Wisdom Is as Wisdom Does: The Use of Folk Proverbs in Q 7:31-35

Abstract

The short section of Q that compares John and Jesus (Q 7:31-35) is notoriously difficult to interpret. In the main, the difficulty is attributed to the piecemeal composition of the unit whose four elements—(l) a statement of comparison (to what shall I compare this generation ... ), (2) the saying about children in the agora, (3) the comment on the respective table manners of John and Jesus and the reactions they elicit, and (4) the saying about Wisdom—seem to fit together artificially, if not clumsily. Although the history of composition of the passage is debated, there is broad agreement that it was not cut of whole cloth; each of four distinct forms is detachable from the others and the intentions of the redactor in bringing these pieces together is far from clear. Wendy Cotter rehearses some of the scholarly confusion as follows: (1) the switch at verse thirty-three from "this generation" to John and Jesus, (2) the common difficulty of reading the saying on children as an exact allegory for the comment on John and Jesus; and, related to this, (3) the lack of parallel correspondence in vocabulary.