Did Jesus claim to be God? Mark 10:18 and John 8:58

The passages

And Jesus said unto him, Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is, God.

Mark 10:18

And Jesus said, I am: and ye shall see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven.

Mark 14:62

Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Before Abraham was, I am.

John 8:58

I and my Father are one.

John 10:30

The problem

In Mark, the oldest Gospel, Jesus deflects the title "good" to God alone and speaks of himself mostly as "the Son of man". When asked by the high priest whether he is the Messiah, he answers "I am" and speaks of the Son of man coming in the clouds, which provokes a charge of blasphemy. In John, he speaks of existing before Abraham and of being one with the Father, and his hearers try to stone him. The contrast leads some scholars to ask whether the historical Jesus made the explicit claims reported in John, or whether the later Gospel put its own theology into his mouth.

What believers and scholars say

He claimed it, in ways that his audience understood. C. S. Lewis and many others argue that the Gospels show Jesus forgiving sins, accepting worship and taking the divine name "I am" (Exodus 3:14), and that the reaction of his hearers proves they understood a claim to divinity.

The claim developed. Brown, Ehrman and many critical scholars suggest that the explicit statements are Johannine, reflecting what Christians believed by AD 90, and that Jesus himself spoke of a unique relationship with God without using the language of the later creeds. Ehrman holds that the belief in Jesus's divinity grew in stages.

High Christology was early. Hurtado and Bauckham reply that devotion to Jesus, including prayer, hymns and the use of "Lord," appears in the earliest Christian communities, within years of his death, and was not a slow development. That is difficult to explain if he had not given grounds for it.

Mark 10:18. Believers read the verse as a question inviting the man to think about who Jesus is. Others read it as evidence that Jesus distinguished himself from God. The saying in Mark 13:32 about not knowing the hour is also cited both ways.

Where this leaves it

Historians cannot recover Jesus's exact words with certainty. The Gospels agree that the people around him were convinced he was more than a teacher. How much of the later teaching goes back to him is a question on which careful scholars disagree. Faith and history ask different things here.