but rather to the Father. It's like a son and his father. The son is a completely different person from the father and vice versa, it's the same with Jesus and God. Jesus is a seperate person and God is a seperate person so again, Jesus wasn't praying to Himself, He was praying to God the Father: a seperate Person shown in John 1:1. Can you show me how Jesus asking God to take the cup from Him implies a separate will and a separate consciousness? Further, when Jesus says "the Father is greater than I" he refers to His solely voluntary role during His earthy incarnation, not that He is less divine all-together. "Son of Man" is a messianic title that Jesus gives to Himself in light of Daniel 7:13-14's prophecy about Him. If Jesus was to come into the earth and not be hungry, grow, learn, get tired, and get genuinely tempted, He wouldn't fulfill what was said about Him when Isaiah prophecied about Emmanuel, 'God with us'. Also, your timeline doesn't really fit the evidence. Jesus was crucified around 30-33 AD, yet Paul's letters, written around 50-55 AD, already describe Jesus in divine terms. For example, Philippians 2:6-11 says Jesus existed in the 'form of God' and recieves the worship due to the Lord, white 1 Corinthians 8:6 includes Jesus within the unique identity of the one God. Those actually appear decardes before the Church had any form of political power, so your claim that Jesus' divinity was simply added later to consolidate power needs evidence beyond the timeline of 30 AD - 55 AD.

A distinction that's brought up between Jesus and the Father doesn't equal a denial of divinity, it only shows they're not the same Person. It's like the fact that a son being younger than his father doesn't deny that the son is the son of his father. The real question also is wether the text attributes to Jesus things unique to God, and in multiple places: both in the Gospels and in Paul's letters, the text does attribute these things to Jesus. a few examples include John 1:1, John 20:28 and Philippians 2:6-11. So if John 10:30 isn't about identity, then the Jews wouldn't have stoned him, but instead the Jews attempted to stone Jesus for blasphemy. Also, you made the claim that 'His disciples prayed to the Father through Jesus, not to Jesus himself.' but the claim is that they NEVER prayed to Jesus or only saw prayer directed to the Father that excludes Jesus from worship, needs proof from you, so could you just give me some evidence of that? Matter of fact, theres scriptures showing the direct invocation of Jesus. In Acts 7:59 as Stephen is being stoned for speaking about Jesus' resurrection, he says "Lord Jesus, recieve my spirit", a direct address to Jesus Himself. Also, 1 Corinthians 16:22 is a Liturgical prayer/cry directed to Jesus. You also mentioned that Peter preaching "God has made this Jesus both Lord and Christ" implies that He wasn't Lord and Christ before. The word "Lord" in Acts has a flexible meaning to it, the word "Lord" (kyrios) can mean master, messianic ruler, or it can have a divine title but this is context dependent. Therefore, Peter's primary point is The crucified Jesus now has been publicly vindicated and installed as Messiah and exalted Lord. If anything really, the claim that Jesus wasn't truly tempted reduces his relevance. The Christian claim is stronger that he faced real human weakness, desires, and pressure, yet He remained faithful to God, so therefore he models resistance, not performance. Also, the relevant question for this whether all of those experiences are equally well-explained or whether some are more truth-tracking than other. So, let me ask you this: What's the basis for assuming they are all epistemically equal? My final point in this round is this: Calling Jesus a 'perfectly God-connected human' doesn't naturally explain why He recieves worship, forgives sins, and is placed within God's unique indentity in multiple early Christian texts. These things aren't typical categories for even the highest human prophet or exemplar. Why? Because Prophets rebuke people when they recieve worship, they wouldn't be a prophet if they didn't forgive sins, and they would be blasphemous if they were placed within God's unique identity.

