by jimwalton » Wed Jun 20, 2018 3:25 pm
No, Jews are not Satan's children. Jesus was reaming out the Jewish religious leaders for rejecting him. The text uses this language to suggest that Satan is behind human hostility to Jesus. It is thought by some that the verse is anti-Semitic, but that's not possible. That would require the author himself to be a Gentile, or he would be condemning himself. In fact, the text is more anti-Jewish if it is not historically accurate. If it reflects something the Jewish Jesus actually said, it cannot be anti-Jewish by definition. Moreover, nothing in John, or anywhere else in the NT for that matter, condemns every last Jewish person to ever live, nor even every Jew in Jesus's day. The strong language that does appear is precisely the kind of generalized condemnations of the majority of people in a particular context that one often finds in the OT prophets, and the prophets can scarcely be accused of being anti-Jewish when they were Jewish themselves and were canonized in the Jewish Scriptures!
So John 8.44 is definitely not anti-Semitic, and it is certainly not anti-Gentile.
What Jesus is saying is, "I know this is hard for you to understand, but there are only two choices here: life and death. If you are not following me on the path of truth and life, you are on the path of the deceiver, your father is Satan himself, and you are on the path to destruction." These are shocking things for Jesus to say, but the way to get someone to change their mindset and lifestyle is often to confront them with a harsh truth.
No, Jews are not Satan's children. Jesus was reaming out the Jewish religious leaders for rejecting him. The text uses this language to suggest that Satan is behind human hostility to Jesus. It is thought by some that the verse is anti-Semitic, but that's not possible. That would require the author himself to be a Gentile, or he would be condemning himself. In fact, the text is more anti-Jewish if it is not historically accurate. If it reflects something the Jewish Jesus actually said, it cannot be anti-Jewish by definition. Moreover, nothing in John, or anywhere else in the NT for that matter, condemns every last Jewish person to ever live, nor even every Jew in Jesus's day. The strong language that does appear is precisely the kind of generalized condemnations of the majority of people in a particular context that one often finds in the OT prophets, and the prophets can scarcely be accused of being anti-Jewish when they were Jewish themselves and were canonized in the Jewish Scriptures!
So John 8.44 is definitely not anti-Semitic, and it is certainly not anti-Gentile.
What Jesus is saying is, "I know this is hard for you to understand, but there are only two choices here: life and death. If you are not following me on the path of truth and life, you are on the path of the deceiver, your father is Satan himself, and you are on the path to destruction." These are shocking things for Jesus to say, but the way to get someone to change their mindset and lifestyle is often to confront them with a harsh truth.