You're right, 8:44, not 8:39. (39 was in bold.) "The closest to" made me laugh, btw. You can't stand what it says, I think.
The point about John is that references to the Jews have become generic. In the earlier Gospels, some attempt was made to limit the calumnies to particular sects of the Jews. Jesus gets into fights with the Pharisees, too, but in that passage he's talking to a body of Jews.
The footnote annotation (in the New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha) to John 8:56 reads, "Refusal to believe [in Jesus] severs them from Abraham." Abraham wasn't a Pharisee, he was the father of the Jewish people. This is also clear in the reply of the Jews to Jesus's spawn of Satan crack, which mentions their father-- Abraham.
John 8:44
"You are from your father the Devil, and you choose to do your father's
desires. He was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in the truth,
because there is no truth in him, when he lies, he speaks according to his own nature,
for he is a liar and the father of lies." |
