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Joh_8:39-40. The Jews observe that He means another father than Abraham.
Jesus proves to them from their non-Abrahamic mode of action that they are no children of Abraham.
τέκνα and ἔργα are correlates; the former is used in an ethical sense, so that here (comp. Joh_8:37) a distinction is drawn, as in Rom_9:8, between the fleshly σπέρμα and the moral τέκνα .
In the reading ἐστε (see the critical notes) there is a change in the view of the relationship, as in Luk_17:5 f. See remarks on the passage. On the non-employment of ἄν , see Buttmann in Studien u. Kritiken for 1858, p. 485, and his Neutest. Gramm. p. 195 [E. T. p. 224].
νῦν δέ ] but under such circumstances, nunc autem.
ἄνθρωπον in reference to παρὰ τ . θεοῦ . The λελάληκα following in the first person is regular; see Buttm. Neut. Gramm. p. 241 [E. T. p. 396].
τοῦτο ] seek to take the life of a man who speaks the truth which he has heard of God—that Abraham did not do![24] The words are far from referring to Abraham’s conduct towards the angel of the Lord, Genesis 18 (Hengstenberg, after Lampe); nor is such a reference involved in Joh_8:56.
παρὰ τοῦ θεοῦ ] when I was in my pre-human state, ΠΑΡᾺ Τῷ ΠΑΤΡΊ ΜΟΥ , Joh_8:38. To this view ἌΝΘΡΩΠΟΝ is not opposed (Beyschlag), for Jesus must needs describe Himself in this general human manner, if there were to be congruity between the category of His self-description and the example of Abraham.
[24] The expression is a Litotes (“From the like of this the God-fearing spirit of the patriarch was far removed”), but all the more fitted to put them to shame.