Regarding the book: King and Messiah as Son of God: Divine, by Adela Yarbro Collins and John J. Collins.
While these scholars do confirm the belief among early Christians concerning the deity of Christ, they do reportedly wander into the weeds quite a bit.
Dr. Burer (editor for Bible.org and editor and assistant project director for the NET Bible, who also worked on the New English Translation-Novum Testamentum Graece diglot, offers these this comments on this work:
Relative to the divinity of the king of Israel, the authors are somewhat guilty of Bousset’s own history-of-religions error in making assumptions about its development. Their argument is that the belief about the divinity of the king made its way to Israel through Canaanite religion, which in turn was influenced by Egyptian religion. However, alternative views relative to this theme are not discussed (e.g., Ps. 2). Readers who disagree with this thesis might arrive at the same conclusion, but the starting point as well as the reconstruction of some of the data differs.
In addition the authors accept without debate the theory of the deuteronomist and deuteronomistic history. (Deuteronomistic History theory holds that, rather than being recorded at the times of the events themselves, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, and the books of Samuel and Kings were compiled later)
Certainly this book was not the place to debate that theory, but again readers might put the pieces of the argument together differently if this theory is not accepted.
Surprisingly the authors suggest that John 1:1c “may be translated either ‘the word was God’ or ‘the word was a god.’ ” Current scholarship is decidedly on the side of the traditional translation, giving little or no credence to the translation “the word was a god.”