The gospels approach Jesus’ identity in narrative and oblique fashion rather than in systematic assertions that a reader can bullet-point, store, and pull out of the drawer on demand. It took the emerging Church centuries to define the Christian understanding of God in terms that would command philosophical assent. The biblical materials fueled that endeavor but display a marked nonchalance about it.
When Jesus was confronted by his eventual arrestors in Gethesemane, the Fourth Gospel narrates an encounter that probes at Jesus’ complex identity. Jesus asks those who confront him, ‘Whom do you seek?’
Their response is entirely conventional for men accustomed to rooting out prophetic daredevils: ‘Jesus of Nazareth’. Their prey does not evade the very real identity with which they’ve pegged their conceptual vandal. He does not deny this most human of descriptors, complete with his name and location of record. Yet his reply to them cannot fail to evoke a claim to something like deity as well, for it cunningly echoes YHWH’s own self-identification in scriptural materials that would have been more than familiar to the intellectual authors of Jesus’ arrest:
Then Jesus, knowing all that was to happen to him, came forward and asked them, ‘Whom are you looking for?’ They answered, ‘Jesus of Nazareth.’ Jesus replied, ‘I am he.’ Judas, who betrayed him, was standing with them. When Jesus said to them, I am he,’ they stepped back and fell to the ground.
‘I am he’—John considers the phrasing of it worthy of double note—knocks these men backwards onto their para-legal asses. It is the Fourth Gospel’s way of indicating that they only half understand the man upon whom they are about to lay hands. It is also a shocking—if carefully nuanced—claim to a stature that any sane man of simple rather than complex identity would refuse to make. Deity hovers in such narrative, not submitting to philosophical articulation but at the same time refusing to be written out of the story.
This man is Jesus of Nazareth. This man is more than Jesus of Nazareth.
Canter Bridge 
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