Let's address that. The New Testament's language of Jesus being 'sent' or 'obeying' the Father reflects His mission and role rather than implying His inferiority. That's why the same texts also call Him God (John 10:30), actively attributes divine authority to Him (Luke 10:19), and command worship of Him (Hebrews 1:6). The distinction is relational AND function, not a denial of equality in nature. Obedience in Phillipians 2:6-11 isn't Jesus obeying Himself. The passage has already distinguished 'God' from 'Christ Jesus', showing relational distinction between God and Jesus. In the incarnation, the Son takes a real human role and lives in obedience to the Father's will, for God to send Jesus to die for our sins and be raised to life again. So, knowing this we have to realize that obedience is not intra-personal. It instead reflects the Son's mission within the Father-Son relationship, not a contradiction of the Son's divinity. Next, Philippians 2:6-11 doesn't argue that Jesus stopped being God or was less than God because He gave up divine privillege, instead it argues that the Son voluntarily takes on a humbled human condition. The distinction in the text is between the two people (Father and Son), not between divine and non-divine beings. So, setting aside privilege explains incarnation, not a lack of deity. It's like when the King of a Kingdom temporarily leaves his throne, takes on the role of a servant among his people, and chooses not to exercise his royal privileges while still remaining king by identity and status. That change is in the role and the mode of action instead of in who he is. He's not a servant having left the throne because he takes on the role of a servant and keeps his identity as the king of the kingdom. To the first part of your statement about a beginning, Jesus didn't have a beginning. John 1:1 says that in the Beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. That alone places the Word in continous existence at "the beginning" rather than entireing into it, also Colossians 1:15 actually calls Jesus the image of the image of the invisible God before it says that He's the firstborn of all creation, so the verse you mentioned actually supports my argument. The next verse even says that He created all things. 1 Corinithians 8:6, instead of setting up a hierarchy between God and a lesser lord, it reworks the Shema by placing the Father and Jesus together within the one God of Israel, while assigning to Jesus the Creator role 'through whom are all things.' Daniel 7 does show the Son of Man recieving authority from the Ancient of Days, that's right, but it also gives him universal, everlasting dominion and worship. These categories go beyong a merely human representative. Further, the distrinction in roles within the vision doesn't imply a difference in nature; rather it describes how divine rule is shared and revealed within the vision, not that the Son of Man is simply a non-divine human agent. Bottom line is, The biblical portrait isn't 'God vs. a relatable human', instead it's a divine person who becomes truly human, and both His submission and His divine identity are part of the same inegrated picture.

The core issue is that your “cosmic theater” framing assumes the Trinity means God is acting like three separate beings splitting roles, but that’s not what classical Trinitarian theology actually claims. It’s one divine being with one will, so the Father’s sending, the Son’s obedience, and the Spirit’s work are not staged interactions but real distinctions within one unified divine action in history. On that account, the cry of abandonment in the crucifixion is not God deceiving Himself, but the incarnate Son genuinely entering the depth of human suffering and dereliction within a real covenantal relationship, where separation is experienced in the human mode, not ontologically divided deity talking to itself. On Philippians 2, “emptying” is not defined as subtracting divinity but as relinquishing divine status and privilege—specifically the mode of equality with God as something to be exploited. The text itself explains the emptying immediately: “taking the form of a servant… becoming obedient to death.” The content of the emptying is incarnation and humiliation, not loss of divine nature. That’s why the same passage ends with God highly exalting Him again—what changes is not who He is essentially, but His status in the economy of salvation. Acts 2:36 doesn’t say Jesus becomes God; it says He is installed as “Lord and Christ” in a public, historical sense after resurrection. That “making” language consistently tracks with enthronement and vindication, not ontological upgrade. Similarly, Acts 7:59 shows Stephen doing something far stronger than normal prophetic devotion: he directly invokes Jesus in death in parallel with prayer to God, which reflects worship directed to a heavenly figure sharing divine authority, not merely respect for an exalted teacher. Finally, the “they would have said it more clearly” argument assumes a modern expectation of systematic definitions. But Second Temple Jewish monotheism already had categories for Yahweh’s unique identity that included exalted divine agency—where God can be represented, enthroned, invoked, and worshipped through His appointed figure without abandoning monotheism. So the real question isn’t whether the wording is “explicit enough,” but whether the total pattern of exaltation, invocation, worship, and divine prerogatives assigned to Jesus fits within mere human agency or goes beyond it.