John 8:41

“You do the works of your father.”

He repeated His enigmatic statement. ‘You (Judaisers) are doing just what your father does.' They could now hardly fail to realise that there was an unpleasant implication behind His words. He was linking their ‘father', whoever that might mean, with a murderous attitude. So recognising that they could no longer defend themselves by reference to Abraham they changed tack.

‘We (Judaisers) were not born of fornication. We have one Father, God'.

This may well have been a sneer at the mystery surrounding the birth of Jesus. They may have been saying, ‘Well your birth may be doubtful but there is no doubt as to our position.' Alternately it may have been because they saw non-Jews as impure, and not true children of God. Both were possibly in their thoughts. They may well also have been still smarting at having been called ‘slaves' to sin, for slaves were equated by them with bastards. So they were contrasting that state with their own. They were proud of the fact that God was  their  Father as the Old Testament often implied (Isaiah 63:16; Isaiah 64:8; Hosea 11:1; Malachi 1:6; Malachi 2:10) and overlooked the strictures in Malachi, which they thought (rightly to a certain extent) no longer applied to themselves. They overlooked the fact that there might be other things that could exclude them from God's Fatherhood.