It is just one uppmanship. He didn’t start out being thought that way but people kept adding. Whole process took over two centuries
Some Gnostics went pretty quickly down the road of “he’s the real god, here to expose the demiurge (Yahweh, formerly known as Ba’al, according to them… But not according to Canaanite religion)”
Supposedly. I think a lot of scholars are in the process of reexamining what the Gnostics actually believed.