54Jesus answered, `If I glorify myself, my glory is nothing; it is my Father who is glorifying me, of whom ye say that He is your God; 55and ye have not known Him, and I have known Him, and if I say that I have not known Him, I shall be like you -- speaking falsely; but I have known Him, and His word I keep; 56Abraham, your father, was glad that he might see my day; and he saw, and did rejoice.' 57The Jews, therefore, said unto him, `Thou art not yet fifty years old, and Abraham hast thou seen?' 58Jesus said to them, `Verily, verily, I say to you, Before Abraham's coming -- I am;' 59they took up, therefore, stones that they may cast at him, but Jesus hid himself, and went forth out of the temple, going through the midst of them, and so passed by.
Alamo-girl's interpretation is simply backed up by the context. The leaders' reaction to Jesus' words, and the words themselves, suggest Jesus intentionally provoked them.
And then we have the man born blind story of chapter 9:
35Jesus heard that they cast him forth without, and having found him, he said to him, `Dost thou believe in the Son of God?' 36he answered and said, `Who is he, sir, that I may believe in him?' 37And Jesus said to him, `Thou hast both seen him, and he who is speaking with thee is he;' 38and he said, `I believe, sir,' and bowed before him.
Jesus received WORSHIP from a man who had believed Jesus' own words about HIS being the Son of God.
"I AM" indeed.
In context, dear xzins, the Pharisees were angry with Jesus becuase in their eyes he was saying that he knew Moses, not that he is equivalent to God. That is clear from John 8:57
In other words they were angry with him for lying. Simple as that. Nowheere in the Greek text does Jesus say he is God.
The way Jesus expresses himself (ego eimi) in John 8:58 is not equivalent either to ehyer (I shall become) in the Masoretic Hebrew, or to to the LXX Greek ο ων [ho on] (the existence), in Exodus 3:14, because it's missing the essential ho on.
In other words, simple ego eimi without the ho on is just "I am" and not the sacred name of God in Greek. Ego eimi is found all over the NT (over 1,600 times) without it ever being confsued with the sacred name of God, which is ο ων and which is not mentioned in John 8:58.
And then we have the man born blind story of chapter 9...Jesus received WORSHIP from a man who had believed Jesus' own words about HIS being the Son of God.
Naurally. The Gospel of John was written at the very end of the first century precisely for that purpose. In the historical context the timing of John's Gospel was no coincidence, but a dire necessity: Christianity needed to establish divine authority for itself, independent of Judaism. Christians were shortly before that thrown out of the synagogues, declared heretics and their books publicly rejected by official rabbinic Judaism.
Christianity could no longer derive its authority from Judaism unless it established that Jesus was not just the anointed (Jewish) human messiah but rather the God of Israel himself! John's entire Gospel is a project for accomplishing that goal. So, such tales as you mention in John 9 are perfectly expected in that work.
That doesn't show, however, that (grammatically or otherwise) the word "ego eimi" (I am) is equivalent to "ego eimi ho on."