Few of the recorded sayings of Jesus can have attracted such a wide popular interest and yet such a limited scholarly interest as his aphorisms. These pithy proverbial sayings are found in abundance in the synoptic tradition. Amongst them are sayings such as:

Such aphorisms are indeed far more numerous than the parables of Jesus, those figurative sayings with a narrative element. Yet, while the parables have been subjected to intense scholarly study and have been related to the major themes of Jesus' preaching about God's kingdom, very few scholars have known quite what to do with the aphoristic sayings. Therefore, as late as 1983, J. D. Crossan could pointedly write in the introduction to his book, In Fragments: The Aphorisms of Jesus, that ‘while very many books have been written on the parabolic or narrative tradition of Jesus’ sayings, none has ever been written on the non-narrative or aphoristic tradition alone' (p. viii).

Of course it has long been recognized that sayings of a ‘proverbial’ or ‘aphoristic’ kind are to be found amongst the sayings of Jesus recorded in the synoptic gospels. Early form-critical studies inevitably had to classify and analyse such sayings. M. Dibelius distinguished the ‘gnome’ from the Greek ‘chria’ by indicating that the gnome, unlike the chria, was unconnected with any particular person.