By Water & Blood

Judas, Cain, and the true sense of “children of the devil”

6. And in vain, among them and those like them, according to the blindness of their mind, what has been well said is misrepresented.

For the Savior did not speak about the devil in his word to the Jews, as is found clear to everyone who follows the truth; rather, he spoke the saying to them because of Judas.

For they were not children of Abraham, who received him under the oak of Mamre before his incarnate coming; but they condemned themselves to become sons of the betrayal of Judas, who was named by the Lord “Satan” and “devil,” as he says: “Did I not choose you twelve, and one of you is a devil?”

And for this reason the Lord, interpreting the ways of his wickedness, said that “when he speaks the lie, he speaks from his own,” as also elsewhere the Gospel says that “he was a thief and himself carried the money-bag.”

This Judas, then, who was called devil, had Cain as father—Cain who by a lie deceived his brother Abel and killed him, as also when asked by the Lord, “Where is Abel your brother?” he lyingly said, “I do not know.”

Reasonably, then, this man too, having imitated in his ways the devil by nature, was worthily proclaimed his son by the Savior. “For by whatever one has been overcome, to that he has also been enslaved”; and each of us, whatever he may do, will have as fathers those who have done this before, by imitating them.

Clearly, then, the saying spoken by the Lord has been explained—“You are children of the devil”—and again, “when he speaks the lie, he speaks from his own, because his father is a liar”—so that he may mean Judas and Cain;

and then also “for his father too was a liar,” so that he may mean the devil himself, because of the similar deeds wrought by each of these. For breathing into the mouth of the serpent, the devil spoke all things false and so then deceived Eve.

And among these people the erring myth-making has been done away with, even if Scripture says that “Cain killed his brother because he was of the devil.” For it has been shown altogether that it was not because Eve, having conceived from the seed of the devil as in a marriage union and joining of bodies, bore Cain and Abel, as these people supposed, but because of likeness of ways and imitation of the devil’s wickedness that he was called his son.