Why do we say "A Wolf In Sheep's Clothing"?

Meaning:

A wolf in sheep’s clothing is someone dangerous or with evil intent who appears benign at first glance.

Background:

This idiom is certainly an old one; some form of it has been in circulation since ancient times.

It’s possible the image originated with Aesop (620-564 BCE or thereabouts) – if one accepts that Aesop was a historical figure. Most scholars consider the fables attributed to him to have been part of an oral storytelling tradition that pre-dates Christianity (which also explains the wide variation one finds between different versions of the same story). One such tale concerns a dog donning sheep’s clothing, not a wolf. Other “Aesop’s Fables” use wolves in duplicitous roles as well, so some crossover would seem reasonable, and later compilers swapped out the dog. According to phrases.org.uk, the version of the story best known to us today is from an 1867 translation by George Fyler Townsend:

Once upon a time a Wolf resolved to disguise his appearance in order to secure food more easily. Encased in the skin of a sheep, he pastured with the flock deceiving the shepherd by his costume. In the evening he was shut up by the shepherd in the fold; the gate was closed, and the entrance made thoroughly secure. But the shepherd, returning to the fold during the night to obtain meat for the next day, mistakenly caught up the Wolf instead of a sheep, and killed him instantly.

A closer variant of the phrase occurs in the Bible, where the New Testament book of Matthew records Jesus as having used the idiom in his Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 7:15); Jesus is consequently credited with coining the idiom we use today. The earliest English translation of the text is from John Wycliffe’s 1382 Bible:

Be ye war of fals prophetis, that comen to you in clothing is of scheep, but withynneforth thei ben as wolues of raueyn.

… which the King James Version (1611) renders as:

Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.

And so, as far as anyone can tell, the first use of “a wolf in sheep’s clothing” to appear in English in print is in Wyclif’s Bible, but the image of a wolf in sheep’s clothing likely springs from a much older oral tradition that predates Jesus.

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