The disciples waited for nightfall, and they tried to go back across the sea. They see Jesus walking on the water, and are terrified. "It is I; do not be afraid" is a perfectly good translation of the first half of that Greek sentence combination. But you can also translate the "it is I" as, "I am." So the whole thing would read, "I am; do not be afraid." As we will see later, "I am" is one of the ways that Jesus claims to be God, and to have existed before he was born as a man. Some of the "I am" statements are more obvious, and it could be argued that this is not one of them, but grammatically, it could be.
Meanwhile, Jesus does another miracle by bringing them close to the shore, immediately after their conversation with him.
I also think that these events are probably the same ones recorded in Matthew 14:22-33 and Mark 6:45-53.
We should not worry, if we notice that the same biblical story is told differently in two or more places. The human authors may have remembered different things, and even if we cannot find a reasonable explanation to fit the difference, God is using the difference to tell us something important that He wants us to know. Even though the Bible is ever and always the word of God, we are devoted to the God who spoke the word, much more than to the certainty of the details about it.
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