Praesumptio, I can clearly see how you could have formed the proposition you brought up for debate through a misperception of the stance taken by many conservative evangelical Christians – but, quite frankly, you’re wrong.
First, Jesus Himself never made any of the claims that are made in His name by orthodox Trinitarians. He identified Himself as one with “the Father” – by which He clearly meant the God of Judaism. And He indicated that after His death His followers would receive “another Paraclete” – understood to be the Holy Spirit. The verses from John quoted above are quite simply His response to one of His closest followers asking Him to “Show us the Father, and we will be satisfied.” The reconstruction of them into a “my way or highway” stance regarding salvation on His part is something that does not fit accurate Scriptural exegesis. What exactly He meant by the second sentence is debatable, but I doubt that He took His last night with His twelve chosen followers to suggest a new theological topic of exclusivist intellectual adherence to doctrines concerning Him that He had not yet spoken of in the previous three years they’d been together.
Now, virtually every person who uses the term Christian except for the Christian UUists adheres to the idea that He is at the same time a human being and the incarnate Second Person of the Triune God. But that’s a doctrinal interpretation of what His nature and role is, not something that He explicitly taught.
One has to remember that the line between godhood and its antithesis in the Greek world was a bit more nebulous than the sharp line drawn by the Jews and preserved in today’s thought. And that the New Testament was written in Greek by Greek-speaking Jews. This means that references to Jesus as God may not be precisely what they sound like to us.
Finally, the Heaven/Hell dichotomy that pervades any such religious discussion in Christian America is the product of the superimposition of what it was that the Jews and Jesus taught over the mythical concepts of the Greeks, Romans, and Germanic peoples as to what the afterlife was supposed to be.
So to construct Jesus in the role of somebody who says, “Believe that I’m God or you’re gonna go to Hell” is to take a misperception of what it was He taught, incorporate later theological doctrine into His concept of His role, and then put the whole thing into a criminal-court metaphor that was in no way what the Jews meant by judgment.
The one time Jesus spoke of individual responsibility and morality in connection with the Judgment of God was in the Parable of the Sheep and Goats. And it was explicitly geared to the idea that moral behavior towards one’s fellow man is key, and the legal equivalent of doing the same thing to Him.
The implications of this for Christian theology are quite deep.
