Jesus Quotes Psalm 82

"Isn't it written in your law, 'I said, you are gods'?" (John 10:34). When the crowd accuses Jesus of blasphemy for calling himself the Son of God, he answers by quoting Psalm 82:6 — and his entire argument depends on that verse meaning exactly what it says.
Jesus reasons that if Scripture can already apply the word "gods" to those "to whom the word of God came" (John 10:35), his own far greater claim to be God's Son should not be dismissed outright as inherently blasphemous. This is an argument from the lesser to the greater: if lesser spiritual beings can be called elohim by God's own commission, how much more the one uniquely sent and consecrated by the Father himself. The argument only works, though, if Psalm 82's "gods" genuinely denotes a category of real spiritual beings under God's authority — a reading that would be considerably weakened, almost to the point of losing its force entirely, if the psalm were instead describing ordinary human judges in an earthly courtroom. Jesus is not correcting or reinterpreting Psalm 82 to fit his own claim, softening its original meaning to make a rhetorical point. He is assuming the divine-council reading as settled, well-understood background, and building his defense directly on top of it, trusting his hearers to recognize exactly what the psalm was describing.
That Jesus reaches for this psalm, of all places, to defend his identity as the Son of God is itself telling. He does not soften or explain away the council's existence to make his point more palatable — he uses it, confident that "the Scripture cannot be broken" (John 10:35), all the way down to the beings named within it.