1 John 5:5

And who is he that overcometh the world, but he that believeth that Jesus is the Son of God?

It was the basic, fundamental conviction of Christians regarding who Christ was (and is) that fed the springs of their courage and determination. They did not believe, merely, that Christ was some great and wonderful teacher, but that he Was God come in the flesh, the lawful ruler of heaven and earth, the Holy One who would at the last day raise all the dead who ever lived and appoint every soul his everlasting destiny. The very expression "Son of God" carries with it the idea of equality with God; and so the Jews of Jesus' day understood it. For example:

Therefore the Jews sought the more to kill him ... because he said that God was his Father, making himself equal to God (John 5:18). Christ confessed under oath that he was the Son of God (Mark 114:62), and the Pharisees mad that the crime for which they demanded his crucifixion (John 19:7).

Knowing that he would be put to death for this claim, Jesus carefully avoided making it until he would choose to do so before the Sanhedrin, except in circumstances where his enemies were powerless to use it as the basis of a legal charge of blasphemy. Thus, he spoke freely to the woman at the well of Samaria (John 4) and to the man healed of congenital blindness (John 9), flatly declaring to the latter that he was indeed the Son of God (John 9:35-37). In those two cases, the woman being a Samaritan, and the erstwhile blind man having been thrown out of the synagogue, neither could be recruited by the Sanhedrin as a witness against Christ. By far the favorite designation of himself, on Jesus' part, was "Son of Man," by which he meant everything that Son of God means; but the occasional use of "Son of Man" in the Old Testament to mean any ordinary person (Psalms 8:4) prohibited the Sanhedrin from making a charge based on the title "Son of Man," despite the fact that Christ and his followers, as well as his enemies, perfectly understood that Jesus used the title in the sense of Daniel 10:16, where the title is suggested for one who is divine. For fuller discussion of these two titles, see in my Commentary on James, pp. 54-56.