formed a salient feature of his own speech-practice, his ‘voice’ or manner of speaking, in linguistic terms, his ‘idiolect’.34 This would be an example of what competent users of languages often do, adapting idiomatic expressions, either in form or connotation, to serve some new and particular semantic purpose.35 The obvious next question is what might have prompted Jesus to formulate and deploy so regularly this apparently unusual expression with its particularizing implication. We have already