Meaning & Analysis
Scripture is treated like a soft, pliable wax nose that can be bent into any shape—twisted to fit the interpreter’s will rather than its own sense.
Insights
Manipulated authority
The proverb indicts readers who bend sacred text to pre-decided conclusions, converting divine authority into a tool for partisan ends.
Context-wrenching
It warns that verses severed from context can be curved to argue for anything; elasticity replaces exegesis.
Epistemic bad faith
Portrays interpretive dishonesty: the interpreter pretends to submit to the text while quietly reshaping it to match desire or doctrine.
Fragile foundations
If public norms rest on infinitely malleable readings, communal guidance collapses into sophistry and faction.
Reformation polemic
From Tyndale onward, Protestants blasted opponents for ‘wresting’ Scripture, while Catholics accused reformers of the same. The wax nose became a stock image for hermeneutical abuse in 16th–17th c. controversy.
Body-part symbolism
A nose is prominent and defining; to make it wax is to make identity itself malleable. The image shames interpreters who put on whatever ‘face’ suits the moment.
Rule of faith vs. free play
The proverb tacitly argues for controls on meaning—grammar, genre, canon, tradition—so that interpretation forms the reader rather than the reader forming the text.
Law and scripture
A parallel charge—‘the law is a nose of wax’—shows a wider anxiety: any normative code can be lawyered into putty unless disciplined by principle and community.
Psychology of rationalization
Humans retrofit reasons to desires; the wax-nose sneer exposes motivated reasoning masked as piety, a timeless cognitive temptation.
Rhetorical Devices
Metaphor
Equates Scripture with a wax nose—vivid, tactile shorthand for pliability and abuse.
Synecdoche
A single body part (‘nose’) stands for the whole face/text, implying that twisting a part disfigures the entire meaning.
Material symbolism
Wax signifies softness and shapability; the choice of material encodes the moral: truth should be firm, not fusible.
Irony
What ought to shape us (revelation) is said to be shaped by us, reversing the rightful order to expose hypocrisy.
Allusion density
The phrase carries a history of polemical usage; its compactness lets one image summon a whole debate on hermeneutics.
Transcription
Quotations
The text to turne and glose, like a welshe manes hose, or lyk a waxen nose.
If the scripture be contrary, then make it a nose of wax, and wrest it this way and that way, till it agree.
Affirming .. that the Scriptures are darke .. because they may bee wrested euery way, like a nose of waxe, or like a leaden Rule.
The Scripture is a Nose of Wax.
No reasoning by scripture will convince them; for they make that but a nose of wax.
The dissenting sects of Mahametans quarrel .. and make the one as much a nose of wax as .. the other.
This mystical way of interpreting makes the Scripture a nose of wax, which a man may turn which way he will.
Oral Tradition, that Nose of Wax, which you may turn and set which way you list.
Cross References
Explanation
[[An expression applied to the practice of wresting the Scriptures from their context.]]
Related Proverbs
Original Scan
Used under CC BY-NC 3.0.