Jesus never claimed to be God: that was a later theological invention

People looking for Jesus to say something like "I am the second person of the Trinity" won't find it, because that's fourth-century vocabulary, not first-century vocabulary. What the Gospels do show is Jesus repeatedly claiming the honors, authority, and actions that a first-century Jewish audience associated exclusively with God. When his disciples pick grain on the Sabbath and get challenged, Jesus responds that he himself is "Lord of the Sabbath." That sounds mild to modern ears, but in Second Temple Jewish thought, the Sabbath rest was understood as an acknowledgment that God alone truly sustains and does the ongoing work of creation; even on the Sabbath, God keeps the sun rising. Claiming lordship over the Sabbath was functionally claiming to be the one who sustains creation itself. His audience heard that clearly, which is a large part of why they wanted him dead.

The sharpest moment comes at his trial in Mark's Gospel. Asked directly, "Are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed One?" Jesus answers, "I am. And you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power and coming with the clouds of heaven": a direct claim to be the cloud-riding, dominion-receiving figure of Daniel 7. The high priest tears his robe, an act reserved specifically for hearing blasphemy under Jewish law. The people in the room best positioned to know exactly what a divine claim sounded like reacted as though they'd just heard one. Paul, writing earlier than the Gospels were finalized, does something similar in 1 Corinthians 8:6: he takes the Shema, Judaism's core declaration that "the Lord is one," and writes Jesus directly into it as "one Lord, Jesus Christ," without abandoning monotheism. Jesus also receives worship from his disciples without correcting them (Matthew 14), does things Isaiah and Job describe as acts only God performs, like healing and calming the sea, and is described in John 1 in language ('the Word was God') that survives in the earliest manuscripts with no textual variation. This isn't a claim later councils invented: it's embedded in the earliest layers of the text, expressed the way a first-century Jew would express it.