First post: Question for Christians

[nicky g]

I think this is my first post here. I don;t read this forum much so apologies if this has been dealt with many times before.

In her book A History of God, Karen Armstrong says that biblical scholars generally agree that Jesus never claimed to be the son of God or divine, and that these were attributed to him by the Church after his death. I know very little about this so I had a few questions that might lead to some discussion:

Is Armstrong right, or is this a controversial view among serious biblical scholars/religious historians?

If she is right, why do the Christians on this board continue to believe in the divinity of Jesus? Wouldn't he have wanted to make that clear?

Why do Christians in general continue to believe in a whole set of complicated doctrines and creeds that Jesus makes little or no mention of and that Church theologians forumlated long after he died? Again, if these were important wouldn't he have told us? Why trust the Church/orthodoxy over what you can read for yourself in the Bible?

Sorry if these are ignorant questions. I'm not suggesting that these kinds of questions are limited to Christianity; for instance there's a whole host of beliefs in Orthodox Sunni and Shia Islam that have little to do with what the Quran or accepted Hadiths (many of which themselves were unlikely to have been genuinely uttered by Muhammad, even if they might be in the spirt of what he did and said) says and that were intoduced by various figures later on. This is probably common to all religions. But I'm interested in why intelligent people on this board for instance would continue to uphold doctrines if they have no real basis in Jesus's teachings.