Introduction

The small collections of aphoristic sayings were an obvious place to begin our analysis of aphoristic traditions. They are of manageable number; they are reasonably well-defined in extent; they are sufficiently long to pursue profitably questions about compilational tendencies. Unfortunately, it is quite a different matter when one turns to consider those aphoristic sayings which occur apart from such collections. A major difficulty is the sheer number of individual aphoristic sayings in occasional usage in the gospel-tradition. Undoubtedly this explains in part the paucity of detailed scholarly analyses of these sayings and the difficulty of reaching generally valid conclusions about them. Attempts at analysis are also hampered by indeterminate contexts for the sayings, since individual aphorisms frequently ‘drift’ into differing contexts in the different gospels. One must also allow that at times the punctuation of teaching with an aphorism is simply a convenient rhetorical device, and accordingly that it might have no special significance as part of a pattern of usage. The task which one faces is, therefore, not an easy one; but if any patterns of usage do emerge, they will be all the more significant.

Indeed, the very frequency with which aphoristic sayings are encountered in the double tradition apart from the aphoristic sayings-collections is itself a warning against any easy dismissal of such usages as ‘merely’ rhetorical.