The following is a very good article on the evidence for the belief in a
divine embodiment in early Christianity:
David L. Paulsen, Divine
Embodiment: The Earliest Christian Understanding of God
This is an essay in an anthology on one of the best Latter-day Saint
works on the topic of the Great Apostasy:
Early
Christians in Disarray: Contemporary LDS Perspectives on the Christian Apostasy, ed. Noel B.
Reynolds (Provo, Utah: Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, 2005)