John 8:33 “We are Abraham’s seed and were never in bondage to anyone.”
Obviously they were proud of their ability to say they descended from Abraham. However it is a curious statement to say that they had never been in bondage to any man. All of Jacob’s children were in bondage in Egypt. After Egypt the nation of Israel was in bondage many times during the times of the Judges of Israel. Since all Israel had been in bondage many times these people were likely not of Israel.
It is important to know the make up of the people who inhabited Judea during the time of Christ. John Hyrcanus had conquered Edom and forced them to adopt their religion. However, it had been corrupted during the house of Judah’s stay in Babylon. This was a bad choice on the part of Hyrcanus. Within a very short time those Edomites had taken over the government of Judea. By the time of Christ they were a vassal state of Rome. It was more complicated than that, but the results were that even the Sanhedrin was run by many Edomites. Only a few actual Israelites of the house of Judah sat on the council. Many of the rulers in Jerusalem at the time of Christ were of Esau/Edom.
John 1:11 “He came into His own land, and the men of the country received Him not.”
This makes more sense when one realizes that the men of the country of Judea were mostly not Israelites. There were many different peoples living in Judea. They did not receive Christ because they had no kinship with Him. That is why Christ spent most of His ministry in the North around Galilee.
Matthew 15:24 “I wasn’t sent to anyone but the put away and punished sheep of the house of Israel.”
When one sees the word Jew in the new testament it almost always has the meaning of Judean. That is as in any people living in that country. The modern day Jews still follow a modified form of the corrupted Hebrew religion from the time of the new testament Pharisees. Their holy book is the Talmud, not old testament. Of course most of today’s Jew’s ancestry did not become a part of Jewry until 740 AD or later. A small portion of the modern day Jews can trace their lineage to the Edomite Pharisees of the time of Christ. Several years of the Jewish Encyclopedia state this fact with “Edom is in modern Jewry.”