Written by What a Cave 4 manuscript adds to the two fathers of John 8
By Diesel the Magus · eFireTemple · The Mazda/Father Dossier
Before the Gospel of John was written, a Jewish scribe copied a line in Aramaic that called people “sons of the lie.” The damaged words that follow are read as “and not son[s of truth].” The fragment comes from Cave 4 at Qumran. It gives us a dateable witness to something that matters in John 8. Truth and the Lie could describe the family a person belonged to. 4Q548, fragments 1–2, column ii, line 8
What Cave 4 actually says
The phrase בני שקר (benê sheqar, “sons of the lie”) is visible in the transcription. The corresponding phrase in ולא בנ[י קשט] is partly restored. The square brackets show where the manuscript is damaged. Around that line, the text distinguishes children of light from children of darkness, describes the wise and truthful as luminous, and assigns the two groups different destinies. The language of kinship belongs to a larger account of how people live and where their conduct leads them. Aramaic transcription · García Martínez and Tigchelaar, The Dead Sea Scrolls Study Edition
Émile Puech dated the handwriting of 4Q548 to 50–1 BCE. That dates the surviving copy. Its assignment to the Visions of Amram is debated, and the line can be cited by manuscript number regardless of how that question is settled. In a separate Aramaic manuscript, 4Q544, Amram sees two beings dispute who has authority over him. In Hebrew, 4Q257, copied around 100–75 BCE on one paleographic dating, preserves part of the Community Rule’s Two Spirits teaching. The fuller Cave 1 copy, 1QS 3:13–4:26, names the spirits of truth and deceit and speaks of “sons of truth.” Its account places the two spirits under one creator. These manuscripts show how several Jewish texts could use related language while giving it different theological roles. Daniel Machiela, A Handbook of the Aramaic Scrolls from the Qumran Caves · The Community Rules from Qumran · Steven D. Fraade on truth in the Dead Sea Scrolls
The Father of Aša and the Persian record
In Yasna 44.3, Zarathustra asks who is the primordial Father of Aša. Yasna 47.2 associates that fatherhood with Mazda. Aša encompasses truth, rightness and cosmic order. Yasna 30.3–5 sets the choice between truth and deceit in thought, word and deed, and brings that choice into an account of life, death and what awaits those who follow each way. That is the Iranian comparison behind this dossier. Mary Boyce, Encyclopaedia Iranica · Encyclopaedia Iranica, “Dualism” · eFireTemple’s translation and grammar ledger
There is also a separate, datable record of Persian material traveling in Aramaic. Around 520 BCE, Darius invoked Ahura Mazda and warned against the Lie at Behistun. An Aramaic copy of the inscription was found at Elephantine and dates to around 419 BCE. In 2025, Gad Barnea argued that 4Q550, a different Cave 4 manuscript copied around the turn of the era, adapts part of the Behistun epilogue as an Aramaic court narrative. His proposal gives us a specific case of possible literary adaptation to test. The Elephantine copy documents circulation, and 4Q548 independently supplies the wording about the sons of the Lie. Whether that wording itself has an Iranian source remains an open historical question. Gad Barnea, “Imitatio Dei, Imitatio Darii”
Jesus asks whose works they do
Read John 8 in order. In 8:19, Jesus says his interlocutors know neither him nor his Father. In 8:41, he says they do their father’s deeds, and they answer that they have one Father, God. In 8:44, he calls their father the devil, a murderer from the beginning and the father of the lie. In 8:54–55, he says it is his Father who glorifies him, speaks of him as the one they call their God, and says they have never known him. By then Jesus has already named the deed at issue in 8:40. They seek to kill a man who told them the truth he heard from God. John 8
John carries that test into the trial. In 8:47, the person who is of God hears God’s words. In 18:37, the person who is of the truth hears Jesus’ voice. Both lines use the Greek ek to express belonging or origin. A reader who has seen “sons of the lie” in 4Q548 can now hear what is at stake in the question of fatherhood. Jesus treats the will to kill the truth-teller as evidence of whose desires his opponents carry out. 1 John 3:8–12 makes the same connection through Cain. It distinguishes the children of God from the children of the devil by their deeds, then explains Cain’s murder by the difference between his deeds and his brother’s. John 8:47, Greek text · John 18:37 · 1 John 3:8–12
Who wanted Jesus dead?
In John 11, Jesus thanks the Father for hearing him, and Lazarus walks out of the tomb. Many who witness this believe. The chief priests and Pharisees convene a council out of fear of Roman intervention, and Caiaphas makes the case for one man dying to save the nation. The council begins planning Jesus’ death. The narrator gives Caiaphas’s words a further meaning, that Jesus would gather the scattered children of God. And in John 12:31–36, Jesus links his being lifted up to the expulsion of the ruler of this world and urges his hearers to become children of light. The same death through which the council hopes to contain his influence becomes the event through which Jesus says he will draw people to himself. John 11:38–53 · John 12:31–36
A third Cave 4 witness makes that question sharper. 4Q541 fragment 9, copied around 100 BCE or slightly earlier, depicts a priestly figure who makes atonement for his generation, whose light reaches far beyond him, and whom people malign. The fragment places atonement and hostility in the same account. John supplies its own distinction between what the killers intend and what Jesus does with his life. Jesus says he lays it down himself (10:17–18). He also warns that people will kill his disciples believing they offer service to God, because they have known neither the Father nor him (16:2–3). A killer’s belief that he serves God is part of the problem Jesus names. Torleif Elgvin on 4Q541 · John 10:17–18 and 16:2–3
Where I stand
I call Ahura Mazda the Father of Aša. In my reading of John 8, Yahweh fits the profile of the father Jesus exposes. I reach that judgment by putting Jesus’ description of the liar and murderer alongside Yahweh’s own record, including the lying spirit in 1 Kings 22:19–23 and Yahweh’s declaration in Ezekiel 14:9 that he deceived the prophet. Cave 4 carries a specific part of that argument. It places the kinship language on the historical record before John. The identification of the fathers is my theological judgment, and it depends on the texts that describe their deeds. 1 Kings 22:19–23 and Ezekiel 14:9
When I say the Lie killed the witness to Truth, I am reading the cross in light of Jesus’ own charge in John 8. He says where his words came from, and he names the father whose desires his opponents want to carry out. At the tomb of Lazarus, his Father hears him and the dead man comes out. The council hears what happened and decides that Jesus must die. Those are the deeds I keep in view when I ask whose will the killing served.