John 8:44

Ver. 44. “ You are born of the father, the devil, and you wish to fulfil the desires of your father. He was a murderer from the beginning, and he is not in the truth, because there is no truth in him; when he speaks falsehood, he speaks of his own, for he is a liar and the father of the liar. ”

The light does not succeed in penetrating into this Jewish medium, because it is subjected to a principle of darkness. ῾Υμεῖς, you, is strongly emphasized: “You who boast of having God as your Father.” Grotius made τοῦ διαβόλου, of the devil, the object of πατρός, taking the former word in a collective sense: the father of the demons. Hilgenfeld, starting from the same grammatical construction, surprises the evangelist here in the very act of Gnosticism. This father of the devil, according to this critic, is the Demiurge of the Gnostics; in other words, the creator of this material world, the God of the Jews, who is designated here as the father of Satan, in accordance with the doctrine of the Ophites in Irenaeus. Jesus would thus say to the Jews, not: “You are the sons of the devil,” but: “You are the sons of the father of the devil;” that is to say, the brothers of the latter. But where can we find in the Scriptures a word respecting the person of the devil's father? And how, on the supposition that this father of the devil was the God of the Jews, could Jesus have called this God of the Jews His own Father (“the house of my Father ” John 2:16)? Finally, it is sufficient to compare 1 John 3:10, in order to understand that He calls the Jews not the brothers, but the sons of the devil. The literal meaning is the following: You are sons of the father who is the devil, and not, as you think, of that other father who is God.”

The lawless passions (ἐπιθυμίαι) by which this father is animated and which he communicates to them, are unfolded in the second part of the verse: they are, first, hatred of man, and then, abhorrence of truth; precisely the tendencies with which Jesus had just reproached the Jews, John 8:40. The verb θέλετε, you desire, you are eager for (John 8:35), is contrary to the fatalistic principle which Hilgenfeld attributes to John; it expresses the voluntary assent, the abounding sympathy with which they set themselves to the work of realizing the aspirations of their father. The first of these diabolical appetites is the thirst for human blood. Some interpreters ancient and modern (Cyril, Nitzsch, Lucke, de Wette, Reuss) explain the word ἀνθρωποκτόνος, murderer, by an allusion to the murder of Abel. Comp. 1Jn 3:12; 1 John 3:15: “ Not as Cain, who was of the evil one and slew his brother....Whosoever hates his brother is a murderer. ” But the Scriptures do not ascribe to the demon a part in this crime, and the relation which Jesus establishes here between the murderous hatred of Satan and his character as a liar, leads us rather to refer the word murderer to the seduction in Paradise by which Satan caused man to fall under the yoke of sin and thereby of death. By thus separating him from God, through falsehood, he has devoted him to spiritual and physical ruin. The expression from the beginning may, on this view, be much more strictly explained. The sense of ἀρχή, beginning, does not differ from that of this word in John 1:1, except that here the question is of the beginning of the human race, there of the beginning of creation. As to the quotation taken from 1 John, it proves nothing in favor of the allusion to the act of Cain; for that act is there cited as the first example of the hatred of a man to his brother.

When Jesus said in John 8:40: “You seek to kill me, a man,” He already had in His mind the idea of that murderous hatred which is expressed by the word ἀνθρωποκτόνος. Whence did this hatred of Satan against man arise? Undoubtedly, from the fact that he had discerned in him the future organ of divine truth and the destroyer of his own lies. Thus the two features of his character are united: hatred of man and enmity to the truth. And we may understand how this double hatred must be concentrated in the highest degree upon Jesus, in whom at length was perfectly realized the idea of man and of man as the organ of divine truth. Some interpreters, ancient and modern, have applied the expression ἐν ἀληθείᾳ οὐχ ἕστηκεν to the fall of the devil. Vulgate: in veritate non stetit; Arnaud: he did not abide in the truth; Ostervald: he did not persist in...But the perfect ἕστηκα does not mean: did not abide in; its sense, in the sacred as in the classic Greek, is: “I have placed myself in a position and I am there. ” Jesus therefore does not mean to say that the devil has abandoned the domain of truth, in which he was originally placed by God, but rather that he does not find himself there, or, more exactly, that he has not taken his place there, and consequently is not there. The domain of truth is that of the real essence of things, clearly recognized and affirmed, holiness. And why does he not live in this domain? Because, Jesus adds, there is no truth in him. He is wanting in inward truth, truth in the subjective sense, that uprightness of will which aspires after divine reality. We must observe, in this last clause, the absence of the article before the word ἀληθεία, truth: Satan is cut off from the truth, because he is destitute of truth. One can abide in the truth (objectively speaking) in that which God reveals, only when one sincerely desires it. The ὅτι, because, is the counterpart of that in John 8:43. Like father, like son: each of the two lives and works in what is false, because he is false.

What Jesus has just set forth in a negative form, He reproduces in a positive form in the second part of the verse. Not desiring to derive anything from divine truth, Satan is compelled to draw everything that he says from his own resources, that is from the nothingness of his own subjectivity; for the creature, separated from God, is incapable of possessing and creating anything real. Lying is, in this condition, his natural language, as much as speaking the truth is the natural language of Jesus (John 8:38) in the communion with God in which He lives. ᾿Εκ τῶν ἰδίων, from his own resources, admirably characterizes the creative faculty of a being separated from God, who is capable no doubt of producing something, even sometimes great works, and of uttering great words, but whose creations, in proportion as he creates apart from God, are always only a vain phantasmagoria. The word ψεύστης, a liar, reproduces the idea: He has no truth in him. In the expression: “He is a liar and also his father,” we must not make the word his father a second subject to is, as if the question were here also of the father of the devil (Hilgenfeld). The word: and his father is the predicate: “he is a liar and father of...” Otherwise ὅτι αὐτὸς ψεύστης ἐστὶ καὶ ὁ πατὴρ αὐτοῦ would have been necessary.

Only it may be asked to what substantive it is necessary to refer the pronoun αὐτοῦ (his); to the word ψεύστης, liar, or the word ψευδοῦς, falsehood, in the preceding clause? I think, with Lucke, Meyer and others, that the context is decisive in favor of the first alternative. For the question here is, not of the origin of falsehood in general, but specially of the moral sonship of the individual liars whom Jesus has before Him (John 8:40; John 8:44). Weiss objects that in the expression: “he is a liar,” the word liar is used in the generic sense. It is true; but we may certainly derive from it the notion of a concrete substantive. In both senses, there is a slight grammatical difficulty to be overcome. The theory of accommodation, by means of which it is often sought to weaken the force of the declarations of Jesus respecting the personal existence of Satan, may have some probability when it is applied to His conversations with the demoniacs. But here Jesus gives altogether spontaneously this teaching with respect to the person, the character and the part of this mysterious being. After this Jesus comes back from the father to the children: they are enemies of the truth, just as the evil being is to whom they are subject: