Did Jesus Claim To Be God?

In recent years, many skeptics have claimed that Jesus of Nazareth saw himself only as a religious teacher and that the church deified him over the centuries. 

Not according to the eyewitnesses.

When Jesus stood on trial for his life, the high priest challenged him: "I charge you under oath by the living God: Tell us if you are the Messiah, the Son of God" (Matthew 26:63). 

His answer sealed his fate: "Yes. It is just as you say" (v. 64, NIRV). 

Earlier he told his opponents, "Before Abraham was, I am" (John 8:58). 

He clearly claimed to be God. 

The gospels record further evidence in Jesus' own words: 

• "Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away" (Matthew 24:35).
• "As the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself. And he has given him authority to judge because he is the Son of Man" (John 5:26–27).
• "'My Father is always at his work to this very day, and I too am working.' For this reason they tried all the more to kill him; not only was he breaking the Sabbath, but he was even calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God" (John 5:17–18). 

I'm not sure what Jesus could have said to make clearer the fact that he was God. It won't work to counter that these statements were composed by the church as it tried to deify Jesus since they were written when eyewitnesses to his earthly life were still living. 

C. S. Lewis makes the point clearly. 

Consider the most famous words of his famous book, Mere Christianity: 

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: "I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God." That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

Whom do you believe Jesus to be: a lunatic, a liar, or the Lord?