Ye do the deeds of your father
Not Abraham, but the devil.
Then said they unto him, we be not born of
fornication:
meaning either literally, that they were not a brood of bastards,
children of whoredom, illegitimately begotten in unlawful
copulation, or wedlock; or figuratively, that they were not the
children of idolaters, idolatry being called fornication in
Scripture; but that they were the holy seed of Israel, and
children of the prophets, who had retained the pure word, and the
true worship of God, though in all this they might have been
contradicted and refuted; to which they add,
we have one Father, [even] God;
Israel being called by God his Son, and firstborn to them
belonged the adoption, in a national sense, and of this they
boasted; though few of them were the children of God by special
adoption, or God their Father by regenerating grace.